The first wave of designers unemployed due to AI

Over 200 years ago, when photography technology was just born, painters also watched helplessly as the camera took over. The famous French designer Paul Delaro left behind the classic statement: "From today on, painting is dead." However, after the wheel of history rolled by, painting and photography still each have their own place.

As AI technology enters the field of image generation, history seems to be repeating itself, with a large number of designers facing unemployment. For most designers, the decision to leave or stay is a matter of survival. Each grain of sand of the times falls on every individual designer like a mountain. This is one side of the coin - cruel and violent.

The other side of the coin is - subversion, equality, and embrace.

"AI allows many ordinary people to have design capabilities, and with precise descriptions, they can produce decent artistic works. It provides an equal ability; and if designers use AI well, they have the opportunity for equal efficiency, their design limits will be higher, and they can transform into super individuals with the help of AI." Liang Yaoming, founder of the visual creative platform Zcool, said.

In the new wave of technology, no one can remain unaffected. A report from Goldman Sachs shows that artificial intelligence can replace 300 million jobs, and researchers from OpenAI have published a paper showing that about 80% of Americans' jobs will be replaced by AI.

"After studying art for many years, my painting skills are not as good as the paintings produced by AI in a few tens of seconds by inputting keywords." A fine arts student lamented. Concerning the future, he is very anxious and confused, and the news of designers losing their jobs and delivering takeout hits him hard. Furthermore, in the rapid advancement of AI, there are many ethical issues surrounding technology, as AI can indeed improve efficiency, but it can also be misused for spoofing and plagiarism.

"My job has been killed by AI"

Liang Ge, from Dalian, was a design director at a certain e-commerce platform and left two years ago. Nowadays, he has opened a fermentation pub in Longguan. This second-floor shop facing the street is about 50 square meters, with a rent of 250,000.

From the panic brought by AI to designers at the beginning of 2022 to now, many designers have basically accepted the existence of AI.

Liang Ge said, "If you (AI) want to replace me, then go ahead! I have no regrets." He came to Beijing in 2006 and has worked on various design projects over the past 16 years. Now running a small pub, Liang Ge feels that he has not bid farewell to design, as his design is everywhere in this space.

Liang Ge voluntarily left the e-commerce platform at the beginning of 2022. At that time, in his understanding, finding a job was not difficult. By April of that year, he felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, with former colleagues calling him to ask if the company was still hiring. Liang Ge told them he had already left.

By June, Liang Ge noticed that opportunities were even scarcer. His friend Xiao SI, a design director at a major company, and her entire design team of over ten people were all "graduated." This team is one of the oldest design teams in the domestic Internet industry, focusing on visual design, interaction design, user research, and front-end development in the Internet field Unable to stay at home, Liang Ge spent a month in August visiting various museums in Beijing. Upon opening some social apps and designer communities, he found that there were many designers who had been unemployed for half a year or a year. Liang Ge told himself that as a manager, it would be even harder for him to find a job.

A sense of pessimism enveloped Liang Ge, as he began to worry about not being able to find a job, potentially leaving Beijing, and not being able to tell his family about being unemployed for the time being. "If my mom finds out, she will definitely think that I can only wear a uniform, work as a security guard, or deliver takeout in Beijing in the future," Liang Ge joked. He started to adjust his mindset, calming his heart, avoiding anxiety, and ensuring that his mindset remains stable.

After a period of confusion and searching, Liang Ge's small pub finally opened. Customers started coming in gradually from 6 p.m. and it closed at 4 a.m. Liang Ge mentioned a customer named Xiao Pang. Xiao Pang told Liang Ge, "There is finally a craft beer brewery in Huilongguan; you must not give up, you must persevere—sorry, boss, I'm not good at talking."

Liang Ge was deeply impressed by people like Xiao Pang: "The small pub has become a place for employees from internet giants to vent, with some crying while drinking; some worrying about being laid off on the edge of their business; some complaining about the culture of bad money driving out good money in the company..." The giant corporations still resemble a walled city.

Walking out of the walled city of the giant corporations, Liang Ge's newly opened small pub and its future carry his future life and ideals, and regarding the future, Liang Ge now has a more ordinary mindset.

Analysts at Guotai Junan Securities predict that in the next five years, 10%-30% of image content may be generated with the participation of AI. Industry insiders are more inclined to view AIGC as the "industrial revolution of liberal arts students," as AI currently only replaces the industrializable part of painting. With AI painting as the first application to break the boundaries, some designers have been passively brought from the city to the countryside.

As a UI designer at a giant corporation, Zhang He, born in 1989, joined the company through campus recruitment. After "graduating" from the giant corporation, he originally wanted to find a small and beautiful design company to work for.

As a transition, Zhang He went to a bar opened by a friend, invested in the technology, and helped with the development of the brand and some peripheral products. After working in the bar for seven to eight months, he left. During his time at the bar, he met the current boss, who runs a company selling liquor. The boss and his wife both appreciated him and felt that in this era of live streaming and short videos, their team needed someone who understood design.

