Arlo was about to graduate with a degree in lighting design. During his last semester, his professor introduced him to a new tool that integrates AI in the lighting design process. The course was focused on how new technologies like creative AI tools could make the leading design process more efficient and intuitive.

Despite his enthusiasm, Arlo didn't have the money to access these tools. He went to school in a remote location, and they didn’t have the funding to grant all students with emerging technologies. Many students paid for these new tools, but Arlo would only have limited access to the free features they offered.

Arlo fell behind pretty quickly. He watched a handful of his classmates make quick advancements on their projects using AI tools while he manually created his designs. Arlo's experience resembled some of the findings that studies had found about unequal access to new technologies, and they needed to democratize the tools.

He wanted to know if his friends had this accessibility problem, so he asked his classmates and friends who go to other schools. Those he surveyed described a wide range of experiences. Some had full access to the latest AI tools because their families paid for it or they were able to use scholarships. Others, like Arlo, could only access basic versions. He also learned about open-source alternatives and some who pool their resources to share access to paid tools.

Arlo asked his professor if they could create a "tool-sharing" program within the department, where students booked time slots to use the AI software in their computer labs. He also suggested they approach the companies that created these tools to offer student discounts. His professor was receptive to the ideas and collaborated as a class to implement the tool-sharing program. They contacted several AI companies about educational partnerships, both of which began to level the playing field for students like Arlo.

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Dance is Mila's life. As a third-year college student, she has been looking for ways to create more innovative projects that allow her to create choreography in a new way. For this, she has turned to AI. She has been eager to push the boundaries of Dance, so she uses a motion capture technology that records her every movement and then sends the data to an AI system that turns each of those moves into a new sequence. Her classmates are impressed that these new sequences seem to capture human emotion along with precise steps.

Mila soon encountered a complex issue many people in creative fields face. When she shared her performance online, another dancer contacted her and highlighted that some of the new dance moves were the same as those she had created years before. This made her consider issues around consent that Mila had not yet considered.

Mila reached out to the developers of the AI choreography tool. They were open about their data collection methods and training process, and they explained that their AI was trained on a vast dataset of publicly available dance videos. However, they hadn't sought explicit permission from the dancers featured in those videos. The developers pointed out that this approach is similar to human dancers learning from others by watching dances and gaining inspiration. They also acknowledged that they were working on developing a way for dancers to opt out of having their work used in AI training.

Mila then conducted a small survey among her fellow dance students and local professional dancers. She asked them to weigh in on whether they would be willing to contribute their work to AI training datasets if asked. They provided a range of responses: some saw it as a form of artistic legacy and seemed excited about the possibility of their moves influencing AI-generated choreography. In contrast, others were concerned that they would lose control over their creative work and thought this would lead to AI replicating and building on their style without giving them credit. A few dancers proposed a system where dancers could opt in to license their dance moves and earn royalties.

Her story underscores the ethical issues that lie at the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence. The AI tool had been fed an enormous amount of online content, including the works of other artists who had not consented to this. This elevates the issue of intellectual property rights at a time when AI has created artwork in every discipline and when it becomes difficult to see the difference between inspiration and infringement.

This became an important moment of learning for Mila. She began researching AI-generated copyright laws and learned the importance of ensuring that companies get consent from creators before their AI systems generate new works.

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Jona had a critical moment in one of her first web design classes in college. Her professor demoed a new creative AI tool that can generate a wide range of dynamic web layouts for websites in just a few seconds. She and her classmates were amazed when they saw how the tool worked and what it could quickly produce. After the demo, when they were discussing the tool, she went from being excited by the possibility of speeding up how she designs websites to being worried by a tool that was doing what she was still only learning to do. As one of her classmates asked, “Why will a client hire us if this AI tool can already make a website?”

After class, Jona found some articles that explained the impact of AI on employment for designers, artists, and those in other creative industries like web design. The articles highlighted the potential for AI as a tool to help humans handle mundane tasks and, therefore, become more creative. They claimed that this would help designers like her focus on the innovative aspects of their projects but that it would also likely result in there being less need for designers.

Jona also contacted alumni from her program who work as local web designers to learn how AI tools affect them. The senior start-up designer shared that AI tools had created new roles in her company. She described positions for designers who translate client needs into AI prompts and refine AI-generated designs. Another alumnus who works freelance explained how he used AI to handle basic design tasks, which allowed him to take on more clients and focus on more high-level creative direction. A third web designer pointed towards the shrinking job market for entry-level designers and highlighted that some tasks traditionally assigned to junior designers are becoming automated.

These conversations inspired Jona to expand the scope of the website she was building for the semester. The website showcased potential career pathways that might emerge as these creative AI tools expand. For example, she imagined roles like an "Ethical AI Design Consultant" who is responsible for ensuring AI-generated designs adhere to cultural sensitivities and accessibility standards and a "Design Dataset Curator" who is tasked with compiling and maintaining high-quality design databases for training AI models. Jona also explored the role of designers who would add the final, uniquely human elements to AI-generated designs, ensuring each project maintained human qualities. She called this role the "Human Touch Specialist."

Instead of shying away from the topic, Jona focused her entire semester project on these contrasting issues. She created a website that illustrates what a day in the life of a web designer would look like in the future. The main character in her story used AI to speed up the process of doing design tasks. Still, it relied on their individual intuition and their unique emotional intelligence to create designs that resonated with clients in a more personal way.

She presented her project during the final class and referred to some articles she read, including a TED talk by an AI researcher who promoted deeper collaborations between humans and AI. She ended her talk by reflecting on the importance of human creativity. She also suggested ways that AI may change the essence of art and design processes and humans' ability to evoke emotional connections.

Jona's project led to a dynamic class discussion about what their profession would look like in the future, where AI is used in every creative discipline. Her peers discussed how they might leverage AI tools and how AI tools may threaten what they conceive as the web design field. Jona came to believe that her employability lies in her ability to remain flexible and embrace emerging technologies while offering her unique human perspective, empathy, and emotional intelligence in every project.

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