April 12, 2023
Kris: Welcome to the Design and Prosper podcast. This is episode 74 and today we are chatting all about ai, artificial intelligence and the future of graphic design businesses.
Hey everybody.
Don: Hello. Welcome to our episode today. What a doozy.
Kris: It is a doozy,
Don: I think worldwide. Everybody is in a state of what on earth is happening. Yeah. Like what’s going on? People. This AI business, artificial intelligence. It’s really got us all a little bit rattled.
Kris: Yeah. We were almost gonna call this episode AI – What the fuck?
Don: Literally. What the fuck? This is a big, big conversation that has to be had. We cannot go and stick our heads in the sand and pretend this is not happening, this is happening, and we need to look at the benefits. Look at the challenges. Look at how we as graphic design business owners work with this incredibly advanced, fast paced, so fast paced technology. It’s so fast. If you are listening to this and you think, goodness me, what’s going on? You are not alone. The whole world is thinking this, it’s happening so fast.
Kris: Yeah, it, it really is. Like, as we are recording this, there’s a lot of discussion going on about AI in the world at large, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, that’s okay.
Don: Yes. All right. So what is ai? Let’s talk about that. Yeah, that’s, that’s the big question on everybody’s lips, although I think everybody’s got a bit of an understanding of what it is. But let’s just break it down.
So we are far from experts. And what we share is, Definitely gonna be obsolete really, really quickly. It’s moving that fast. Maybe by next week, maybe by the time this goes to air, which will be roughly a week away. So that’s literally how fast it’s moving. But we are so fascinated and have been researching and taking a deep dive and we’ve had a big play with this technology and we are just wanting to share that knowledge with you, what we have so far. If you have been under a rock and know nothing about AI whatsoever, we are literally only a week ahead of you in, in terms of, you know, we’ve known about ai. We’ve known it’s been there for a while now, but. The way that it is right now in our industry and in all industries across the globe, it’s moving rapid fire.
So you are only a week behind us. So all is well. We are here to help you catch up.
Kris: Yes. So the idea of AI is completely fascinating to us. We are actually, we’re excited by it. so it’s basically this incredible technology. It’s an algorithm essentially, which comes up with new complex content within seconds. It just second snap.
Don: We get the giggles at how quickly when we’ve been testing it, haven’t we, Kris? mean, getting the giggles and like, can you believe how quick this is? It’s so fast. Mm-hmm.
Kris: So you’ve already been using rudimentary forms of AI for quite some time. Nothing like what this new technology is, but you know, we’ve been using the clone tool and content aware feel in Photoshop.
You know, that’s, that’s ai. It is, yeah. Like the image trace in Illustrator, when that first came out, it blew our minds.
Don: It was like, what?
Kris: Yeah. And it wasn’t that good at first and then it got better. So these things have a tendency to be a bit clunky at first, and then they get better and better. Um, even the filters that you use on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, they are a form of ai.
Even the way that algorithms predict the content that you are seeing on all the social platforms, like mm-hmm. Even Pinterest, all those sorts of things. It’s a form of intelligence that’s gathering and collating and then spitting out something. Absolutely.
Don: Then there’s things like Grammarly that’s a form of ai and we all know this one. Hey Siri.
Kris: Exactly.
Don: it’s been there. It, it has been there for a very long time and we’ve been using these, you know, for literally years. Yeah.
Kris: But AI is next level and all you need to do is just ask it a question, give it a command, and it will create written pieces. It’ll create images, videos, 3D models, art, like computer coding. It can code actual apps. It’s quite incredible.
Don: It is. It’s incredible and really scary. It feels like no one is really going to be unaffected by this and, and they aren’t. This tool is going to be revolutionary and we need to get on board. We need to understand it.
Kris: So if you haven’t used it and you haven’t played with it, a really simple example is using chat G P T, which is owned by. Open ai, open AI is the company that has created the software, the algorithm that’s underpinning all the ai, um, platforms at the moment. So they’re the clever bunnies who have done this. They are the leaders yet, so they’ve got this great free platform called Chat, G p T, and just log in for free. You could use chat g p t to write a note to your partner, for example, telling them how upset you are because they didn’t make dinner for you.
Don: Yes. It could be as simple as that
Kris: Mm-hmm.
