AI: The Final Verdict?

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is back in public discussion with its use in Brady Corbet’s Oscar-hopeful The Brutalist (2025), but in reality, it feels as though AI never left the public consciousness since its first foray into the creative industry. It is without a doubt that AI was the biggest point of discourse in the creative industry last year; the ups, the downs, the scandal. Everyone had an opinion on its presence and if you didn’t have one, you better decide fast. Creatives have been bombarded with think piece after think piece on the matter, but what have we actually determined about the use of this technology? What are the proverbial lines in the sand?

While the development of AI has spanned long before the new millennium, AI quickly took center stage as the creative  industry’s most prevalent point of contention during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as we entered the prominence of the AI Boom. While overlap between AI and creative pursuits have occurred sporadically over the years, it was mainly associated with more experimental, or coding based visual pursuits. AI first permeated the greater creative industry discourse with the emergence of text-to-image models, like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney, with concerns of generative AI overtaking the world of illustration in 2023. OpenAI’s language model, ChatGPT, also grew in prominence around the same time.

But, what is AI? Our understanding of AI and how it functions has irrefutably been influenced by how the media has depicted not only AI, but growing automation—a narrative vehicle to express an existential dread unique to humans and how we may not like what is reflected of us in what we create. This dread also often leads us to picture and depict AI at a higher level of sophistication and independence than should be ascribed to it. We fear AI’s capability to take our place with machine learning tantamount to human intelligence. In reality, Generative AI, which is the form of AI the creative industry is primarily coming to grips with, is what can be described as artificial narrow intelligence. In the article “The Important Difference Between Generative AI And AGI”, author Bernard Marr states, “Think of Generative AI as a highly-skilled parrot. It's capable of mimicking complex patterns, producing diverse content, and occasionally surprising us with outputs that seem creatively brilliant. However, like a parrot, Generative AI does not truly "understand" the content it creates. It operates by digesting large datasets and predicting what comes next, whether the next word in a sentence or the next stroke in a digital painting.”

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But the depiction we reinforce of AI and how we perceive it in turn is its own can of worms. At the “Imaginations of AI” panel discussion as part of the 2024 D&AD Festival last May, Amelie Dihn of Baekken + Baeck explained that in researching the narrative devices associated with AI that she did with her colleague, Eris Kupin, they found that the narratives that go hand in hand with AI, dating back to Greek mythology and stories of golems, already positions the technology in opposition with mankind and has been suffused with notions of human hubris, “We can't help but fly too close to the sun, we can't help but unleash the beast.” They continued to explain, “We even see that culminate in the use of the term artificial intelligence itself, which was sort of officialized in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, where they were trying to figure out what are we going to name this area of emerging technology? And artificial intelligence, that term itself already sort of poses a threat, already puts us in opposition. And even at that, in that space, there were people who opposed that term. They thought, ‘This isn't going to set us up very well.’ And instead, other terms were thrown around like ‘complex information processing’. So it's sort of all of these different threads that have come together to position us now as in opposition and threatened by technology. And that's something that we try to challenge in our work.”

The biggest issue with this misrepresentation of this technology is that we then view Generative AI as an independent tool beyond our understanding, capable of things we don’t even know about. This then accredits AI as capable of replicating and therefore replacing the human element in the creative industry when that is simply not the case. Generative AI in its current iteration is simply a tool that still requires human direction. In response to this narrative gap Google Deepmind, Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory, initiated Visualising AI, inviting artists and designers to reimagine and depict AI with a visual language that is more grounded in the reality of the technology. At that same panel discussion, Gaby Pearl, Brand and Product Lead at Google Deepmind explained that the project was first initiated because when they tried to draw on visualizations that already existed, that it just felt very disparate from the technology they were building. “I think the project is an initiative to partner with a diverse range of artists and creatives to redefine and create a more nuanced and accessible visual language for AI,” she remarked.

AI was a topic that came up repeatedly during Grafis Masa Kini’s Bridging Borders program. Throughout the 2024 D&AD Festival, AI was a recurring theme over the event. Whether it was a core theme of panel discussions, like “Imaginations of AI”, and talks, like “Unifying Natural and Artificial Intelligence in Advertising”, or a point of discussion in the Q&A sessions throughout the weekend, AI was on everyone’s mind. In our interview with graphic designer and RCA Associate Lecturer Adrian Shaugnessy, he explained that while he himself had yet to see firsthand the effects of AI in the industry, he approaches AI as simply another evolution in technology that is transforming the design terrain, similarly to the effect of the emergence of computers and digital design software on the industry. He explained, “My feeling about AI is that smart designers will learn to use it to make their work better. I use it. I’m frustrated by it and I will ask one of the AI platforms to do something and it’s never what I want. But there might be an element of it I can use. So that’s my feeling about it. But of course it’s gonna get better, and better, and better, and better. So, it is a threat…I heard a good thing the other day, this is not talking about design though I think it applies to design, ‘AI will not take your job, but someone using AI will take your job.’ And I think that’s the way to look at it.”


