Design X AI - 07
AI CONTENT OVER TIME
For those who want to take a stance against the use of AI throughout an industry, system, or society, we cannot depend on our ability to recognize it to do so. This is for three reasons: First, generative AI is improving dramatically and is already more than capable of creating imperceptibly realistic imagery, text, audio, and video content.
Secondly, when AI tools are involved and integrated into a number of steps throughout the process of a thing being made, who’s to say whether it is the result of AI or not? For example, let’s say the Director of Seating Development uses ChatGPT to write the brief for a new chair. Then the design team uses AI to supplement some of their secondary research on measurement and scale requirements. Next the engineers use generative design to optimize physical properties, the marketing team uses an AI powered platform to optimize their targeted ad strategy, and finally UPS uses an AI powered software to optimize the route it takes in shipping to get to your front door. Did AI design that chair? Not any more than computers did. This integration of AI throughout the supply chain isn’t an abstract concept, it just takes some time for it to become reality across industries and professional practices, and has almost nothing to do with your being able to “see” the use of AI as an end user.
Lastly and more to the point, rejecting the AI content doesn’t create a protest against the greater threats to equality, freedom, and justice that are being posed. Because we are in the early years of AI ubiquity, this may be challenging to imagine so I will use an example. Imagine you’re upset with the use of single-use plastics because of the devastation they’re causing to the planet (or maybe you don’t need to imagine this one), you feel that the system is broken and you set out to reject single-use plastics! So you switch from plastic bags at the grocery store to paper and…that’s it. You still order just as many junk products on Amazon, you drive your car every day (even walkable distances), and you shop at big box stores which rely on unsustainable and unethical manufacturing methods. It’s not that using paper bags at the grocery store is a bad thing, or even a meaningless effort, it just fails to acknowledge the bigger picture and results in an easy to adopt, somewhat performative and self-soothing change in lifestyle which does almost nothing to utilize one’s position of privilege against the root of the problem. Because the reality is, the use of plastics is just one symptom of a broken system built on rapid consumerism, disposability, and fossil fuels, and while we can (and should) avoid single use plastic bags, it should be recognized that this is the treatment of a symptom, not a cure to the illness.
Similarly, visibly evident AI generated content is just a symptom of an increasingly AI-powered information network that drives our economy and society. Rejecting AI generated graphic design or art does almost nothing to form a collective resistance against the more vast and systemic powers which utilize AI to guide hiring practices, optimize insurance policies, maximize online engagement and outrage, increase political polarization, determine sentencing for crime, and drop bombs on military targets.
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DESIGN X AI is an 8 part blog series written 100% by my fallible human brain. I’m a designer, not an AI expert.