Don: You could ask a tiny, teeny little thing like that, or you can ask something big and serious,
Kris: Or you can this is not serious. You can ask, um, chat g p t to make a poem about your cat. Yeah. You know, it’s just, yeah. Oh, it’s. Endless. You can ask it to condense information. You can ask it to summarize information. You can ask it to expand upon ideas that you’ve already got. It’s pretty incredible.
Don: It is so incredible. And for those things where, like the dinner, you didn’t make me dinner, you can say, oh, make it kinder.
Mm-hmm. And, and then, oh yes, we’ll make it kinder. Or can you make it more friendly? And we love how, chat G p t says Absolutely, and then gives you, then gives you a friendlier response. So you, you get to drive this. And I think it’s really important, we’re gonna go into detail a little bit about that.
That the input is really important. The, the driver is really important. So whatever you put in, that’s what you’re gonna get out. So yeah.
Kris: And whenever we use it collectively and individually, every time we use it, it gets smarter and smarter. And the algorithm, picks up on, more clues and yeah. The more people use it, the smarter it’s gonna get.
Don: Absolutely.
Kris: Because, yeah, because what it’s doing is it’s crawling the web, it’s referencing billions and billions of pieces of information, content, you know, from all around the world that’s already been published.
And it’s putting it all together in a new generative form. So we are talking conversations, articles, blog posts, social media posts, like all all that stuff.
Don: Literally all of it. Yes. Can you wrap your head around that? It’s literally all of those things are accessible to you and, and within seconds it really is mind blowing. Mind blowing. Yeah. It can actually create stuff that might not have really been possible otherwise. That’s mind blowing. Like it’s, that’s the revolutionary sort of aspect of this. Yeah.
Kris: That’s generative aspect of it. Like it’s generating something completely new.
Don: Brand new original content. So, you know, watch out schools and, and the education, industry, it’s gonna be very tricky. It’s gonna be very, very tricky to monitor this, but we, our school, my, my eldest daughter is in year 11 and here in Australia, and that’s a senior school and her school is encouraging their students to embrace, Artificial intelligence absolutely embrace it and work with it.
And they are already teaching them the pros and cons. So I think that that in itself is incredibly innovative that a school is going, okay, this is going to change the way we educate our kids. It’s going to change the landscape, so let’s be at the four of that. Let’s be a part of that change rather than sort of be racing behind. So I really love that.
Kris: Yeah. Because there will be Luddites out there that are like, this is evil, this is bad. We can’t use this. But we have a feeling that it’s a force to be reckoned with. You know, there’s, there’s no stopping this.
Don: No, there is no stopping this. Absolutely. And, and like we were saying, this beautiful platform is creating brand new intel based on all of the things that it’s finding. So it’s being fed information and it’s creating something new.
That’s the whole beautiful generative aspect of it. However, is the new, this is what Kris and I wanna know is the new, never been, never been seen stuff ever before, actually. Any good. So, currently mic drop. We really don’t think it is great at the minute, however. It is early days, and we do believe that it will become great as long as the person who’s putting the information in has a discerning opinion on what they’re saying or a discerning way in which to ask for that information to come back out.
So we do believe it’s early days, and we do believe it will get better and better, but at the moment we’ve tried, we’ve, we’ve had a week of. And trying lots of different things. And it is, it’s rudimentary at the moment. There are some, especially in the visual space, the written space, mind blowing. But even still, we are noticing that some mistakes are being made, some misappropriation, some gender bias, and lots of different little things are going on where not factual.
So, we absolutely need to say, make sure crosscheck, fact check and make sure that you, whenever it’s wrong, say no, that’s not quite right, because then that will improve the platform as well. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve been really blown away by, The, the written chat, g p t, but the visual, AI isn’t quite there yet.
Not to say it won’t be. Absolutely, it will be. It’s only a matter of time, but it’s early days.
Kris: Yeah. So we wanted to really break it down for you in this episode, just in case you really don’t know much about it.You’re hearing about this chat GPT thing, you’re hearing about ai, but who created this? Who created this technology? So the technology underpinning all the AI, as we mentioned before, was built by a company called OpenAI. So OpenAI was initially nonprofit, but they’ve had some huge investors joining, like Microsoft and Elon Musk was originally part of it, but he’s since dropped out.
LinkedIn co-founder, uh, Reid Hoffman, just to name a few. And there’s a guy called Sam Altman, he’s the CEO of OpenAI. And if you don’t know his name yet, you soon will. And he seems like a lovely guy.
Don: We really liked him. We’re like, oh, he’s great guy.