Renowned designer and Pentagram partner Paula Scher seems to share these sentiments. Scher recently came under fire for her use of AI in the design for the Federal U.S. government website, performance.gov. The project involved the creation of an illustration style with analog methods like paint and cut paper, which was then fed to Midjourney to combine the elements into 1500 illustrated configurations to represent the various government divisions and topics. In an interview with Daniel John for Creative Bloq, Scher argues that AI is simply the next evolution of design tools. “I mean, this is a progression of life. I like AI because I see it seeping in and being a private little helper. I guess you could say, oh, well, this is going to ruin originality, or people are going to steal, or whatever you say about it and like, I'm sorry, but I don't think anybody will be more ripped off by any kind of AI than my husband (Seymore Chwast) has been by other illustrators. Designers stand on each other's shoulders. Illustrators do it. You get influenced by somebody, and often that helps your work. From my point of view, AI is another tool, and how it’s used is the responsibility of the designer who is charged with delivering the project and making those kinds of decisions. I’m sorry that the illustration community feels threatened by it, but I think they'll be fine.” 

The outrage regarding the use of AI in the performance.gov project touched upon one of the primary concerns regarding Generative AI—FOBO, or the fear of becoming obsolete. Many felt that Scher used AI where could have hired illustrators, but Scher held firm. “Firstly, with regard to the structure of Pentagram and the way we were hired, we were not hired to use outside illustrators and photographers. This thing was a design project with a capital D, it was not an illustration project. But we were fortunate, because I had on my team a guy called Bruno Bergallo who's both a terrific illustrator and designer. Bruno had worked with AI before, and he knew Midjourney. These tools couldn’t do our work – they couldn’t create the right images, and Bruno didn’t want to use more than five prompts or you’d be doing it forever. So he made the paintings of our drawings, and he designed an entire style, made with paint and tape. They are originals. He is an illustrator. This was then programmed into the computer, and now we have 1500 illustrations in that style.”

Many are intrigued by the experimental capabilities of Generative AI, but the elephant in the room is that many are gravitating towards AI due to its convenience. It is an incredibly tempting tool—images and copy text just at the tapping of your fingers. AI can and is already streamlining project timelines significantly—Midjourney assisting in moodboarding, ChatGPT with copywriting ideation, etc. Many creatives are already incorporating AI into their work. In September, 2023, It’s Nice That conducted a survey as part of their Shades of Intelligence series that found that 83% participants were already using AI in their practice. We can only assume the number has risen since. The general consensus seemed to be that AI is here to stay, what counts is how responsibly we use it.

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However, how reliably can we trust in people to consider the ethical parameters of the technology when there are already issues of IP (intellectual property) infringements and bias in the technology? In the early days of AI’s emergence, many illustrators, digital artists, and writers were quick to raise concerns online regarding originality and copyright infringements. Both text-to-image and language model Generative AI tools require the algorithms to be trained on massive amounts of data and there have been more than a number of incidents where it has been found that the data is used without the explicit permission of the IP owner. On January 13, 2023, illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz sued multiple Generative AI platforms for the use of their work without licence and won. This was followed by a barrage of lawsuits filed against Open AI, including a lawsuit filed by The New York Times in December, 2023, against both OpenAI and Microsoft for training their AI models on their articles without explicit permission. Ironically, there is now an AI model called Nightshade that was created to help protect IP by “poisoning” Generative AI models. Ben Zhao, professor at the University of Chicago, whose team was responsible for Nightshade wrote that he hopes the model can become a deterrent against violations of artists’ IP rights. 

These points of discourse on AI are those most discussed in the industry, being the most immediate concerns to creative professionals, but one point that many seem to be hesitant to address is AI's significant environmental impact. We tend to think of AI and cloud centers to be these nebulous networks stored somewhere not in the real world. However, these models require massive data centers that take up a lot of energy. These data centers run like giant computers which use a water cooling system to prevent the data center from overheating. Typically, computers use a finite amount of water to cool the system down. Unlike regular computers, these data centers run so hot, the water evaporates into thin air and increasing amounts of water must be pumped into the server’s cooling system just to make sure it doesn't crash. One ChatGPT query is equivalent to pouring out an entire bottle of water and turning on the lightbulb for 15 minutes. The U.S. state of Northern Virginia alone has over 300 data centers. In an industry landscape that is, or should be, growing with more concern in regards to sustainability and environmental responsibility, it’s worth asking where the eagerness to use AI as a tool fits in the framework of ethical and responsible design.

So, AI doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, what can creatives do about it? The initial concerns regarding AI’s disruption of the industry is valid considering how Generative AI was presented to the public. However, at the end of the day, it is still down to how you use it if you use it at all. Generative AI is not an industry game changer in the way that we feared but it is certainly ruffling some feathers. But it is important to keep in mind that, as we reach record global temperatures, to fully weigh the worth of AI’s place in the creative ecosystem. Ultimately, creatives hold the power to determine the course of this technology. Will AI become a threat or an ally? That choice is in our hands. This technology is simply a tool, and human creativity is what will always be at the heart of all art.

Image Source: Visualizing AI—Google DeepMind

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About the Author

Kireina Masri

Kireina Masri has had their nose stuck in a book since they could remember. Majoring in Illustration, they now write of all things visual—pouring their love of the arts into the written word. They aspire to be their neighborhood's quirky cat lady in their later years.