We’ve all seen how artificial intelligence (AI) has become dominant in almost all industries, but one of the industries getting affected the most is the design industry. When it comes to AI vs Human Designer, the problems start to show due to the fact that companies like Midjourney or platforms like Midjourney could generate images that require graphic designers or human designers weeks, if not months to create, while this sort of machine does it in an instant.
AI vs Human Designer: The Ongoing Battle
The battle between AI vs Human Designer is always going to be there. You’re always going to be hesitant about whether to choose this or that. Now there are multiple things to consider before making your selection.
The Ethical Dilemma
Firstly, it’s important to know that until this moment, all sorts of AI design, AI image generation, or video generation platforms still fall under some sort of ethical question. There are a lot of lawsuits against those companies because people think (and it’s true) that their models were trained on the works of artists without explicitly asking for permission.
For that reason, there is some sort of ethical boundary when dealing with this software. If you’re unsure whether to go for a designer or an AI tool, and you want to take the safe side when it comes to ethics, you should opt for a human graphic or human designer. That could be through websites like Fiverr, Upwork, or Behance.
Scalability and Speed
In terms of scalability, it’s obviously not really a choice. Video software like Runway or Pika Labs can generate an entire commercial video, like the one recently released by Coca-Cola, in a matter of moments. So if you’re looking at the most scalable option or the quickest option, then the business model of AI tools is always going to be dominant in this sense.
The Profitability Question
Until this moment, most of these AI platforms are not entirely profitable. Even though Midjourney generated over $200 million a year of annual recurring revenue with almost no external fundraising whatsoever, the profitability is still in question.
If you try to run an AI website yourself, there is a huge margin that you have to pay for servers. There is an environmental factor that you need to consider as they are using quite a lot of energy consumption.
The Human Cost Factor vs AI
Let’s give an external example. If you think of creating an image generation website using the API of ChatGPT, which is called DALL-E, it’s going to cost you quite a good amount of money to generate an image. That’s not a problem because you can always charge your users a bit of a premium above it, selling it for a good price.
But the real problem is that users are expecting to generate those videos for free, creating a dilemma there. You could have a freemium business model just to get things running. But it depends on where you are in terms of geographical focus.
Some people in countries like Switzerland would be okay with paying a premium of 20 or 30 dollars per month for such a service, while others in other countries would not be okay with it, knowing that ChatGPT offers a similar service for free. ChatGPT is doing that because of the funding they are having and the funding they are constantly raising.
AI vs Human Designer – Quality Comparison
The future of AI design, when it comes to AI vs Human Designer, is questionable. AI tools until this moment did not really show their absolute strength. They haven’t shown that they could be profitable or that they could release quality as good as a perfect designer. Yes, their quality is now almost the same as an average designer. But when it comes to a good designer, AI tools still haven’t generated an image or video as good as those.
This should always be a benchmark. For instance, if you’re using Runway or Pika Labs to generate a cinematic video, like the Coca-Cola advertisement, then you need to think whether this is on the same level as an advertisement that was humanly directed and cost quite a good amount of money.
The Final Verdict
You’ll find that AI tools, when it comes to design, are good when comparing them with the average director or image designer, but when it comes to a good human designer at this stage of our tech world, humans are still a little bit ahead and the quality of output is better.
So if you’re looking for something that is astonishingly good, then you ought to go for a human designer, but if you’re looking at something average and you need it quickly, then an AI design tool could be the way to go.