The good, the bad and the guilty
In the previous entry I got very passionate about creativity and how it became some sort of an endangered species in the era of raising AI. I still stand by that, however today I would like to bring the perspective of a designer (me, hello!) that worked in tech and was forced to adapt.
First things first: in my mind, changes can be exciting and optimistic, or stressful and horribly painful. To me there is no in between, however those two polarizing characteristics and feelings may somewhat coexist at the same time.
Some design folks see AI in a very bright light, as the solution to all of their work problems. They hyperventilate in front of yet another agent creating interfaces, social media posts, copy, etc. in a matter of minutes. I call it “a child at the ZOO wonder”. That kind of excitement at witnessing something being created out of nowhere in such a short amount of time? Same as seeing a giraffe for the first time with your own eyes.
It’s bliss and I get that.
STAY Afloat or Sink With Your Boat
When I first tried Midjourney, ChatGPT and Gemini, I was actually hooked and amazed like that small child at the ZOO. The technology brought to our tables felt, for a moment, like a breath of fresh air, as if a door of endless possibilities was being opened. That bliss faded when I started asking myself and the world some significant questions about craft, art theft, sustainability, creativity and so on. Did people feel the same when Adobe dropped their CC Suite for the first time, decades ago? I wouldn’t know, because in the end I was native to Adobe Photoshop, and even though a big portion of my life was dedicated to analog media, I was naturally introduced to digital arts and editing because it was the established standard of that time.
Today I’m seeing AI playing a similar role. Many people are pushing it as a new standard, many others are opposing, including myself. But how long can we resist? Is the AI bubble going to burst like the NFT one? Is it going to be at least regulated to some extent? Who knows, the questions are endless and go way beyond the three I just threw into the void. The main polémique for today points at companies and designers that are working, or have worked, in product design teams, especially in tech.
This is actually a bottomless pit to explore. If you want to give yourself a bit of a thrill and a blood pressure spike, I would suggest diving into posts about AI vs. Product Design on LinkedIn. Entertaining, exploitative, repetitive, enraging. After you will need to go outside, touch some grass, and buy yourself a little fizzy drink.
Anywayyyy… all of this to say that my aversion towards AI was born at a tech company. In the beginning it was kind of harmless: I would see many people from my team asking ChatGPT the most futile questions ever, just get that thrill of a magic cloud entity talking to them like a real human. Then the stupid questions turned into outsourcing their knowledge and expertise, treating the chat as the modern library of Alexandria. And then the dreaded moment arrived: “Klaudia, we have to develop this new management platform and you have 5 days to design it”.
LinkedIn dudes would tell everybody that this could be an amazing opportunity to show their skills, love and appreciation for the company to give them such an incredible challenge. But let’s face it: IT’S BULLSHIT. I didn’t think of it as an opportunity or incredible challenge. To me it was pure exploitation, and a display of the company’s lack of fundamental knowledge about product design and its blatant devaluation of it.
I won’t be going into all the details, but the absence of the user research (and impossibility to conduct any in such a short timeframe) and stakeholders’ lack of clarity played a significant role in forcing me to use ChatGPT and Figma Make to deliver something, anything, in 5 days.
Was I happy about it? Absolutely not. Was it reflecting my values? Not really, no. Did it help to please the stakeholders? Yeah, because they don’t know the difference between pretty screens and actually good and useful product for end users. And before any of you freaks say “this is your own fault and it shows that you are not good at your job”… well, shut up. It would have been my fault, if the other part was open to conversation, instead of pushing unrealistic deadlines without even listening to anyone other than their own ego.
At this point you probably got that I want to be as transparent as possible, so it won’t surprise you to hear that I wasn’t 100% proud of that project. Most of it was a basic layout full of random cards showing numbers and stats, with management features and tabs almost fully birthed by Figma Make. Don’t get me wrong, prompts were solid, the information provided was thorough, and the output was almost excessive. At first glance the pages looked fine, but the thing that was partially missing was the most important thing of all: a complete user story. And an answer to the big question: WHY and HOW should this management platform be valuable to our clients?
The experience with that 5-day project taught me that whatever was generated by AI, was a draft. It looked nice, but I would have - and should have - worked on it manually more. It was also not dev ready, or even to go live. It was just a draft in my eyes.
Tok, tok, tik, tok - We Don’t Care, Just Give Us Pretty Screens
The culture of making things in few days just for the sake of doing it because the roadmap demands it is exceptionally stupid, and it fuels the greedy machine of corporations that don’t care about their clients, only their money. On top of that, we live in a very fast world, and since we got accustomed to speed guaranteed by Jeff Bezos, we’ve started applying the same principles and demands to many aspects of our lives. We want fast food, fast transport, fast deliveries, fast processes, fast and cheap everything.
But if you want everything fast and cheap… then you will have to compromise the quality. That’s a universal rule that has been in effect since the beginning of artisanry and merchantry, centuries ago, and it applies just as much to modern-day design.
Unfortunately, if you are a designer that works for those corporations, you will often find yourself in situations where you just have to accept it, do your job and call it a day. That’s exactly what I did. I put my pride and ego aside, and played with Figma Make while dealing with a stress-inducted gastritis flare-up. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” is definitely a motto that kept me going for a while, but the repressed frustration and aversion took eventually took over, and I decided I was done with that job.
It is entirely a matter of the situation that you are in, your character and your values. You can keep going, do mediocre work for disrespectful people, or you can be a raging bitch like me and stay true to yourself by doing something that is actually helpful to other people and that is worth their money.
And the tech companies? I would love to invite them to reflect a bit more on quantity vs. quality, the money invested in their products and services, and most importantly: their clients. We’ve reached a very special point in late capitalism in which every day more and more people are realizing that they don’t want crappy products anymore. They want to be heard and their needs must be met.
In the end I must acknowledge the contradiction of me preaching about the human craft vs AI. I used it, I occasionally still do, but since that 5-day rush at my old job, I gave myself a strict rule: delegate to AI only boring or extremely tedious tasks. For me, one of those is, for example, Excel. I fucking hate that thing and I would rather eat sand than use it.
And what about art and design purposes? Well, in my workflow, AI will never think or use creativity in place of my own brain. For practical work, I want to build things with my own hands and eyes, rather than writing endless prompts and losing my sanity over five thousand iterations. I could make use of it for speeding some steps up, but the core work must be done by my own hands.
And this is exactly what I advocate for. Be yourself, use your own brain, be creative, stay true to your values.
This entry has been written without any AI aid