Kris: Yeah, he seems to be levelheaded and that’s encouraging. So, he’s the main face and he’s the ceo. And so chat G P T is the main offering from open ai and it is incredible. You know, it’s, it’s a chat box software essentially. Great for all your written communications and then other software developers are using open AI’s technology to create all their offerings, which are getting more and more niche.
Don: Yeah. It’s, it’s really incredible. And so there is niche software popping up every day, like literally every day there.
There’s AI specifically for content writers. There’s AI for podcasters, and now there’s AI for designers. So that’s where we come in. That’s why this conversation has to be had because there is AI available, especially for graphic designers available to us right now.
Kris: Yeah, and they literally do seem to be popping up daily and we’re curious about what other kind of offerings there’ll be in different niches.
So just keep an eye out for that because at the time of this recording, Canva and Adobe, had released, their offerings, their AI offerings, within days of each other. And this was only a couple of weeks ago, not even a couple of weeks ago. So it’s really interesting to think about them behind the scenes going, oh my goodness,
Don: Hurry up.
Kris: Can you just imagine? Determined
Kris: to be the leader in the field, determined and desperate to, um, to be on the cusp, be the first. So it’s happening and you know, there’s those design specific software, but then there’s the writing stuff, which of course, designers need too.
Don: When we’ve been playing in this, it’s been so much fun and we are, we are looking at it. We’re taking it for a test run with all of the elements within a design business, because that’s what we do. We are design business mentors and coaches. We teach the Academy, which is the design business school for graphic designers. So how is this going to impact on how we can deliver? At an el in an elevated way.
We want it to be elevated and we want this to help us out. So how can we, how can we use this to our advantage? And that’s why Kris and I are, are optimistic and we are always the, the ever optimist. And we’re excited. We’re excited we are looking at it with, those beautiful, big rose colored glasses, if you like, just initially.
And going, wow, okay, so what can we actually glean from this for our beautiful designers out there, for our community to help you, to help you to elevate your business? So let’s take that beautiful positive skew on it rather than run away and get scared.
Kris: How can we use this amazing tool to elevate the design industry at large?
Don: Yeah. Absolutely. So there’s gonna be some fears. Yes. So there are already conversations happening that they’re fearful conversations around the whole AI space and the future of your design business. So let’s unpack that for a second. So, you know, we’ve been around the block a few times over the past few decades, and we’ve seen new technology weave into our lives in our businesses Constantly.
Pretty constantly. The design industry was threatened by the introduction of design software, for example.
Kris: Like Photoshop.
Don: Like Photoshop. We’ve experienced the world with and without computers in our homes, we have literally, I have literally experienced designing with a bromide camera. Mm-hmm.
And then a computer, then it was around in 1994 when Photoshop was launched and I was going, what? Wow. This is how you have to be aware that in the beginning, everything is as slow as it’s ever gonna be.
Kris: Mm-hmm.
Don: It’s going to get faster and it’s going to get better, and it’s gonna get more niche and it’s gonna get more tailored as it goes.
So in the beginning, when we first got Photoshop back in 1994, or earlier 1993, was it 90? I will get the, we’ll get the, the year of that. But I remember sitting there and I was doing a, and now I’m gonna pronounce this incorrectly. Is it Guassian Blur? How do I pronounce it?
Kris: Oh, who knows. it’s got a funny pronunciation.
Don: It throws me every, every time.
Kris: That sounds right.
Don: And I was doing a band poster, and I literally could get up, go and make a cup of tea, put on a load of washing and come back and still eat. Hadn’t done its done. Its thing.
Kris: You could probably wait for the washing machine to finish and then put it on the line as well. It really was like that. And I think that when we first started, using Photoshop, I don’t think it even had layers. It certainly didn’t have the clone tool. And I remember when, the clone tool and the, content aware fill came in and.
Seriously, like I’d spent days and days on client projects doing what I could then do with a click of the finger. And so with that, there is a bit of a fear that, oh, I’m not gonna be able to be, paid for my work anymore, or it’s not gonna be worth as much. Or, there won’t be as much money to be made or something. You start to, you, you get into fear and
Don: worry you will become obsolete. I’ll become obsolete. My job is, is finished because a computer can do my job. That’s the underlying fear for, for a lot of industries.
Kris: And like even back in the industrial revolution, the fear was real for many people and there was a disruption and, they watched as their livelihoods disappeared and they were completely replaced by machines.
