AI is becoming very capable. There’s a lot of talk going on about the breakthroughs happening in AI research. Deepmind’s strategic AI, AlphaGo has beaten the best human players at Go, a game that is so complex that there are more combinations of pieces on the board than there are atoms in the observable universe. The latest version, AlphaGo Zero can beat all previous AlphaGo’s, and it learns to do so just by playing against itself.
These scarily intelligent computer programs are based on what is called a neural network, a type of software architecture that mimics the way human brain cells interact with each other. Neural networks are wired to recognize patterns very efficiently, just like the human brain, and exhibit machine learning. This is what Google has been using to learn how to recognize images so well, and what Tesla Motors uses to power and continually improve the autopilot in their cars.
Oh by the way, here’s an image for you to consider.
James Cameron predicted the potential of Neural Networks back in 1984 with The Terminator
Skynet logo and Terminator are owned by Paramount Pictures Corporation
Our beloved real-world Tony Stark constantly repeats that AI is a greater threat to humans than global warming. Musk has joined the AI race against Google and IBM by founding OpenAI, which is a non-profit with the goal is to create ‘safe’ AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
(An AGI is a computer code capable of processing any sort of information towards any end. Much like our brains.)
WILL BOTS TAKE OUR JOBS?
An AGI through self-learning could become better at any form of art and design than any human that exists or has ever existed on Earth, that too, in a matter of days. Thankfully we are at least a few decades away from such technology, and global warming may just kill all of us before we can get around to building it.
What does exist today is something that seems very tame in comparison. However, today’s attempts at delegating the work of designers to algorithms will be the foundation of much more capable algorithms in the future.
One such example is The Grid – which is a code that is supposed to create websites for clients from scratch. The intention for The Grid was to provide users with a custom website that looks good and adapts the layout and style of the user’s industry. However, The Grid is notorious for creating terrible garbled messes of code and the most horrid web design ever.
So cutting humans out of the equation clearly doesn’t work. Another service that does it much better than The Grid, is Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). Wix applies templates appropriate to the user’s industry and provides an easy to use interface that allows plenty of tweaking.
Tools like Wix could actually reduce the demand for web designers, as they enable users to create quality websites while guiding them through the process. Availability of AI tools to users will also increase the push for designers to innovate, the good news is we’ll have code on our side too.
A symbiotic relationship with code
Much of the software we use today is intelligent code and fits the definition of AI. One such example is Adobe Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill. If you’ve been keeping up with the Adobe’s MAX 2017 conference, you know that they’ve demonstrated prototypes of tools that boggle the mind and could do away with hundreds of hours of work.
This is exactly how designers and AI can develop a sort of symbiotic relationship that allows each to grow. If you think about it, we’re already cyborgs, dependent on software and computers in every facet of our lives and work.
We carry mini computers with us everywhere.
A lot of repetitive, boring design work that requires human intuition and couldn’t be done by a machine can be automated thanks to machine learning. Software advances will free up much time and allow designers to spend more energy on innovating.
Netflix is one company that uses algorithms in a remarkable way. All their posters are created automatically by computers from pictures of characters. To these, the text is customized regionally and the pictures are sent off to a test audience for review. After that, it is simply a matter of choosing the posters with the highest scores.
Sourced from The Netflix Tech Blog
In the meanwhile, Machine Learning will continue to analyze swathes of data, media, images and it’ll keep making AI based design tools better. The best thing to do as a designer in the AI age is to stay on top of the latest software. You don’t want to waste your energy doing something that a computer is doing somewhere else in the world.
