On a sunny Wednesday morning, I sat down with my Design Team to discuss what the future of the Graphic Design Service might look like. The main focus of our conversation: Generative AI tools. For anyone working in the Information Services Group, or in fact any form of digital technology, artificial intelligence is the new shiny toy in the toy shop. It’s a topic we need to regularly return to, as developments in this field often outpace our ability to understand and implement them.

Our discussion highlighted three key things: 

• AI, whilst commonly discussed, is widely an unknown 

• There are opportunities to create efficiencies using AI technologies  

• The AI poses significant challenges to creative pursuits, such as Graphic Design, raising complicated questions of ownership, copyright, and quality 

So, first things first, what do we mean when we say “AI”? 

In our case, we are looking at Generative AI tools, which mostly make use of large language models. These models can quickly synthesise large quantities of data, and generate responses based on recognised patterns. Large language models (amongst others) provide the basis for machine learning.

Our friends over at Wikipedia have some wonderful articles for anyone looking to develop their understanding of generative AI tools, but aren’t quite sure where to start.

Generative artificial intelligence | Wikipedia

In the world of Graphic Design, machine learning has given us the following tools: 

• Generative AI which produces both text and image responses. (Think the Edinburgh access to Language Models (ELM)) 

• In-built automated features in design software (e.g. Photoshop) 

Opportunities of machine learning technologies 

Generative AI provides a powerful tool for ideation and supporting the graphic designer throughout their ideation process. Text generators can provide suggestions for iconography, images, and colour schemes, based on the designer’s brief, initial thoughts, or when they are completely stumped. In this way generative AI can be used as a powerful search engine. It helps you brainstorm when you have no one else to talk to in that moment. This however does raise a lot of questions relating to sustainability, but we’re not going there in this post. If you’re interested MIT News has an easy to read article about some of the environmental impacts of Generative AI tools

Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact | MIT News

Similarly, image generators can create visuals when one needs a starting point. It is a quick way to produce an idea and change it with minimal time and effort on the designer’s part. In our time-poor ways of working, generative AI is a powerful ideation tool.  

Continuing along this train of thought, we now also have in-built tools into the every-day software we use, which in our case is mostly Adobe products. Once upon a time we had to manually remove every part of a background we didn’t want and now with a few clicks the background is gone and we have more time to focus on the more enjoyable and creative elements of a project. Here we welcome to removal of the mundane from our work, and relish in the additional time we can spend on the illustrative and compositional parts of the process where our creative juices can flow. When these software updates happen, at times we aren’t even aware of the technologies making these functions possible. Something we need to be aware of each time an update is released.

Challenges of machine learning technologies 

The biggest challenge of machine learning technologies is that to many of us they are unknown. There are so many unanswered questions, and unfortunately many of those questions don’t have clear cut answers. Here are a few questions we have, which make us hesitant in using GenAI tools:

• What source did this image or text come from? Is it reliable? 

• Who owns the generated material? What are the copyright and legal implications?* 

• How do we protect our own work from being copied? 

• How can we use generated material in an ethical way? Is it ethical to use it at all? 

*Our colleague Lorna Campbell wrote an interesting post on GenAI and Copyright which you can read on our Open Ed blog:

Copyright and Cartoon Mice – Gen AI Images and the Public Domain | Open.Ed

We identified a need for quality professional development so graphic designers can confidently answer these questions and possibly be more comfortable with how they use generative AI technologies. 

Then there is the bigger challenge regarding the human designers themselves. Is this the beginning of a digital version of the industrial revolution? Do generative AI technologies signal the end of ways of working as we know them? Will our colleagues, family members, students, selves lose jobs? Will we need to retrain? (Many of us already have, think the transition from film to digital photography). Or perhaps is this a short-lived hysteria and the hype and excitement surrounding generative AI technologies will all blow over and we will continue mostly (but not exactly) as we have been? 

GenAI and the wider Graphic Design Community

The jury of our peers is still yet to decide on which side of this debate our industry will fall. While Adobe AI is “putting AI superpowers in everyone’s hands”, Procreate believe “the path generative AI is on is wrong for us”. In our work there is such a human element in the way we work, both with client interactions, and how our projects connect with their intended audience. Can a machine produce, or even comprehend, the empathy required for those tasks? 

Adobe AI

Creativity is made, not generated | Procreate®

Generated images also raise issues of quality. While my own playful experiences with image generation have resulted in impressive fantasy style haunted houses, and luscious magical meadows, we have all also seen the 6-fingered hands, and lack of symmetry in generated images. Issues as designers we then need to correct, and issues we would not have had should we have just done the image ourselves in the first place.  

 Our future…

We do not yet have the benefit of hindsight to inform how we act in the present to help us decide the best way to move forward with generative AI technologies. There is most likely not one “best way” to approach this. What we can do is to see Generative AI tools as an opportunity to learn new skills, and to develop the ways we play with the skills we have. The human in our graphic designers not only bring the ability to produce creative works, but they bring the why to our approaches and question processes to continue to ensure our work is relevant, high quality and accessible to our audiences.

Machine learning technologies are another tool in the graphic designer’s toolkit. The technology does not yet have the capability to replace the human element of our work. Perhaps one day we will be faced with the choice, just because we can, does that mean we should? But, today is not quite that day. Today we are here to play, to learn, and to find how we might shake up our ways of working for the best.

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Graphic Design and AI: Opportunity, hype, or threat? / Digital Skills, Design and Training by is licensed under a