A member of the audience recently had an experience with a web service that automatically generated a logo for his business along with different applications of the logo within a couple of seconds. He was largely satisfied with the result and was pretty impressed by the fact that it got done at a fraction of the time and price he’d have spent if he had engaged a human designer.

My reply to this in the context of which the question was asked is pretty simple. AI won’t take the job of visual designers.

Constance made it quite clear in his response that the designer’s duty is to solve problems, no matter what those are. But we differ in that while he believes visual designers will become obsolete in a couple of decades as intelligent systems will be able to do most of what they currently do, I’m more of the opinion that it’s the tools visual designers use that will evolve and AI will play a huge part in optimizing their decision making process.

AI in its current state is best suited to replace tasks that are patterned and/or predictable. Though some processes in a designer’s workflow are predictable and can be automated, the work of designing in itself is not predictable. We tend to forget that as much as designers love to follow patterns to make their jobs easier or faster, a large part of the choices they make are based on intuition. It might not be perfect, but it has a key component — the human touch.

So how will AI come into a designer’s workflow? To go with yesterday’s theme of colour picking, instead of spending hours agonizing over what shade of blue to pick, which is probably as a result of not knowing enough about what my a large number of my audience will be comfortable with, an intelligent system will help me analyse research data it’s collected from my potential audience and show me the best shade of blue that will work. Another scenario could be presenting me with a range of page layouts my audience will most likely be comfortable viewing my content on and saving me a huge amount of time designing mockups and coding prototypes that end up wasted.

I’m no AI expert and could be very well wrong. Please make room for that. My thoughts on AI taking over our jobs are largely informed by a couple of articles I’ve read over the last few years, one of which is this McKinsey report from last year.

If I want you to take anything from what I’ve written, it’ll be this: roles will evolve, tools will change and titles will become irrelevant, but the core duty of a designer won’t change — solving problems. And the only way to avoid getting left behind is to never stop learning. Constance and I will definitely agree on this.