A Designer on AI: Part 1

I’ve just returned from a wonderful few weeks at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where I performed in two beautiful puppetry shows for early years. Surrounded by so much art and creativity, and so many wonderful stories, I definitely feel like my soul cup is full.

The skill level of my peers, the artistry, the dedication to their craft, was so incredibly inspiring. In the age of AI, it is a beautiful and reassuring thing to witness so much human creativity flowing, so much passion and SOUL - something the bots cannot come close to.

Human creativity has always mattered, and will always matter.

I've fought my own battle with the rise of AI in recent months, so I wanted to share a little bit of it here, in the hope that it might resonate with some of you. 

The Hatchling (Wakefield) by Trigger Stuff. Powerful street theatre and human connection. We encountered so many wonderful people that day. Credit: JMA Photography

As a puppeteer and performer, in the past couple of years I've had my image copied without my true understanding or the option to say ‘no’ on the set of a feature film - something I rely on for my living, part of my tools of the trade, and now the production company can use it to populate a crowd scene without needing to pay me a penny. I see my peers all around me - wonderfully talented and dedicated artists - lose work and struggle to pay their bills. Screenwriters have witnessed their work dwindle as companies realise they can use AI-generated scripts, audiobook artists and audio description professionals get called up less and less times as companies move to using AI to generate their audio content and voiceovers. People are scared.

As a web and brand designer I'm constantly hearing how you can ‘just use AI to build your website’, how ‘you don’t need a designer'. Designers are worrying we won't have a profession in a few years. People are scared.

In the business world all I hear is how you should be using AI to automate this and automate that, how you can use Claude to generate a month's worth of content for social media, how if you've not already got your agents set up and basically running your whole business for you, you're behind. I wonder who else is scared? Social media managers? VAs? Copywriters?

Me doing ‘fish poi’ in Whisker’s First Winter, Odd Doll Theatre. I managed not to drop them once, but there may have been a few tangles! Credit: David Lindsay.

Resistance

And I have to ask myself: how can something be good, how can it be considered progress, when it’s making people scared they’ll no longer have a job? How is a situation where people are losing work, and therefore struggling to get by, a positive thing? And how does an economy survive when people no longer have any money to spend? (I realise an economist may have a proper answer for that one, so I’ll leave that to them.) 

So for a long time I’ve resisted getting excited about AI and its advancements, which are indeed growing at an alarming rate. I’ve pushed back against it or just remained silent. I’ve done things the old-fashioned way. The slow way.

Yet it’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid AI. Most of the tools I use in my business now have AI baked into them. It is, most definitely, here to stay. And recently, I’ve found myself exploring a little more of what it can do. I’m not talking turning my face into a cat or other such nonsense, but the fact I can now use Claude to lay out a neatly presented PDF in less than a minute, removing the background of an image requires but a click in Canva, and Claude can build out a whole database in Notion without me even needing to open the app, that’s genuinely useful stuff. And then there’s vibe coding…

Wait, it can do that?

The fact that I can design a custom section of a webpage, describe this to an AI tool (having installed a ‘skill’), and it will then write the code for this, which I can copy and paste into the back end of a site, just blows my mind. As a designer who, until now, has only touched code when absolutely necessary, it’s a game-changer. (Though I have to wonder, but what of the developers? How do they feel about all this?) Granted, it does pay to have an understanding of the code, so you can then troubleshoot if needed.

And anyone thinking they can just go and vibe code a whole website, when they don’t even think they’re techy enough to handle building one in a platform like Squarespace or Wix, may get a nasty shock when they realise they still need to sort the hosting, site security, accessibility, and what about when they want to update something on their site?

Taking tentative steps

It seems the designers who are planning on sticking around are finding ways to work with AI in their process, yet proceeding with caution - our creativity is our superpower. If we give that over to AI, what are we? Surely not designers any more, but where is the line drawn? And what about other creatives? In theatre and film, we are pushing back. Our livelihoods are at stake.

And then there's the huge environmental impact, the ethical and security concerns… We have already reached a point where the question is no longer, ‘can I use AI for that?’, but ‘should I?’

So I leave you here, confused and conflicted as I get excited about the latest vibe coding bootcamp while reading about the vast amounts of water needed for the data centre cooling systems as our country faces drought. I proceed with caution, with an unnerving knot in my stomach. I know I’m not the only one…