3 Reasons Why I'm Not Scared of AI
I don't think AI is coming to take my clients
It’s kind of like having a really amazing, really fast intern.
You still have to teach them, if you’re not super super specific they mess up (a lot), they tell you you’re right all the time instead of bringing new perspectives, you hope they have taste but maybe not, you have to double check the facts, their work feels derivative because they don’t yet know who they are.
It's humor is pretty mediocre.
Maybe I just haven’t trained my AI to be funny enough, but what I get back doesn’t feel bold or clever, it feels mid. I’m cheeky (according to my 6 year old); I make up words, celebrate flaws and don’t hide my personal experience.
I'm not an order taker anymore.
For many years of my career I often found myself feeling like an order taker. I accepted prompts from my clients - “put the Brooklyn bridge in the logo because my company is in Brooklyn”. I executed their edits “put the logo on the left side” “make it fit horizontally” even if I didn't agree. I am solidly past that stage of my career (thankfully for both of us).
Clients are hiring me to think, they are hiring me to have an opinion, they want to know what future problems I can spot and tackle now to save them time fixing something that wasn’t well thought out to start.
I am grateful for my super fast intern who takes notes, gives me a list of my client's competitors, makes my sentences more coherent and makes my mock ups look real. But I am careful what tasks I assign it. I am the one leading the meetings, writing the real stuff, doing the real sketches, and drawing the real vectors.
The super fast intern, who isn't funny and does only what you ask isn't me. You're hiring a human, that human is undeniably me :)