If current “AI” is taking one’s job as a graphics designer, it means that one isn’t a very good graphics designer.
I think more likely answer is that most businesses are cheap and a mediocre image generated by AI is good enough vs paying a human to make a really good one.
This is something people always miss in these discussions. A graphic designer working for a medium marketing company is replaceable with a Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, because there, quality is not really that important. They work on quantity and “AI” is much more “efficient” in creating the quantity. That too even without paying for stock photos.
High end jobs will always be there in every profession. But the vast majority of the jobs in a sector do not belong to the “high end” category. That is where the job loss is going to happen. Not for Beeple Crap level artists.
Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.
Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.
If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.
High-end businesses that need high-quality design would never use output from an “AI”.
If they do, that means they don’t take design seriously, and are fine with “not a very good graphics designer”. So my point stands, IMO.
Yeah, quality is expensive, welcome to Earth.
That’s not capitalism, that’s economics. It’s the way it should be.
I invest half of my life’s time studying and honing my skill. I will charge accordingly for it.
Most clients don’t understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess. They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
Most clients don’t understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess.
That means shit prompts and shit visuals.
They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
Well, that’s where the “not very good at graphics design” comes in. If you’re only hired because “you know illustrator”, that says more about you than the client.
AI = productivity goes up, quality goes down
I think the bitter lesson here is that there’s a bunch of jobs where quality has zero importance.
If you take for example, content marketing, SEO, and ad copy writing… It’s a lot of bullshit, and it’s been filling the web with gpt-grade slop for 20 years now. If you can do the same for cheap I don’t see a reason not to.
Fair point. There are lot of morons who should be replaced. But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling. But it got worse since AI rise up.
But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling
Most SEO is done by freelancers (at least in my industry). When i talk about content marketing i mean anybody who writes blog posts and LinkedIn posts for companies. It was already shit long before AI arrived.
I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is “learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups”, like that’s somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings
Maybe, but hard disagree that software is being automated away.
It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It’s almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.
It’s the same in many fields. Trainees learn by doing the easy, repetitive work that can now be automated.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that’s how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look “right” on a first glance.
I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.
Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.
This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!
Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.
The headline says “digital freelancers,” so maybe it’s talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
Well at least the buggy software will eventually generate more jobs because they need more hands fixing everything while AI can’t do it.
I was traveling this week, and saw a couple very obviously AI-generated billboards for the city’s downtown. Something about downtown eats or something. They were, and I’m being extremely nice here, absolutely hideous. I have never, in all my life, seen such ugly billboards. And, while they were different, they were basically the same thing (does that make sense? Them being different, but the same? Not really sure how else to describe it). I was actually looking for a place to eat, and those things deterred me from going downtown. Ended up finding this cute little coffeeshop in some random side road. No food, but holy crap the coffee and crepes were good!
Precisely what designers do - they make the visuals Pleasing. Doesn’t mater if it’s for goat sacrifice service or granny’s muffin shop.
It is a skill that can barely be learned by a person. Often very good designers have ‘talent’ or ‘good eye’.
Even though art is subjective, you can still pretty much rank designers.
