We here at UNIVERSE welcome our new robot partners. The potential of automating repetitive, technically complex (and most importantly, uncreative) production work is quite exciting. The question of how much will eventually be possible when we give AI more specific direction is a fascinating one. 

The future is now

Technical advancements that we imagine far in the future will likely escalate much faster than we could imagine. Early attempts at machine rendering were crude and kind of laughable but check out how much the creative rendering AI DALL-E 2 has progressed in just one year:

“Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.”

— Hans Hoffman

Where are we currently at?

Airbnb is already using AI to render sketched wireframes into digital prototypes. This is exactly the kind of magic help we are looking forward to seeing available to all designers one day. Hand crafting digital web prototypes is so 2010 you guys.

So just how good will the robots get and will we still need designers?

Thinking of our latest brand design we created, we wonder if given the design references and keywords of importance, along with samples of our design style, how good could it get? The suspense is real. Even if AI generated designs are 80% of what you want to see and as a designer you have to tweak it, co-creating is still going to save tons of time and likely provide some unexpected creative inspirations along the way. The decision making of a designer and every choice they make is what creates their work ultimately. So a designer with less experience, understanding of current best practices and trends, or without natural creative vision isn’t going to be able to automate their way into awesome designs.