For Zhang He now, the income is not as high as it was in the giant corporation, but he is much happier than before, and he is satisfied with the current situation. "In the past, he was just a screw in the giant corporation, now he often needs to find original images on foreign websites, and he is also very happy in the process of finding images because he can see a lot of good ideas, and he is full of creativity in the process of drawing illustrations."

"I am more powerful after mastering AI"

"Little SI, AI is here, what should we do?" "We must embrace AI for sure!"

As the wheels of time roar forward, whether it's proactive or passive, Liang Ge and Zhang He chose to leave. Little SI's choice is to get on this train. In her view, for an excellent designer, AI is both a challenge and an opportunity After leaving the big company, Xiao SI started making short videos and founded her own studio. It's definitely not a problem to support herself, but becoming extremely wealthy is out of the question.

When Xiao SI was studying at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, her mentor often said, "You guys didn't catch a good era. In the 1990s, designers would often exchange a design project for a car worth 700,000 to 800,000 yuan. But now, why has graphic design declined? Because you can design a business card, a menu for just 50 yuan. Design has become templated, and this templating can be seen as the earliest form of AI."

Now that AI is so powerful, for today's Xiao SI, she has always been thinking about how to form a one-person team, where repetitive physical tasks can be handled by AI.

"For a designer, she has returned to the essence of design - creativity and inspiration," Xiao SI told "AI Light Years."

"In the entire market, competitive designers can be divided into two categories. One type of designer is very good at creativity and expression; while the other type has very strong technical skills, including software applications such as 3D, rendering, and has truly spent time on their work," Xiao SI explained.

Xiao SI is from Shenyang. During her university years, seeing the exquisite sculptures and reliefs at the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall in Guangzhou greatly impressed her. Isn't this China's Rococo and Baroque? In addition to being shocked, Xiao SI was more contemplative, "If I were to sculpt to this level, with this amount of work, I would be exhausted. I could only carve one door in a year."

It is well known that da Vinci took 4 years to paint the "Mona Lisa," Monet took 7 years to complete "Water Lilies," and Hayao Miyazaki worked diligently for 13 years to complete the manuscript of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind." AI, with its tireless efficiency, is changing all of this at present.

Xiao SI said, "The fusion capability demonstrated by AI now exceeds 90% of practitioners in the industry. A large part of artistic creativity belongs to physical labor, and now AI is taking on this physical labor."

For creative designers, with the support of AI, they will become more powerful than at any other time.

"Ye Qing is a top designer in China, skilled in 3D and also enjoys photography. Now he is trying to use AI to produce photos, constantly challenging the limits of AI with his works. With each iteration, his works become more detailed. Later, Ye Qing posted the photos on the Zcool community, and everyone was amazed at how well he used AI!" Liang Yaoming told "AI Light Years."

Liang Yaoming, founder of the visual creative platform Zcool, was born in 1978 and is from Guangzhou. It is reported that there are 18 million designers in China, and currently Zcool has 17 million registered users. Liang Yaoming worked as a graphic designer for ten years, then worked at Shanda Network and mop.com, and founded Zcool in 2006 "The entire design industry has come to a disruptive and revolutionary moment. The current era is quite different from the previous PC Internet era and mobile Internet era. The future is still very much worth looking forward to—AI technology is worth embracing," said Leung Yiu Ming.

Leung Yiu Ming has experienced the ups and downs of the Chinese Internet industry for many years. His life philosophy is "to swim against the current as a person, and to act with the trend in doing things." In February this year, Meitu spent 300 million acquiring Zcool. In this acquisition, Leung Yiu Ming's focus was on "enabling designers to make money using Meitu's AI technology."

"I hope Zcool can help designers master new technical tools and focus on creativity or visual presentation," said Wu Xinhong, the founder of Meitu. "People are constantly learning and growing in change, and need to make good use of new tools."

Yu Yu is the founder and design director of Yixiang Huaran, tall and thin, with a ponytail, exuding an artistic temperament. He holds a master's degree in architectural management from the National School of Fine Arts in France and is a doctoral student at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He specializes in winery, theme park design, and cultural IP development. Beijing Zhangyu Aifeibao International Winery and Lanzhou Silk Road Theme Park are both design works of Yu Yu.

Yu Yu has now embarked on his third entrepreneurial venture. He purchased the script "Mars War" from his brother Yu Lei, a screenwriter, and developed a full industry chain of IP categories such as novels, movies, and theme parks based on a script. Yu Yu organized a global R&D team of 70 people with a focus on IP, including an astronomer, science fiction writer, screenwriter, AI designer, and theme park design and operation talents.

