Surrendering creative control: A hard but necessary thing to do in the age of AI

AI is getting demonised in the creative world at the moment. But one of the things I really like about it, is that it’s given non-design people the ability to create (arguably) nice-looking art and design for the first time in their entire lives. You can prompt, create, and revise when things aren’t to your liking – and we’ve never been able to do that before without serious design skills and a program to match!

It’s especially helpful for my clients who have big visions, but restrictive budgets – or whose disabilities, such as blindness, mean accessible creation tools that don’t require huge user input are so empowering and genuinely enhance their quality of life. But there are big problems too – and in the design world, I’ve found that increased AI usage has left many clients struggling to release creative control. Their projects suffer as a result.

The problem: AI is making us arrogant, intolerant, and impatient

The tech industry was absolutely rocked by AI earlier this year, with mass redundancies in IT support and web development reaching right across the world. As more of a designer than a tech person, I’ve felt more resilient to these effects, as my clients still love to pay for human creativity and the prospect of simply having a nice conversation with their design support (honestly, a lot of my client meetings turn into gossip sessions before we look at the clock, realise 20 minutes have passed – uncharged, of course – and decide we need to crack into business!).

Where I have seen design-world impacts, though, is when having AI tools on hand has made people more arrogant, intolerant, and impatient during design processes. Let me break each of these aspects down and show you why it’s a problem and how it impacts their work.

Arrogance

It’s easy to confuse the power to create, with the power to create well. “I could get get AI to do this” shows a lack of understanding of the fundamentals behind successful design, the ethics behind art theft (remember: AI learns by scanning and ripping what’s already out there on the internet), the importance and effectiveness of originality, the basics of human respect, the legality of trademark-ability, and the time and effort taken to complete a four-year tertiary degree in design or marketing.

The thing is, your audience isn’t robots. Your audience is, and (hopefully) always will be, people. A human person is going to have a more close-up understanding of your human audience than AI will. So don’t forget to lean into human expertise when trying to engage human eyeballs on your product or service – especially if marketing is completely out of your own area of expertise. The odds are you don’t know what you’re doing, and therefore won’t be able to appropriately audit your AI output.

Recently, I created some marketing materials on a job where AI use was really accelerating in the company’s workflows. The design and copy team found that the bot failed to take human psychology into account when providing feedback, and was making suggestions which were likely to decrease the company’s customer engagement and uptake – whilst also making unnecessary annotations and errors in its reviews.

In maximising the theoretical efficiency of the process and leaning too far into unemotional, robotic logic, the humanity and effective appeal of the product communication was lost. The expertise of two experienced marketing designers and a professional copywriter was disregarded. The company spent thousands of dollars on human advice and expertise, which was then ignored in favour of AI output that contained errors and insufficiencies.

We finished the job anyway, and crossed our fingers that the target audience would still gain some positive impact from the product. But we felt dissatisfied that more trust was placed in AI than three specialists who catered specifically for this client’s audience, who had put in an effort to connect with the human readers, and who were in agreement with each other about the more suitable approach.

Intolerance

A human who charges for their time, skill, and efforts, can’t turn things around as cheaply as a robot can. You also can’t prompt a professional to revise your work for free, and continue to do so 100 times if it doesn’t come out exactly the way you imagined. And this is exactly how it should be.

Working with a designer involves a certain level of surrendering creative control. The professional went to school for this, and so you trust them to produce a great result which is more effective than you could have done yourself – even if the final product isn’t what you imagined (note: it’s often better than you imagined).

I had a chat to one of my colleagues about this, and she aptly said the following:

“AI is genuinely incredible in some ways, but it’s a difficult time to be a designer, and parse through what are useful tools vs parts of the workflow that need human creativity and oversight… taking parts away would make some work meaningless, when everything is changing at a rapid pace and we’re trying to collaborate with people as well!“

And she’s totally right. Certain things still need human creativity and oversight, and it’s a mistake to automate that away in the pursuit of speed and personal control. The newfound power we all have to generate art and text for free, has made us intolerant of imperfection – we get so focused on having things turn out exactly as we imagined that we neglect to challenge our thinking and defer to the specialists we’ve hired.

I had to remind a client recently that I can’t give them a refund just because they’re unhappy with a design, when the project was finished and I’d followed their instructions, references, and revisions perfectly the whole time. They just couldn’t get over the lack of control they had to get it exactly the way they were seeing it in their heads. I’ve reminded other clients, too, that less is sometimes better in social media artwork – and that you don’t need to pack graphics in to a tile for it to be optimally effective and readable. These are both examples of intolerance that rises from a lack of complete creative control.

The irony is, of course, that AI art and copy is notorious for having imperfections and overdoing flourishes and details. But when I say we’re intolerant, what I mean is that we’re used to regenerating over and over again until we’re ready to stop. We’re no longer used to having professional boundaries set, being informed we’ve used up our allowed revision time, or being told we can’t get a refund just because we don’t love the end product after a series of drafts and feedback rounds. In other words, we’re becoming more entitled because AI lets ask for whatever we want, whenever we want – and humans don’t.

Impatience

AI usage goes hand in hand with rushing. This makes sense, since even the technology itself seems to be a giant arms race between four major artificial intelligence companies. The unspoken challenge in the air is clear: innovate or be left behind.

On the consumer level, people who are used to instant regenerations with a prompt are starting to struggle with the turnaround times caused by real human labour. However, human professionals can’t work as quickly as a robot, nor should they. Great work often takes time, fast robotic output is due to automative shortcuts, and a busy professional is busy for a reason: they’re good at what they do and their services are heavily in demand.

I’ve just spent the last few months booked out, which was heartening (but extremely stressful). It’s important to me that the work I produce is high-quality and personal, so I don’t outsource my design tasks to AI – and sometimes that causes lengthier turnarounds. My clients and I are all well aware that peak seasons happen, and that’s why I offer earlybird discounts for people who might like to consider an off-peak booking (January thru March each year). I also do express rates for those who can’t wait and need me pulling an all-nighter on their job.

Recently, I had a client pull a substantial book project and cancel their entire design booking. I was actually rather impressed with this, because they took months to refine the material and then decided not to run it because they couldn’t get it right. This shows they focus on quality over output, and was really refreshing to see when we’re always so bombarded with Content and speed at the cost of real substance.

The truth is, so many good things take time, and art and design are one of the most essential examples of that. Don’t get so caught up in efficiency and profits that you neglect to do something well and with heart. Your customers will probably be able to tell when you’ve rushed, and it’s just not a good look. We’re all so tired of it.

What next?

It’s hard to tell if the current consumer usage style of AI is a phase, or if it’ll permeate more and more into our lives and workflows. Whatever the outcome, I hope we manage to keep our personal human strengths and remember how to use professional discernment with these intelligent tools.

What are the biggest positive and negative impacts you’ve seen from AI adoption? Leave a comment and let me know.