But what happens is humans pivot and they adapt. Like even when the, the camera was first invented. Yes. That was so frowned upon by the art industry. It was like, no, no, no, no
Don: Do not do that. Do not bring this thing in.
Kris: It has no artistic integrity. No.
Don: Can you imagine? So, yeah, there was a lot of fear even, even way back then. So I love that you used the word disruption, Kris, because disruption doesn’t have to be the big, bad enemy.
Disruption can be really good, you know, it happens and, and as a society, like you said, we shift and we adapt, we pivot, we have to, and if we don’t, that’s when we get left behind. So I think it’s a really beautiful way. Disruption for me equals growth.
Kris: Mm-hmm.
Don: Whenever there’s a disruption, it makes us look at things in a different way, look at it, look at things in hopefully a more interesting way. So yeah, it’s can be healthy.
Kris: Yeah. Everything changes, but it doesn’t mean that, it’s gonna be bad. Yeah. And, we can’t predict it. We don’t know what it’s gonna look like.
Don: Yeah.
Kris: But hopefully it’s wonderful things.
Don: And as optimist, we like to believe that too. We really do. And we really do believe that if you are one of those jobs where the, where it gets taken over by this new technology, there will be other jobs that become available. You know, there’ll be new things. There’ll be nuances that, that shift and, and move and, and you will move with it again.
Embracing this technology, we believe will actually elevate you. So rather than lose a job, you’ll gain something. So let’s, let’s be, let’s be the leaders in that. Let’s take this on.
Kris: Let’s just say it takes away all the mundane crap that you don’t wanna do. How exciting is that? Yeah. And you just get to do what you really love.
Don: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a great video from Wired where 20 people with different jobs try ai.
Kris: We’ll link it in the show notes.
Don: This is great. Kris sent me this little, video and I was like, this is so cool, just watching them have a play with it. So basically there was a graphic designer amongst them. Mm-hmm. And they all had a little play, and for almost all of the people interviewed, they could see that AI was going to make an impact on their career. However, it was, it still wasn’t picking up the beautiful little nuances and the emotional connections that humans provide. So for the most part, they said, Nope, AI can’t have my job just yet.
Kris: Except for one,
Don: except for the firemen at the end.
Kris: Although I can imagine this firefighting robot like wheeling in into fires and then spraying around water and figuring it all out. But I think we’re pretty far away from that still. Although I have seen a robot wandering around the aisles of the supermarket and I’m not exactly sure what that’s doing, but
Don: What is that robot doing? Maybe it’s a vacuum cleaner.
Kris: Yeah. But it’s totally natural to feel a bit freaked out about this.
Don: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And beautiful Sam Altman again, we watched that video. We will link that video in the show notes as well, because we got a lot out of it. And like we said, he’s definitely the right face for this business. He is a very well appointed CEO because he quelled a lot of fears. He was very measured, very grounded, and very, very relatable. So, and I think when we are talking about technology that is way out of our imagination, out of our realm, then we need somebody like Sam to guide us through that. So, so he said, if you look at the way that people use chat, g p t, there is a pretty common arc where people hear about it for the first time and they’re a little bit dubious, and then someone tells them about it and they, they get scared.
We get scared, we shut down, we go, no, I don’t wanna do that. And then they have a go, like we have, like, we’ve been having a go this past week, and then they realize the potential it has to help. So, you know, and in a way this tool can make their job better. They can see it. It’s like, okay, like we have already seen ways at which we can elevate the way that we operate, design and prosper.
We have already seen ways at which we can help our students in the Design and Prosper Business Academy. It’s all there. We know now after just one week of a deep dive of playing. So, you know, it’s, if you have play, you won’t be as scared once you know something, it sort of demystifies.
Kris: It’s almost like a learning arc with this ai. We totally experienced that and no doubt you are too. So when we first found out about it, we were like, uh, okay. It was another new, it was a bit of a groan moment, wasn’t it? Like Yeah. Another new tech thing that we have to wrap our hands around, we have to embrace. And then we learned a little bit more about it and it felt monumental. Like scary, monumental,
Don: scary
Kris: And we’re like, oh shit. Are we all gonna be replaced? Will we become irrelevant? And all those sorts of thoughts were coming in. And then we had a play like Don said, and we could see it’s incredible potential and you know, what AI can produce in seconds. It took us hours and or even days to do previously and that is so exciting to us.
