I've been reading a lot about AI's influence on the workforce – mostly about how it's going to kill off higher paying jobs in various professions.
As the founder of I Design, I'm obviously concerned about web dev and graphic design. What does the future hold for my services?
Chat GTP and Google Bard initially caught my attention, and I test drove them for a bit. But this weekend I finally got some time to "play" with Firefly, Adobe's creative generative AI engine. Adobe has already released a Photoshop beta that includes a "generative fill" tool that adds or removes content by typing in queries. There's no doubt it won't take long until Firefly flits it's way into the other Adobe apps. But for now, I only tried out a couple of the online browser based Firefly engines.
I love the beach, waves and being in the water, so the query below was my first entry into Firefly's Text to Image engine:
"Use the hex color values #1b004c and #0202a3 to generate an abstract painting of a rough ocean"
… and after sifting through quadrillions (maybe more?) of pixels carefully placed by millions of artists, Firefly and I created this nice piece of art:
My second query involved waves of a different kind. Using the Text Effects engine, I generated my company's name in blue and green "light waves."
Both results were sorta what I envisioned, given the basic instructions. But the obvious value of AI generated image content is time savings. Each of the designs above took around 2 minutes to generate, although I wish I could have spent hours going down AI's rabbit hole.
It's a given that as AI gets exponentially smarter over time, there's going to be a lot of change. But the end results will be generated and edited by creative people conceptualizing messages that are targeted to their audience. It all starts through properly worded queries that can return the desired results.
I'm really looking forward to using the AI tool in the beta version of Photoshop and eventually Illustrator. As Adobe says on the Firefly website:
"Your imagination is unlimited. Now your power to create is too."
Finally, I queried Chat GTP with "I'm a graphic designer. Will AI replace me soon?" The answer was comforting – at least for now :)
Matt King