Creatives, AI will reshape your role
A follow-up to my earlier piece: Creatives, AI will take your job
I do understand people being afraid AI will take their jobs. I’ve had times in my life where my income vanished unexpectedly. Scary times, those. So, I get that.
I’ve seen technology changes take people’s jobs.
CAD software replaced draftsmen at Boeing just before I joined the company as an illustrator fresh from art school. Some of the draftsmen—and they were all men—learned to operate the CAD systems that did the drawings. CAD was far more efficient than doing the drawings by hand, so lots of draftsmen lost their jobs.
Shortly after the Mac, PageMaker, and Quark Express were introduced, thousands of typesetters that had provided typesetting to creative services businesses simply went out of business. In my firm, we moved to doing our typesetting in-house. With the now greater responsibility for accuracy, we hired a proofreader who had formerly been employed by a local typesetter. What happened to all the others employed by typesetting shops? I have no idea, but I’m sure it was a scary time for many people.
With the arrival of the Internet and digital cameras, the world of highly skilled and highly paid assignment photographers changed dramatically. High res, inexpensive digitized stock photography became widely available, substantially reducing the need to hire photographers to shoot stuff you could get from stock. Designers and agency art directors often began shooting their own stuff. In past positions I’ve hired a couple of former assignment photographers to work inside design agencies. In both cases, they became graphic designers and did the photography we needed as well. What happened to all the other former assignment photographers? I have no idea.
One of my clients let go of three writers last year. She realized that with help from ChatGPT, her designers could do the kind of writing that her clients needed. What happened to those writers? I have no idea.
I’ve always drawn my own sketches for the pieces I write. I do it because I like to draw, and I think it makes the pieces I post feel more personal. But it does take me extra time. And I’ve thought more than once that I could save time and some angst about getting the drawing just right if I used AI.
I see AI-created art and what appear to be quickly done Canva illustrations throughout Medium and Substack, along with the advertising and journalism that fills my inbox. What’s happened to the illustrators who would have done that work in the past? Are they all supported by selling their work on Etsy? Probably not.
I recently put my pet sketches on mugs and sweatshirts on Etsy, mainly for family. But I don’t think they’ll provide much of an income.
I believe AI will reshape thousands of design, writing, illustration, filmmaking, and other single-function creative roles we consider professional today. We creatives will use the tools AI provides to change and broaden our roles, just as we always have.
Every step of my career has been shaped by changes in technology. I started as an illustrator and very quickly became a graphic designer. When the Mac arrived, I moved from design to management and began to focus on new business.
With the arrival of the Internet, our business grew, we became an acquisition target, and we sold the firm. For a while, I had a corporate job with creative responsibility for twenty-plus offices. None of this would have been possible without the changes in technology.
I began writing late in my career, and I don’t think that would have happened without the supporting software and spell check. I’m still a terrible speller.
I self-published my book on Amazon, which was only possible with the ever-changing technology.
Then, thanks to CreativeLIVE, I conducted a series of trainings for creatives on negotiations. Again, this would not have been possible without digital technology.
Today, I work four days a week on Zoom advising creatives. My clients are all over the world. Thanks to online video conferencing, I have a completely new career.
So, once, I was an illustrator, then a designer, then a manager, and a salesman. Thanks to the ever-improving tools, I learned to become a better writer. I love to draw, so I still do it. My natural skill, I now realize, comes from my interest in people and my ability to listen and learn. I use ChatGPT off and on. I find it useful and interesting.
What I’m seeing amongst my clients is the growth of highly skilled creatives being paired with generative AI assistants. This makes it possible for writers to become designers or art directors with support from AI. Those of us who are visual creators are using AI to improve our writing. Writers, in turn, are creating storyboards, and designers are writing websites, all with AI assistance.
I think of myself as a creative who uses tools to help me in my weak areas. That’s always been the case for professional creatives. So yes, AI is new and poses new challenges. And yes, the challenges it poses can be disruptive and stressful. But in my view, AI provides opportunities to expand what we do not limit us.