Don: Yeah, so here it is, beautiful people. Overall, we believe that the graphic design profession is safe and your business is safe. If you are offering a high end experience, especially you are safe. So people buy relationships and connections. They wanna be nurtured and looked after by a human, human contact.
They want to know that you know that they’re being taken care of. So we’ve said it in a, recent podcast, you are not a commodity. You are not an avocado on the shelf. So it’s really important for you to understand that the bottom line is just because your clients have this fun new tool that they can also use.
Because that’s the scary thing, right?
Kris: Mm-hmm.
Don: The layperson ca is isn’t gonna go out and buy the Adobe suite and get their hands on Photoshop and illustrate an InDesign, and they’re not gonna get the specialized software that a designer has. But this platform is available to the entire world.
Kris: That’s a bit scary. So it’s not just our clients, it’s everyone,
Don: Everyone.
Kris: Everyone. So is everyone going to become a design expert? Because they can, input a request, and then, press go and then out spits their logo or out spits, you know, their new website or whatever it might
Don: Yeah. Yeah. Even just that language, Kris, like spits out
Kris: I know. It’s so elevated, isn’t it?
Don: But that’s what it’s doing, isn’t it? It is literally spitting out a logo. Now, if you are an elevated designer, and that’s the whole premise of the academy teaching beautiful designers how to be elevated, then you’re not gonna spit anything out. There’s gonna be so many subtle nuances within that whole journey, the briefing journey and understanding the brand and the human element.
There’s no way you can just spit something out. So remember, AI is just a tool, just like Photoshop or a paintbrush. And with practice and experimentation, which is what we’ve been doing for only one week, can imagine, we’re gonna get a lot better at it, Kris. You’ll get more skilled at using the tool for the greater good of your process.
So, and if you are good at what you do, AI is only gonna make you better. And there’s this quote we love, and it just, it, to me, it’s sums it up. It’s like, it’s a quote from Clay Hebert. And it’s his take on it.
Kris: He’s really interesting to follow on Twitter, if you, we’ll, we’ll link him as well,
Don: We’ll link him as well. But essentially he said, okay, Canva came out a decade ago. And there’s still horrible graphic design everywhere. Okay. We say, we say yes to that. powerful tools. Kill the creative middle. If you are average, well then you are toast. And if you are great, well, you are even better. Yes. That just excited me no end. Yes. I love that. Thanks Clay.
Kris: Yes. Absolutely. And there was another guy who is a project manager. He’s a specialist in training project managers, but he had a couple of, um, tweets as well that were really interesting takes. And one of them was saying something like, AI won’t replace you, but designers using AI will. Yes.
Don: Right, yeah. Because they’re going to use it to enhance their abilities. Yeah, that’s right.
Kris: Yeah. Yeah. And he also had a, another idea, which is, like at your core, your role within business partnerships, within servicing your clients is to be a leader, a guide and AI can’t lead. It’s amazing, but it can’t lead like you can, like a human can. It can’t be a leader.
Don: No. I love that. Thanks Carl. Yeah, we love that. So that, that should quell some fears. As soon as we saw those tweets, it was like, oh, thank you. That’s great. That’s a love, lovely perspective where hopefully we can actually dispel a few fears that are going on out there.
Kris: Yes. So let’s talk about ways that you can use this incredible technology to elevate your design business. We’ve touched on a few, but let’s get a little bit deeper with it. So this is actually fun stuff. This is the stuff that gets us really excited and you can tell already by us talking about this.
We’re super excited about this. You know, we just, we have got a section that we wanna talk about a bit later, which is all about the, the dark side of ai. But right now…
Don: Let’s let’s keep those rose colored glasses on for a little bit.
Kris: Yeah. So, Imagine using AI for brainstorming conceptual development and research. So the research parts of your process. We like to think of it as your brainstorming buddy. It’s just gonna be incredible, sounding board.
Don: Yes.
Kris: We believe AI will help you streamline your creative process. Honestly, we can see it happening and save you a ton of time. So, when you get keywords from a client, when you get a brief, you can extract some of those concepts, some of those words, and ask AI to expand upon them for you.
Of course, only a human mind can inject that level of sophistication and intuition that a design solution needs a good design solution needs.
And for us designers, it’s really based on understanding those subtle nuances. The nuances of a brief, of a client and a solution. Because a lot of the goal that we create as designers is based on intuition and also the difference between good and bad design can be so subtle.
Don: It really can. It really can.
Kris: The nuances.
