With AI increasingly taking over tasks that were once reserved for people, one begins to wonder what the future holds for creative professionals like us: artists, designers, illustrators, photographers, programmers…
It’s true that the statistical type of training that generates the AI Large Language Models is not conducive to teaching them the true meaning of what AI learns, you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you judge their output…which grows more and more nuanced and clever seemingly by the day—no joke.
Some of us are telling ourselves that, sure, AI can automate some tasks, but it’s not capable of replicating the creativity and flavor of human expression. A computer program may be able to generate a product description, but it can’t capture the essence of a brand’s personality or tell a compelling story.
And to some extent this is true at this point, but time will tell whether that holds true in the future. So, we at Digit are doing everything we can to adapt to this new environment. Part of that adaptation takes the shape of learning how to prompt these systems to obtain predictable, consistent results of the highest quality.
Other times, we lucubrate about what the future holds for design and development agencies like ours and any creative professional at large. And recently we got to talking about this notion of the “curator.”
Our roles might shift from content creator to content curator. Instead of developing everything from scratch, creatives will focus on selecting, combining, remixing, and editing content generated by AI systems. This requires a different skill set than traditional content creation, but it’s no less valuable (or is it? At any rate this is what we are telling ourselves, for now).
Curating content requires an understanding of your audience and your brand’s identity, as well as the ability to spot trends and anticipate what will resonate with your audience. It also requires a keen eye for detail and the ability to recognize when something isn’t working and needs to be revised or scrapped.
In some ways, the “age of the curator” is already here: music sampling, the meme culture, museum collections, collage artwork, social media storytelling, and more.
So, hopefully rather than AI replacing people, it’ll just shift our understanding of what art techniques are about.
As always if you need help with a website, app or need help navigating the changes that AI is bringing, get in touch with us.