100. Preparing for Gen-AI Coup
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Slowly but surely, Generative AI is infiltrating our image, text, and other creative tools. Where will you be when it creeps up into the tools in your hands, hacks the very job you say you do with passion, and disrupts a career you’ve built on the je-ne-sais-a of “creativity” — one that you can’t define for yourself? How can you best prepare for this impending inglorious infestation?
Consider the following three objects gathered from uncharted places and times that might contain hints for us to act now!
For Milan Design Week 2023, Speculative Futures Milan and Domus Academy invited me to create three ‘Design Fiction’ visualisations for a panel discussion; to show potential futures of working with (or against) AI as designers.
These objects are not meant to exist in our world, but show potential situations we might end up in, extrapolating on the current state of AI and the discourse around it.
Generating concepts and visuals can be a large part of a designers’ job.
What might designers have to do with the time that has freed up by GenAI generating at a rapid pace? It is likely they have to spend it parsing, curating, prioritising the context-less AI hallucinations.
Might designers become the Masters of Vivid Description?
When images and text – a large part of the internet – are generated by AI; we could very well see a ‘Great Online Mediocrity’ washing over the internet – a bland aesthetic that’s low-effort to produce.
However, the best of designers might rise above this dreariness by whispering to their AI effectively.
When we all whisper to our AI, we might want to keep our prompts a secret. Where there is secrecy of IP, there is piracy.
Here is an official product, “Prompt Encryptor”, and a hacking device, “Prompt Decryptor” which can hide and hack into bespoke prompting languages.