Don: It’s the nuances, absolutely. And I think that, I love how you’re talking about that sophistication that needs to be input into the AI to get that output to be at that level. Because if that doesn’t exist, that beautiful intuition doesn’t exist. AI can’t sit in front of a client, whether it be via zoom or in person and c a person light up when they speak to an aspect of their brand or they can’t see when a client says, yes, we are using this gorgeous green in our palette, and we’ve also got this accent color that we are not particularly fond of.
Kris: They might just have a little grimace or a little like, ugh. You know?
Don: AI can’t distinguish that emotion in the words written. So it takes a sophisticated designer to intuit that and then direct the AI with that level of emotion. You have to put that in, you have to put that in to get that out. That’s what we’ve discovered. It’s only as good as what you input into it.
Kris: Yeah. So as part of the academy, we spend quite a bit of time helping designers refine their brand voice. And we were having a conversation about it this morning in our weekly coaching session. And we realize how important it is more than ever if you are using AI to finesse your brand voice.
Don: Absolutely. Be very clear.
Kris: Yeah. Cuz if you are not clear on it, you are not going to know if AI is aligned to you. If what it’s spitting out is aligned to you is in tune with you. So it’s more important than ever to know what it is. And then you can actually, you know, submit some of your beautiful brand voice to the AI and say, write it like this. Match this brand voice. So that’s really key. You can’t skip that process.
Don: It’s really, really important because you can disappear. And that’s what we’re talking about this morning in our coaching session. If you don’t really truly understand who you are, what you say you do, and how you do it, and AI gets a hold.
Just a few instructions it’ll take from the rest of the world, and it’ll give you an idea concept of who you might be or and what you might do. And if you aren’t rock solid grounded with who you are and your voice, you might go, oh, that’s all right then. That sounds okay. I’ll go with that. And then before you know it, you are, AI is imprinting that onto you, and you’re like losing yourself in amongst that.
So you have to really stand with integrity in this so that you really understand who you are and always correct the ai when it goes off course. If it goes away from who you are, if it goes away from your voice, then make sure you correct it. I mean, my daughters are 14 and 16 and they’ve been having a play with it as I’ve been having a play with it because, you know, in our, in our household been going, what he should see this, what this just didn’t do.
They’re like, what’s going on? What’s going on? They’ve been having a play and my, like I said, my eldest daughter’s been having a play literally since last, last year, last November. But then we started having a play with a few of their school things like, and, and just reworking things and just having, just seeing what the output would be.
And then my youngest was like, that doesn’t sound like me at all. I would never say that. That doesn’t sound like me. And I loved it. I loved that she knew her own voice. She could tell that’s not who I am. I’m not, I’m not, I would never say it
Kris: Like yeah, I’m not generic.
Don: I’m not generic. Yes. Nice one. So yeah, it’s really, really important that you understand who you are or you could, you could get lost. So here are some examples of what you could ask AI to help with, with regard to brainstorming. Let’s pull it back into that so here’s a good one that was brought up in the academy. Where, AI was used and we were introduced to it. And I think the question was, what are symbols of integrity?
Kris: Yeah. One of our, academy students, Paul,
Don: Paul, thank you, Paul.
Kris: He brought up this one. He shared this in our community and that was one of my first introductions to using it conceptually. So thank you, Paul. Because I, I knew it was for writing and I knew people were using it to write emails and whatever, like, uh, social media captions, but this was like, oh!
Don: aha moment.
Kris: And so that really opened up a door and we’re thinking, okay, this is really cool. So we started having a play with it. And so you could ask Chap, G p T to give you examples of imagery associated with customer service. In the beauty industry or in the restaurant industry or whatever it may be.
Don: Whatever industry or the industries.
Kris: Yeah.
Don: You could do a word association for the words, you know, Al Fresco cafe.
Kris: Wwhat comes up with that and it might spit out, who knows what it’s gonna spit out in my brain, would spit out, you know, chairs and tables and you know, awnings and you know, coffee and all that sort of thing. But what is AI gonna say? It’s really fascinating. It’s really,
Don: really fascinating. You could create a fluffy pink letter K.
Kris: Using the visual AI ones.
Don: And we’ve got some links we’ll share with you for the visual AI generators for you to have a play with. And one of them is Adobe Firefly and Canva of course we mentioned earlier. And Canva is calling there offering magic design. I just felt that needed a bit of drama. Um, and we we were having a plates rudimentary at the moment, but it’s sure it’s gonna get better and better and better. And then there’s another one, and we think it’s Dall-E. D A double L hyphen E. So check that one out. We’ll pop the links in there for you.
