Beyond AI: Why your humanity is your greatest design asset

There’s no doubt about it. AI design is getting better and better. It makes less obvious ‘mistakes’, it understands more nuanced prompts, and its outputs have a put-together glossy polish that looks – at least to the untrained eye – professional.

Of course, as most of us are aware, there is also a lot of controversy about just how AI got this ‘good’. For the machine learning required for this process, generative AI needs to harvest vast amounts of other work – the work of creative humans, most of whom haven’t agreed to this. And on the flip side, there are also creatives defending this process as simply technology developing. There are many articles out there shining a light on this much better than I can – so this isn’t an article about that. Instead, it’s an article about what AI design doesn’t offer.

Because yes, AI is faster, cheaper and less opinionated than a designer. But I believe that humans still have something to bring to the table. When you engage a designer for your project – you get more than just a skillset that follows instructions. You get experience (not just in design, but life), individuality and originality. You get a completely unique filter on your work and how it can reach others. You get answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.

Below, I’ll spotlight some of the main ways that I believe a (human) designer can bring value and validation to creative work.

True Collaboration

All of my favourite projects as a designer have been with truly inspiring clients. They’re all visionaries – they’re storytellers! – but what makes them really great is their openness. They understand that once you start to tell a story – it’s not just yours – it belongs to everybody. And when you let others in on your story, that’s when it grows.

A designer is just one of those creative partners. Working with one might be a little more complicated than feeding prompts to AI, but it really is rewarding. Rather than the resulting design being a mirror of what you had already pictured, a back-and-forth creative process gives both partners the ability to challenge and surprise each other.

If you have the courage to let go of what you thought you wanted,you might just take the work to a more incredible place than either of you could have imagined.

Misinterpretation

Ah, humans. We can be experts at misunderstanding. This is true with AI as well, but I’d argue that when something gets lost in translation between humans – sometimes magic is the result.

I think that this is because humans will innately try to make sense of something when applying it to the design. So, even when misinterpreting a note, a designer will keep to the spirit of the story and the intention of the storyteller. Opening up avenues in this way, instead of closing them down can be the key to something brilliant and beautiful.

Imperfection

Can you draw a perfect circle? No. Can any human? Naturally, any human-led design will have imperfections. But is this a bad thing? When confronted with images that are too airbrushed, too refined, too ‘perfect’, we often feel a distance – even if we don’t fully understand why. It feels ‘uncanny valley’. Unreal. But humans are imperfect. We are telling human stories and those tiny imperfections, they reflect our humanity back at us.

Subconscious Connection

We don’t always give them enough credit, but our brains are incredible. We have billions of neurons and each one of them has thousands of synaptic connections. What’s more, these connections are constantly changing in a process called neuroplasticity!

Now, I’m not a scientist but I definitely believe I’ve seen these connections in action when I’ve found myself doing something in my work that goes a bit like this: Woah! Where did that come from? It’s so random…but somehow…perfect.

If you do anything creative, you’ll know this feeling, this state of flow. It’s exciting, it’s amazing, it makes you feel alive because it makes the work come alive. It’s braver and bolder because we didn’t even know it was there before. We have this uniquely human ability to make these subconscious connections and let them manifest in our work. And it’s so beautiful and mysterious and out-of-the-leftfield that there’s no way you would ever find it if you were basing everything on something you’d made before in the way AI is trained to.

How do you feel about AI design? Can human creatives continue to offer something different or do you think AI will ever find a way to match our human qualities? Do you think there are other benefits of being a human when designing or doing other creative work? Let me know in the comments!