Chinese Graphic Artists Push Back AI and its Average Effect

Designer Sendi Zia, who runs his own studio between Beijing, China and London, UK, says he mainly uses AI generators like Dall-E to create fake photos of background panels and websites when clients can’t access the real thing. This has helped clients on a limited budget, but it also reveals how many creative processes AI can replace. Recently, a potential client working at the university contacted JIA about creating a logo for a new project. Then they changed their minds. They used AI to make it, they said.

Chinese graphic artists are experiencing the impact of image generators on their daily work at a rapid pace. This technology allows counterfeit products, particularly in terms of its work cost and time to produce, and deeply alters clients’ perceptions of their work. Freelance artists or designers working in the industry with clients who invest in stylized, eye-catching graphics, such as advertising, are especially at risk.

Long before AI image generators became popular, large corporation graphic designers and in-house designers of large corporations and clients were often instructed by managers to take charge of aesthetics from competitors and social media, according to an employee of one of China’s leading online shopping platforms who sought to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from their employers.

If humans need to understand and reverse engineer a distinctive style to replicate it, the AI ​​image generator simply creates a randomized mutation of it. In many cases, the results appear to be obvious copies and include errors, but other graphic designers can edit them into the final product.

“I think it would be easier to trade me if I don’t accept (AI),” says an employee at the shopping platform. Early on, tools like stable spread and midi journey became more popular, so well-speaking English colleagues were chosen to study AI image generators to enhance internal expertise on how to create successful prompts and identify the types of tasks that AI could help. Ultimately, it helped me copy the styles of popular artists in the past that took more time to study.

“I think it forces both designers and clients to rethink the value of designers,” Jia says. “Is it just about creating a design? Or is it about consultation, creativity, strategy, direction, aesthetics?”

For example, advertising agencies have graphic designers working on a comprehensive strategy for their campaigns, aiming to create symbolic and recognizable visual identities in a variety of formats. So, AI image generators are not very useful, as they don’t produce anything particularly unique, according to Erbing, a Beijing graphic designer who has worked with several ad agencies and was asked to be called by their nicknames.

“Each project faces a variety of issues and designers are there to solve a particular problem rather than creating the same visual,” he says. “Sometimes, the process of thinking through a project can take longer than actually creating a visual.”

The AI ​​utilities decrease when faced with more complex tasks. Image generators can create many images, but it does not replace the work that is necessary to understand what an ad campaign needs to establish a visual identity and to communicate what clients are selling and why people buy it. Secondly, the unique challenge is to productively translate these concepts into AI. Some Chinese graphic designers have jokes that using AI image generators is like Gacha, referring to addictive games where users spend money to find what they have received randomized items and won.

“You might get good results, but there are inevitably dozens of poor people,” Irving says. “Personally, I think (AI Image Generator) is more like a toy than a tool.”

Overall, however, artists and designers say that AI hype has negatively affected clients’ views on the value of their work. Currently, clients expect graphic designers to create work in short time frames and create work in less money. As clients cut budgets and grab the timeline, the quality of the designer’s output decreases.

“There’s a huge misconception about designer workloads right now,” Irving says. “Some clients believe that AI must have improved efficiency, so they can cut their budgets by halving.”

However, this perception is carried out against what designers spend most of their time.

Erbing, like other designers, hopes that AI image generators will become more useful for graphic designers in the future, and it should be noted that people’s perception of their usefulness outweighs real applications. Meanwhile, it twists the client’s views on the artist’s own usefulness.