Are they actually going to lose their job?

5/5 (1)

The upcoming of Artificial Intelligence applications raises many questions regarding job certainty. Which jobs will become unnecessary due to the replacement by AI? One of those jobs in question is graphic designer. Graphic designers are, as the name suggests, focused on creating artistic and purposeful designs for companies such as logos. This sparked my interest because generative AI tools such as DALL-E are able to produce designs with just some text input and a single mouse click, which should thus be able to easily replace these graphic design businesses right? When DALL-E 2 is in fact able to effortlessly create logos for businesses, it would indicate that DALL-E 2 could cause a digital disruption!

According to Weill & Woerner (2015) does a digital disruption consists of three factors: the business world adapts the new technology through digitising, industry barriers are broken down which creates opportunities, and long-successful business models are severely negatively impacted. These factors must be visible before DALL-E 2 can be described as a digital disruption. When DALL-E 2 is able to effortlessly create business logos, it could potentially cause graphic designers to lose their job. For only $15 you as an individual are able to generate 460 logos for your own business, compared to a few images for more than ten times the amount of money and effort.

To put this to the test, I decided to utilise the functionalities of DALL-E 2 in an attempt to create a new company logo for the consultancy firm where I am employed, OrcaCare, with zero experience in this form of graphic design.

(This is purely out of personal curiosity and is not an assignment for the company)

Firstly, if you want to experiment with DALL-E as well, keep in mind that it is not free. Before being able to generate prompts with DALL-E 2, you will need to buy credits. For $15 you receive 115 prompts, and each prompt includes four generated pictures (Guinness, 2023). This comes down to $0,0326 per generated image. This is however excluding taxes and the credits will expire in one year from the day of payment.

My very first prompt was the following:

Create a new business logo for OrcaCare, a consultancy firm in the Hospitals and Health Care sector, which offers both specialised mechanics as well as consultants with specialised industry knowledge. The main colour of the company is orange in combination with the black and white colours of an orca.

As you can see below, it wasn’t a success at all…

The prompt must thus be more clear. The second prompt I used is as follows:

Create a logo for the company called “OrcaCare”. The main colours of the company are orange, black, and white. The logo must contain an orca and the full company name “OrcaCare”. The company is a consultancy firm active in the Hospitals and Health Care sector.

I would not say that these results could be considered better…

I then proceeded to shorten the prompt in an attempt to make it very concrete.

A modern style business logo with the colours orange, black and white, of an orca and with the text “OrcaCare”.

The results significantly improved! Except for the fourth image.

Creating business logos through DALL-E 2 is much harder than anticipated. Prompts need to be very clear in order to exactly achieve what you desire. It also seems that DALL-E 2 faces a lot of issues incorporating text in images. As visible, not even one of the twelve images includes the full company name. After a few more trials with other prompts and without the addition of text, DALL-E 2 actually started to give great results.

For the next result, I used the prompt: A logo of an orca with the colours orange, black and white.

It became clear to me that generating images through DALL-E 2 is much more effective when you do not try to incorporate the text within the images. By editing in the text myself, I was able to create a pretty decent company logo in my opinion.

With just six prompts and additional human interaction, I was able to design a somewhat professional-looking company logo. With this, DALL-E 2 shows that it is in fact capable of designing logos for companies, which would make the usage of graphic designers unnecessary. However, it is also clear that to be able to create a very professional-looking logo, the user should have the necessary skills to write accurate descriptive prompts to create the proper results. It also includes a bit of luck, since the image I used could have been replaced by another image generated by DALL-E 2, which would have led to me never seeing this potential design of the logo. The evaluation of the potential threat that DALL-E 2 could possibly form, must be analysed in order to prevent companies from facing the negative consequences of missing out on this potential digital disruption (Weill & Woerner, 2015).

Concluding, DALL-E 2 can in my opinion not yet be considered a digital disruption, since it still requires skilled professionals to create the desired high-quality outputs and thus so far lacks the capability of destroying long-successful business models. Which is the third condition before it can be called a digital disruption (Weill & Woerner, 2015). DALL-E 2 is however advancing really fast with the more advanced version DALL-E 3 being released this month in October to premium users. I am thus highly confident that in a matter of months, graphic designers should adopt the usage of Generative AI in their business processes in order to not be one of the companies that will be destroyed by this upcoming digital disruption.

What are your thoughts on this? Will the more advanced version DALLE-3 be advanced enough to form a digital disruption for graphic designers?

References:

Guinness, H. (2023). How to use DALL·E 2 to create AI images. Zapier. https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-dall-e-2/

Weill, P., & Woerner, S. L. (2015, 16 june). Thriving in an increasingly digital ecosystem. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/thriving-in-an-increasingly-digital-ecosystem/