Is design one of the first professions that will be eliminated by AI?

(Dan Tri) - AI can create increasingly perfect design products in the blink of an eye. Therefore, many people think that design will be one of the first professions to disappear soon.

Is it time for the design profession to be replaced by AI?

"I think the first profession to be eliminated because of AI is probably design. Maybe the 9x to 2000 generation is the last generation in this industry."

That is the content of a post on Threads that attracted more than 100 thousand views and thousands of interactions and is causing controversy recently.

Generative AI tools can create a series of design products such as posters, banners, flyers and many other communication products at a fast speed and with increasing perfection.

That's why some people believe that the design profession is at risk of being wiped out.

But under the above post, many people expressed mixed views.

"In the past, when the camera was invented, artists also called it the killer of painting, but in the end, it still exists in parallel. Each industry still has its own value," one user commented.

At the same time, most comments affirm that AI can only replace low-cost products with temporary needs of small customers.

On the contrary, in high-end segments and large projects, design still needs people. Only humans have emotions, can understand customers and the public and truly create valuable and authentic media products.

Talking to Dan Tri reporter, AI expert Nguyen Phong Anh, said that if understood in a broader sense, the design profession is a professional activity to identify problems, understand people and contexts, then organize visual elements, materials, information, functions or experiences into a solution that can operate in reality.

Design includes more than what people often think when mentioning the word "design". If viewed from that perspective, the playing field for the industry is wider than what AI can cover.

The expert said: "Of course with current progress, AI will soon take over many areas on that playing field. It can create many cheaper and faster solutions."

In particular, the mass design segment, including the group of people who often have to work quickly, do a lot, and revise existing, easy-to-describe templates, will be strongly affected.

But in the high-end segment, those who must think at the level of product strategy, provide direction, design concepts, and combination processes that require deep thinking and the ability to understand human aspects will develop very well.

The important thing that AI lacks

Expert Phong Anh affirms that to create a design that suits people, it is necessary to understand people and have empathy for delicate needs.

An intelligence created by microchips will have different characteristics from biological intelligence, so it is difficult to achieve that empathy.

"It can be seen that current AI is still poor at understanding real human needs, which design experts will have to perceive with a subtlety that is very difficult to digitize," he emphasized.

Besides, AI does not really understand the full context of a design problem, from cultural space, living environment, mental factors to complex interactions in real life.

There are many cases where AI is too creative, offering impractical, unreasonable solutions or misinterpreting requirements.

According to the expert, the great advantage of humans lies in their sense of purpose. People understand why they design, understand what users need, have professional ethics and the ability to make decisions based on values ​​that AI cannot replace.

Even many open-minded designers will not see AI as an opponent but see it as a tool to help them expand their creative limits and improve work efficiency.

For professionals, Mr. Phong Anh's advice is that along with learning how to master and adapt to technology, designers now need to proactively accumulate a lot of experience that AI does not have.

That means caressing a few books, visiting a few more exhibitions, watching a few more minutes of afternoon sunlight playing on the foliage, meeting new people, hearing new stories, trying to remember the smell of a few plants.

It is those experiences that are the raw material for creativity, helping people create different values ​​that are difficult for AI to copy.

AI can eventually help designers go faster, but where it goes still depends on humans.

"If Van Gogh was neurologically connected to Midjourney's server, would he reject technology or turn it into a tool to take his creativity further?", the expert posed an interesting assumption.