The Constant Conversation around AI
Perspectives from a designer who interacts with AI occasionally.
In the last few weeks I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being surrounded by non-stop discourse around Artificial Intelligence. From the general disdain for the technology by users on X, (Formerly known as Twitter) to the discourse around its use in multiple Oscar nominated films, the announcement of Stargate, and now the news of Deepseek it seems as though it is never going to end.
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t have some pretty loud opinions floating around in my head about AI - personally I find the technology, specifically the generative type, to be anti-creative; it feels as though it’s trying to fix problems that don’t exist. As a Graphic Designer this is a technology that has slowly seeped its way into my job and, to be completely honest it doesn’t leave the best feeling in my stomach. I’m someone who takes pride in my work, who wants the work to look the best it possibly can, and when a client asks me if I can insert AI generated people into a scene for an advertisement I can’t help but cringe and then say No.
Just the other day on X, (Formerly known as Twitter) I saw this tweet:
Cringe aside it did make me think for a moment. As of recent I have seen nothing but negativity surround any conversation involving AI, no matter the use case. Just a couple weeks ago Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, one of my favorite films of the year, got hit with accusations of using AI technology. This turned out to be a complete overreaction as the technology used was brief and something that is commonplace in post production for movies, similar to ADR technology. (If you’d like to be filled in on the situation, read more here)
Side note: There was also an accusation of The Brutalist using generative AI to create sketches of buildings in the final scene of the film. Brady Corbet has said that there was absolutely no generative AI used.
In tandem with this, Emilia Pérez, a film somehow nominated for 13 oscars was also brought up in using this same technology. I mean, hell, Denis Villneuve’s Dune Part 2 used AI technology to assist with the blue eyes of the Fremen - this is something that we are seeing time and time again.
But that doesn’t really answer the question posed: Why does every conversation surrounding AI seem to lead to a bunch of frustrated yelling? One thing, I think, is that people have a hard time separating generative AI from the rest of the technology. Generative AI very obviously is the worst of the worst. It looks bad, it feels bad, it quite literally is the antithesis of art. It is a totally understandable response anytime a brand or artist posts an AI generated image, or in the case of Coca-Cola, an entirely AI generated advertisement to be one of both disappointment and anger. That’s all without mentioning the very real environmental impact of the technology.
It’s also the most popular form of AI technology, and when people talk about AI it’s most likely with this technology in mind. Were you not able to draw a person in art class? Don’t fret! Just type in “draw me a human” and in 30 seconds you’ll get multiple options of a kind of oddly off-putting person (most likely to be white) to choose from and post online. Want that person in a specific art style? Go ahead and enter what style with it and surely you’ll get back another kind of oddly off-putting person, but this time with an extra finger or two, and maybe in the style of Picasso.
And that’s the other thing, all of these image generators had to pull the data-sets from somewhere, and where do you think they’re pulling it from? The internet. Every famous artist you could possibly think of has had images thrown into these generators to train them so that it can spit those styles back out at you. It’s remarkably questionable, and at best incredibly problematic.
Broadly speaking it certainly isn’t a great feeling either to see some technology that isn’t even that well developed taking human jobs. This is certainly a fear that is common among people in creative spaces currently, but, can we truly blame them for feeling that way? Corporations have always looked for a way to increase their margins, and if they can throw the entire marketing department out and replace it with AI what’s stopping them? Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI just recently opened his mouth and said “the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration” as a result of AI technology. Who does he think he is and why does he think AI gets to make that decision? I personally feel as though leaving the fate of the future of our society in the hands of the technocrats to be a horrible idea. I certainly would not trust any of them to help foster a well functioning society, let alone change the social fabric of our current one.
Another thing that I believe contributes to the general disdain that society has towards AI currently is the pure amount it’s shoved right in front of our faces. The film industry as previously mentioned has become a bit of a hot bed for this stuff with varying cases from A24 using AI to generate posters for the advertisement of the movie ‘Civil War’, to ‘Late Night with the Devil,’ an indie horror film, using AI for background pieces. People can’t even participate in the things they enjoy and unwind without AI rearing it’s ugly uncanny valley-esque head. I know for one that I am certainly tired of seeing and hearing about it but, what can we do? Boycotting is one option, and drawing a hard-line in the sand has been something I’ve been seeing people do; Any use of AI and we won’t give you our money. Certainly that’s an option, but it’s clearly a technology that is not going away anytime soon unfortunately. There’s too much money invested into it.
On top of this, every day I see multiple ads from Google pushing their AI engine, or Apple advertising theirs. Generate a new emoji! Spill your deepest darkest secrets like it’s the movie Her! Talk to it! Befriend it! It’s non-stop, and doesn’t really seem to be pumping the breaks. With the Superbowl rapidly approaching I would almost bet my life savings that we see at least 5 AI adjacent commercials in the first half alone.
I think one thing is that there needs to be an understanding from those developing this technology that the best use cases for AI are places that help increase workflow and take care of some of the mundane parts of tasks. For example: Notion does a very good job with AI. When I need to organize information in a specific way I can have the AI help me do that, and it saves me time. It can create charts, sort, and do things that help me not spend so much time on the mundane. What AI should not be doing is sticking it’s poorly rendered fingers into creative spaces. One of the most beautiful parts about art is the creative process and the humanity of it all. Running prompts through a generator completely takes away those things that make art this beautifully human experience and distills it down into something that feels so robotic. So again I ask, what is the solution? Maybe movies that use any ounce of AI should have to put a disclaimer prior to the film that AI was used in the production. Maybe people who want to generate images through places like Midjourney, and Dall-E should have to label their “art” as such. I don’t know if those are solutions, or even relative answers, but I do know that where things currently stand does not feel great.
And that’s just from the creative side of things. There’s a whole slew of other issues that have arisen as AI is being installed in more and more places. With companies substituting in AI for people in jobs ranging from a person at a drive-thru taking your order, to customer service lines to who approves or denies if you are approved for medically necessary health coverage (!!! Seriously, what are we doing?) eliminating the human decision making from very important parts of society and leaving them up to computers who can’t exactly reason seems like a really, really bad idea that unfortunately doesn’t look like it has any plans of stopping.
Just this week we saw Donald Trump announce Stargate, which was followed within the next two days with China’s announcement of Deepseek which shook the market and now has the entire tech-sector in an absolute freak out, and now Alibaba has announced their own AI engine named Qwen, which they say outperforms Deepseek. Every day it seems that there is new technology announced, new updates to these various platforms, and new ways introduced for us to shortcut doing things the way we used to. While I see AI technology potentially being a net-positive in the long run, currently with where AI stands it is certainly not that. Will it get better? Probably. Hopefully. I can’t however help but wonder if all of this time, money, and energy that we are investing into a technology like this could be better spent elsewhere improving the lives of the many. But, hey, that’s what they’re promising AI will do, right?