Kris: So Donna mentioned, please AI create a pink, fluffy letter. K, and one could ask why. Why would you do that? So that this is the thing, you can create all these crazy things and Yeah. We’re still on the positives though. We’re gonna get into the negatives.
Don: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were about to jump into the negative thing. Yeah. Come back, come back,
Kris:Come back to the positives. So, we’ll put a, a link to some of these visual generators. You’ve probably heard of the art ones already. The, they’ve been around for a while. Like mid journey and there’s, there’s whole lot of them.
Don: there’s a stack of them. We’ll pop a link there for later.
Kris: We will. And a lot of the apps are in beta mode but it’s interesting that just recently, Firefly has come up, so that’s Adobe’s offering and yeah, it’s like, okay,
Don: One of the cool ones that you could ask in a brainstorming situation is, please create five icon variations from one of your sketches. Now that’s cool. That’s cool because for me, we’re sitting in integrity. It’s my sketch. And now I just want you to, you know, do this next part of my process really quickly and efficiently for me.
Kris: Yeah. See if it’s got legs.
Don: super cool. See if it’s got legs Exactly. And exhaust that avenue. And then try another one. So Kris and I wanna talk to, we’ll probably talk to you more about being in integrity in the, the dark side of ai. But yeah, we believe that if you are coming at it, no matter what you ask it to do, if you are coming at it from a space, so if this feels right for me, this feels really, uh, genuinely like who I am and you, and you feel like you are integrity, then it’s actually okay. Give it a go and have a play.
Kris: Yeah. So that’s some visual stuff. Um, You know, designers need to write, and this technology is so good for writing I don’t know about you, Don, but when I first started my design degree, I didn’t realize I would have to be a writer. When I started business, I didn’t even realize that I’d have to be. a copywriter, a writer extraordinaire in all these different aspects, right? To boost up my client’s work and to boost up our work. And weknow that a lot of designers, may not be the most confident writers, and it’s a skill that we’ve honed, really, we’ve honed in on it over decades.
Don: over many years.
Kris: But we would’ve had so much fun with chat G P t
Don: Oh, tell me about it. This is just like, so exciting to me. It’s just that, that whole, what I was really lucky that. I went through my design degree in the early nineties and I went through with my lecturers who were pretty much admin and um, and very conceptual thinkers.
So we, our cohort was introduced to writing and conceptual thought really quickly, really early on in my education, and I furthered that by going into the advertising industry and was then spoiled rotten by having copywriters available to us for every single project where we could run with them with any little nuance that we needed. We’d say, I wanna type set this and I was a brat.
I wanna type set this, and there’s two words, I just need you to remove two words. And then our beautiful copywriter would sit there and go,
Kris: bloody Donna,
Don: bloody Donna. They would say it this way. And then I’d type set it into my layout and I’d go, yes, that’s it. Thank you. The, all the things that mattered to me. In my first years in the advertising industry, I needed things to be type, set to perfection.
Then when I moved into my own business, into my own, my own design business, I had to do the cutting to get the type setting. Perfect. So imagine having this as a tool. Now, this is one way I would imagine designers worldwide will use this immediately. Distill this down to six words. Yeah. Remove three words from this. You know, it just, it’ll be such a magic tool now that will be magic.
Kris: Oh gosh. We’ve actually used chat g p t to map out the last couple of podcasts that we’ve done, including this one. Yes. Very meta, right? Yes. So it’s such a great starting point. You know, when you’re staring at a blank page and you have writer’s block, it can just, you can ask some questions.
Can you please expand on this concept? So you can have like a couple of sentences. I’ve got a couple of sentences. That’s it. I’m out.
Don: Yeah. Yeah. I’m out.
Kris: And then can you please expand upon it? And then you can have a conversation essentially about it and keep getting deeper and you add your insights. It’s, it’s really exciting.
And if you’ve got something, this often happens, actually, you have something that’s too complicated and, and that’s what you were talking about before. Or too long, or too lengthy. Too long. Or too lengthy. Yeah. And you can ask the app to make it more succinct. Yeah.
Don: Yeah.
Kris: Yeah, summarize it. That’s cool as well. Especially if you’ve been given a copy from a client. It’s pretty good, but it’s just way too wordy.
Don: Yeah. You will need to seek permission from your client. You will need to make sure that they are aware of what’s going on.
