A cartoon character with a skull-like head, wearing a pink shirt, and holding up its middle finger. The text "Eliza The Ghost in Every Machine" appears next to the character in bold, colorful letters.

100. Preparing for Gen-AI Coup

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Slowly but surely, Generative AI is infiltrating our image, text, and other creative tools. Where will you be when it creeps up into the tools in your hands, hacks the very job you say you do with passion, and disrupts a career you’ve built on the je-ne-sais-a of “creativity” — one that you can’t define for yourself? How can you best prepare for this impending inglorious infestation?

Consider the following three objects gathered from uncharted places and times that might contain hints for us to act now!

Digital illustration of a cartoon character resembling a ghost with a human body, wearing sunglasses and a yellow beanie, holding a black briefcase, with a yellow circle background.

For Milan Design Week 2023, Speculative Futures Milan and Domus Academy invited me to create three ‘Design Fiction’ visualisations for a panel discussion; to show potential futures of working with (or against) AI as designers.

These objects are not meant to exist in our world, but show potential situations we might end up in, extrapolating on the current state of AI and the discourse around it.

Digital poster advertising AI linguistics courses at University of Townshire, featuring a cartoon illustration of a man riding a purple and black monster with sharp teeth, labeled 'the world that runs on AI', and text about gaining linguistic expertise.

Generating concepts and visuals can be a large part of a designers’ job.

What might designers have to do with the time that has freed up by GenAI generating at a rapid pace? It is likely they have to spend it parsing, curating, prioritising the context-less AI hallucinations.

Might designers become the Masters of Vivid Description?

Magazine cover titled DIME with a cartoon AI character and a woman using a laptop. The cover features text about AI designing websites and images. The magazine is on a white table alongside glasses, a cup of coffee, a potted plant, a notebook, and a pen.

When images and text – a large part of the internet – are generated by AI; we could very well see a ‘Great Online Mediocrity’ washing over the internet – a bland aesthetic that’s low-effort to produce.

However, the best of designers might rise above this dreariness by whispering to their AI effectively.

A digital setup with a laptop and a vintage computer, demonstrating a coding and encryption process. The laptop screen shows code for creating and manipulating an array of colors, while the vintage computer displays ‘Decrypted Candy Text’ with a pie chart icon and text. The workspace includes books, a camera, a coffee cup, and potted plants.

When we all whisper to our AI, we might want to keep our prompts a secret. Where there is secrecy of IP, there is piracy.

Here is an official product, “Prompt Encryptor”, and a hacking device, “Prompt Decryptor” which can hide and hack into bespoke prompting languages.