AI is here. And it's here to stay. And it's affecting most industries, especially the creative ones. Writing, photography, design, packaging design, logo, brand design. Name it, it has infiltrated it. Since I am the creative director of a branding agency, I want to focus on the latter.
Cheap, fast, easy and accessible design has been around for years. Websites selling stock logos and templated designs are nothing new. And clients who opted for those, were never your clients to begin with.
Now we have websites selling AI driven logo and brand design. So I took the bait, and I decided to try one of them out. I wanted to see if it could design a viable new logo for my branding agency, FLAT 6 CONCEPTS.
The process was simple enough. You enter your business name, your keywords, logo styles, and color preferences. A screenshot of the results can be seen below.
I just love how there is a heart on each one so I can pick my favorites and narrow them down. Hmm, no hearts from me, sorry.
As you can see, the bot spat out and regurgitated so many cliché and nonsensical options that it gave me an instant headache. It was simply popping out design concepts that were not even cohesive let alone elegant. I can only equate it to a "Frankenstein" design, botched and stitched together in the hopes of resonating with the user. A client who is not savvy in design, or is unfamiliar with the fundamentals of what constitutes a good logo, could fall for any of these.
But then again look at the design. Would a client who picks one of these options be a client of a reputable design agency? I highly doubt it. You see AI can only work with scouring the internet, and works with design elements that have been used over and over again. It does not have the innate ability to create a beautiful and functional design, at least not yet. It completely misses the creative thought process, - the human interaction, the sensibilities, the sensitivities. These designs are not special or unique in any shape or form. Pun intended. In all fairness, you can probe and probe and probe the designs to flesh out more ideas, but it does the same old thing. You see garbage in, garbage out. At some point you end up in a rabbit hole with a whole bunch of nonsensical designs that you cannot use. And then you realize you spent the last 3 hours trying to figure out why this thing is not giving you the designs you want or like. AI depends on your inputs, and your own design knowledge to produce something new. But isn't that the exact reason why you hire a design agency in the first place? For them to bring their design experience and acumen and guide you and steer you if you are making the wrong design decisions. AI doesn't care about your company, nor if the design is appropriate. It's simply programmed to show you as many (crappy) designs as possible. It is evident that the fight against the ugliness (and the machine) is on.