Employment

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.

What do you think?