Kris: Disclose the ai.
Don: Disclose the ai. I think that’s that whole part of being in integrity with it. Right. We need to speak to, we need to be using this thing. We have got AI to help us repurpose our last few podcasts into our blog. We’ve said it all, it’s all of our words. We have come up with the intel and then putting the transcript into AI and say, Hey, pop that in there with some subheadings and you know, make our chat make sense to a reader. And it’s been phenomenal. And there’s been some things that have been completely the mark. Yeah. And we’ve gone No, no, no
Kris: And we usually have to… actually, we always have to ask it to do another version. Yeah. Because it’s usually very robotic, very kind of, rigid stiff. Yeah. It doesn’t have the right cadence. Yeah. It’s just a bit weird. And it’s not…
Don: Kris and Don.
Kris: And so then we just have to make sure we say, now use our voice. Use, use the source material. Use the words and phrases from that. Yeah. Just make it a little bit tidied up so it makes sense. Yeah. For a blog post.
Don: get rid of the ums and the ahs. That’s right. So here are just some of the things you can use it for in your business right away today. Start now. Have a play. Do some blog posts. Emails.
Kris: Make sure you do your blog posts! Now you can.
Don: Beautiful nurture sequence emails, um, social media posts if you get stuck just ask chat, g p t to do a little brainstorming session with you.
Design proposals, mapping out your goals and objectives, using the right language in there. That, that, if you’re feeling a little bit, if you get awkward when it comes to that type of communication, then you could ask for some help there.
Branding audits and reports that reporting speak that might not be your usual language, that you might need to sort of elevate the language so that it isn’t in a report style. You’ve got, you’ve got the information there, but then you could ask chat g p t to put it into a reporting format. So we are playing with what we’ve got.
We’re playing with our own intel, you know, design briefs, design rationales, onboarding materials like welcome guides and things. That’s like where Kris said earlier, be very, very clear on your own voice. Don’t let. The AI influence you into another voice. We have to be really clear about who we are, but, but have a play. There’s so much there to have a play with.
Kris: But it can really help you refine your sentence structure. And, what I’ve seen quite a few people do as well is they’ll get, chat g p t to do a starting point, then they’ll run it through something else.
Like Grammarly. We love Hemingway as well, just to make sure that it’s readable and then you can inject your own brand voice. It can tell, you know, with Grammarly it’ll tell you if it’s friendly or if it’s corporate or if it’s a bit serious or whatever. And so, that’s helpful as well. But so important that it’s your own brand voice and be very clear on it.
Don: Yep. So some of the writing apps to try would be the chat, G P T, which we’ve been talking about, and Jounce and Jasper. So there’s so many.
Kris: Yeah, as we said, we’re always banging on about the importance of designers to get those blog posts done, get those emails out, nurture your audience, so now you have no excuse.
Don: yeah. Hopefully this will make it so much easier for you. It’s wonderful, wonderful starting point. Yeah.
Kris: We’re also really intrigued about the potential with AI for project management. And we’re kind of new to this idea, like wrapping our heads around how it can be used, but we imagine it could be used to help with, you know, when you have decision making fatigue and you’re like, you’ve got something really complex and you wanna break it down into steps, and you can say, I’ve got all this stuff to do.
I’ve got this project gonna help me unpack it into different steps and phases or you could use chat g p t to map out your business plan or your marketing plan, or, you know, do do some business de development stuff with it. That could be really interesting to have a look at.
Don: could be so much fun. Absolutely.
Kris: Yep. So, now we’re gonna talk about the dark side, but I’m just looking and we have act actually talked for a lot. We we’re very clearly passionate about this.
Don: Very excited. Well it’s so brand new. We love a good brand new sparkly thing.
Kris: Yes.
Don: And it’s something that is gonna be so worthy of this time spent talking about it because it’s going to be a big part of our lives. Yes. Whether you like it or not.
Kris: Mm-hmm. So we were going to talk about the dark side, but I think we are going to split this up into two now I think.
What do you reckon, Don?
Don: Yeah, absolutely.
Kris: So we’ll have, we’ll be back cause we’ve still got more to say about this. Yeah. Our next episode we will be about unpacking the concerns we have. And just making you a bit more aware of what could go wrong with it in terms of your design business and looking at the legal things.
Don: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, we’ll talk to you again very soon. Okay. Bye!
Kris: Bye!
© Copyright 2024 Design & Prosper Pty Ltd