Earlier today I had a quick look at Adobe’s Firefly generative AI system, which is going to be embedded across many of their products. And I was blown away. You can get a sense of the ease with which you can tweak variables in this video. Generative fill is what Adobe is calling the feature that’s integrated into the beta version of Photoshop. I love their tagline; create something from nothing.
As a creative tool, this feels like something that’s going to do two things:
- Enable the creation of incredible content by people who understand design.
- Enable the creation of enormous volumes of mediocre content by people with a poor eye for design.
If you’re a designer who uses generative AI, your productivity and creative potential is going to explode with tools like this. And if you choose to ignore this incoming wave of new tools, you’re going to be replaced by the army of non-designers who can approximate your work for free.
- Unskilled designer + AI = creative output (maybe good, maybe terrible).
- Skilled designer – AI = good creative output (the status quo).
- Skilled designer + AI = fantastic creative output.
The difference between 1 and 2 isn’t going to be very much i.e. I think generative AI will allow unskilled users to approximate the output of the average skilled designer. But the difference between 2 and 3 is going to be significant. Maybe significant enough that people will be willing to pay more for 3 compared to 2, than they would be to pay more for 2 compared to 1. In other words, strong skills + AI will outperform everything else.
So, now isn’t the time to pay less attention to skills, or to think that the value of skills is going to deteriorate over time. Now is the time to:
- Build advanced skills and expertise in your domain.
- Learn how to amplify those skills with AI.