One for the Freelance Photoshoppers out there. How much is the AI feature going to hammer your income, taking seconds to carry out the work compared to your current chargeable time using the ‘traditional’ methods?
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Photoshop generative AI. Worried?
- Thread starter dazzer21-2
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All of this AI technology is fairly new, and while it demos pretty good and has some unique results, I wouldn't worry about it taking any jobs away just yet.
I would say that AI isn't going to take our jobs, but designers that are experienced and qualified to use AI as a tool are.
I’m more interested in the effort (or lack thereof) it takes to produce something in 30 seconds that, using traditional retouching methods, could take hours or, in some cases I’ve seen, be impossible to achieve. Charging £200 for a minute’s work is going to be acceptable to nobody.
AI generates and does a lot of the technical work, but designing is more than that. The eye, soft skills, and mind is also needed. You can give me a dozen technically excellent, AI-generated logos, but if it's not what the client is looking for, it's not what the client is looking for. It happens more often than not that a client or stakeholder thinks they know what they want, but they really don't. Designers need to navigate that journey, and AI will never replace that.
We have been playing with machine learning for some while now, in its various forms, and Ithink most of all it is helpful. Whether using the masking tools in Lightroom or GPT4 et al for assistance on synonyms, corrections, shortening social media for Twitter, text inspirations and so on, all of these help, not perfectly but well enough, with tedious tasks. It’s like with a pocket calculator or GPS navigation… it’s just smart to use it. Dall-e and Midjourney so far are fun, but far, far to uncontrollable for professional work and the results have a certain look that often feels overdone. It’s fun to work with as a technological toy in its early formative stages but not what you can really use practically (as opposed to the text tools). Photoshop is a step in the right direction as it offers to work on tiny aspects of images, repairing and filling stuff, adding little details. Working with the beta however, most of the result felt like Dall-E, all of it a bit bizarre and not photorealistic enough. You try to replace a watch with something else and despite a clear prompt the engine gives you some cyberpunk bracelet and so on. It’s at the same time amazing and frustrating. Will it change what we do in the long term? I think so, just as DTP, digital cameras, digital video and digital print have, the ability to edit a movie on my desktop machine in 4K or to not have to scan images from Film etc, being able to professionally print very low print runs, the ability to go online with some stuffon the web within a few hours and so on. Machine learning is the next step in this direction with all the tos and fros we had with other technological progressions. It will be a further democratization of what used to be professional work, more layman doing design, building websites, shooting movies. It will destroy some businesses and bring up others. Just as postscript fonts and Quark did, just as all progress does. At the moment I really really enjoy that my tools are getting smarter,hope for a self-scheduling calendar, smarter todos, self-generating invoices and, yes, a smart assistant that makes retouching more fun and playful. Let’s enjoy it and be creative with it, as artists and designers that is our mission, ride with the new.
I found this piece of Photoshop AI work. If AI believes the moon landing was fake*, I'm going to have a hard time trusting AI to do real work.
*the moon has an atmosphere? There are clouds in the sky, y'all.
*the moon has an atmosphere? There are clouds in the sky, y'all.