The AI Industry is a Giant Treadmill
And we can't press stop or get off
Four Sobering Articles About The Near Future
The PR department should have tried to hold him back, but perhaps Emad Mostaque (CEO of Stability AI) felt that honesty is the best policy when he said “There will be no human programmer jobs within five years”
If you’re a designer and you’re worried about AI and Job security, you should probably read this Medium Post from Mia Blume, where she lays out five actionable things that you can do right now to keep your seat at the table. “Given this massive shift, the time to prepare is now. It’s yesterday. Make sure you and your teams are relevant before you get pushed out — because you won’t get pushed up.”
This article from Brad Frost dates all the way back to February, but it’s still relevant as he carefully explains how easy it would be for a generative tool to both build and deploy a design system. While he cautions that we still need human involvement to “pull the project across the finish line”, it’s easy easy to imagine that some jobs will disappear.
On a slightly more positive note, if you work in Product Design you will probably appreciate this article from the team at Pitch. They caution against rushing headfirst into adding AI features just because everyone else is doing it and offer a detailed view of their actual working process.
Midjourney Roundup
Barely a week has passed since Midjourney surprised us with their ‘Zoom’ feature, and this week it gets even better with the new ‘Pan’ feature. While not a perfect answer to outpainting, you will now see four arrow buttons in your Discord interface that will extend your canvas in any direction. Read about how to use it here or watch here.
Or, if you just need to get caught up on all of the new Midjourney features, you can start with this article from Diana Dovgopol.
While you’re at it, why not freshen up on exactly what Midjourney is doing when you specify ‘stylize, chaos, and weird’ in this excellent tutorial from John Walter.
AI Video Tool of The Week #1: Kaiber
If we’re friends on Instagram, you’ve probably already seen this video I made with Kaiber. I realize that this is just like putting a time-extended Photoshop filter over your video, but it came out pretty cool. The whole process is hit-or-miss and sometimes it comes out awful, but in the ‘Text to Video’ space, I like it better than Runway ML. I paid for a $5 starter plan to get enough credits, but you can start for free at Kaiber.ai.
AI Video Tool of the Week #2: Pika
I’ve only been using it for a few days, but I’m blown away by the speed and quality of Pika Labs. You have to prompt in Discord so it’s a very chaotic environment, but it’s free (for now) and the results are better than Runway ML. Here’s a fake beer commercial I quickly patched together in about 45 minutes. I reused the audio from a similar project from a few weeks ago.
Script: Chat GPT, Audio: Eleven Labs, Video: Pika Labs
This Week’s Inspiration
If all that AI doomsdaying is getting you down, you might be inspired by this article from Fast Company where the profile a design firm that is going all in on AI and used it to generate their latest branding campaign.
“As an owner of a design company, I don’t want to be left behind,” she says. “I feel like we humans need to keep up with the technology and find a way to work with it. It’s too late to be against it.” Pum Lefebure, Design Army
Midjourney For Web Design
I’m not advocating that you start using Midjourney to actually design your web projects, but I am impressed with the thorough process that Paul DelSignore followed in his exploration of what’s possible. He agrees it’s not quite there…yet.
I do believe that one day in the future, we will be using prompt engineering for the full creation of websites with intricate and polished details, including real content input.
AI Best Practices for UX Designers
And if you’re already being asked to leverage some AI for your current product or UX design project and you don ‘t even know where to start, check out this article, complete with additional reading at the end.