Every day, Yu Yu can see the progress of his designers' work in the Midjouney community on Midway Island. This community is connected to Midjouney. Through this AI generation platform, Yu Yu has not only improved work efficiency but also saved a lot of personnel costs.

The future is here, everything is just beginning

Xiao SI still remembers a dream he had when he was studying, which was "as long as there is creativity in my mind, AI can immediately help me realize it, and designers only need to focus on creativity." Today, with the support of AI, Xiao SI's dream has come true.

In fact, AI painting is not a new phenomenon. Back in the 1970s, an artist named Harold Cohen began creating a computer program called "AARON" for painting. In 2008, a rough portrait created by AI was auctioned at Christie's for a whopping $432,500, showcasing the potential of AI in art.

In 2022, engineers from several open-source communities developed an AI image generator called Disco Diffusion, marking a qualitative leap in AI painting. In March, Midjouney began internal testing, followed by the appearance of Dalle2 in July, capable of generating more precise composite logical images Stable Diffusion can generate high-precision images comparable to Dalle2.

Stable Diffusion is considered the most powerful AI painting model in the world today. It successfully addresses the issues of detail and efficiency, improving the precision of AI drawing to the level of art pieces through algorithm iterations. It also increases production efficiency to the second level, and lowers the equipment threshold required for creation to a civilian level.

In fact, the academic community had long proposed the Diffusion model, which forms the underlying technology for all AI-generated images on the market. After Stable Diffusion was open-sourced, the industry made a breakthrough in key technologies, and many applications based on the Stable Diffusion model entered the market.

In an article titled "Generative AI: A Creative New World," two partners from Sequoia Capital USA wrote in 2022 that machines are beginning to create meaningful and beautiful things, a new category known as "Generative AI," which means machines are generating new things rather than analyzing existing ones.

Indeed, this is the case. In an art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair, the first prize was awarded to an AI-generated painting titled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial." Similarly, the best short film at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival was also awarded to an AI-generated work titled "THE CROW."

Of course, the advancement of technology does not stop there. With the emergence of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, AI painting has also begun to flourish. Furthermore, the gap between AI and the general public is narrowing. Whether it's from flat images to videos, giving instructions to AI, or chatting with AI on WeChat, the level of detail in AI has greatly improved.

After Meitu's acquisition of Zcool, Liang Yaoming and Wu Xinhong held many meetings to discuss how to output the abilities of some designers on the Meitu platform or turn them into templates, allowing more Meitu users to enjoy the artistic beauty and convenience. The era where ordinary people quietly enjoy the convenience of technology has arrived, and everyone is a designer.

On March 31, 2023, Lu Chuan said in an interview, "Now, the happiest thing every day is lying in bed chatting with ChatGPT before going to sleep, letting AI help him draw movie posters. To be honest, the effect produced by AI in 15 seconds is much more powerful than the one I would receive after a month from a professional poster company."

Everything seems very promising, but current AI is not without its flaws. "While working with AI, Yu Yu also found that due to AI's integration and recreation based on existing human-created works, there are noticeable cognitive ceilings in certain niche areas, which hinders breakthrough innovations to some extent In addition, there are controversies surrounding these new things brought by AI. At the early stage of AIGC development, the ownership of the copyright of AI-generated content has not been clearly defined.

The "Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) White Paper" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology this year pointed out that as the application of AIGC continues to expand, disputes over fairness, responsibility, and security are increasing, and there are still many difficulties and challenges in technical algorithms, corporate management, and policy regulation.

However, some things have changed. Zhou Qingfeng, a senior publisher, founded a cross-cultural company called Weiyan in 2016, focusing on publishing. Zhou Qingfeng pays great attention to details. When he couldn't find a suitable cover for the book "Six Records of a Floating Life," he was willing to wait for half a year. "Later, I finally saw a satisfactory image, which was created by AI. I paid to buy this AI-generated image."

Image Description: Cover of "Six Records of a Floating Life" designed by AI

This time, AI is making inroads into the field of painting, perhaps this is just the beginning.

"AI replacing human work, looking at this cycle over 5-10 years, is still very meaningful. Think about the arrival of the Internet era 20 years ago, think about the first industrial revolution to the second industrial revolution. After extending the cycle, it is discovered that everyone's life has undergone earth-shaking changes. During the industrial revolution, most people left their hometowns, moved to cities, and then to cubicles in companies. In fact, the essence of every major change is the same." Jin Jianhua, founder and CEO of iAnalysis, told "AI Light Years."

In this process of change, some people may resist, some may refuse, wanting to maintain their current way of life. From the historical evidence of every change, it can be seen that everyone eventually has to embrace it. Jin Jianhua believes that whether people actively embrace this process or accept it in anxiety and panic, the essence is how everyone can better face this matter, which is a topic that can be studied for 10 to 20 years.

Author: Xue Fang, Source: Tencent News on the Deep Web, Original Title: "The First Wave of Designers Unemployed Because of AI | AI Light Years"