UpTrajectory Review
The piece discusses the limitations of AI in creative design, highlighting insights from OpenAI's Andrew Ambrosino and Figma's Dylan Field. While AI is transforming various industries, it struggles with the subjective nature of design, which requires a nuanced understanding of taste and aesthetics. Ambrosino notes that measuring design quality is more complex than evaluating code, suggesting that AI's current capabilities in this area are still rudimentary.
For small business owners, this report serves as a reminder that while AI tools can enhance productivity, they are not yet a substitute for human creativity. As the landscape evolves, operators should focus on integrating AI into their workflows without losing the unique human touch that distinguishes their brand. The emphasis on learning new skills, such as effective prompting, indicates that adapting to AI's role in design will be crucial for maintaining a competitive edge.
“At the end of the day, there's going to be a certain level of human taste that's still required to prompt the AI to create something that we'll all enjoy.” — Business Insider
Takeaway: Embrace AI as a tool, but prioritize human creativity to maintain your brand's unique identity.
From the original item — Business Insider:
Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
- AI famously still struggles with creative design.
- OpenAI’s Andrew Ambrosino says design is harder to get right than code due to its subjective nature.
- “What’s good design and what’s bad design is just a little bit more tedious,” he said.
AI is still learning.
The technology is revolutionizing all kinds of industries, but there are some things it still can’t quite get right, and, by most accounts, design is one of them. The gap is not just technical. It has to do with taste, and the judgment required to know when something actually works.
OpenAI’s head of Codex, Andrew Ambrosino, put it simply: Design is harder to measure than code.
“I think design’s a little bit harder to grade than software,” Ambrosino said on a recent episode of “Lenny’s Podcast.” “In that, creating a loop where you can train the model on what’s good design and what’s bad design is just a little bit more tedious and onerous than, you know, does the code compile?”
Anyone working in a creative field is likely worried about the impact AI will have on their careers. So far, it seems to serve as a useful tool that speeds up some processes, but it rarely produces a polished finished product on its own.
Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, a digital design company that has taken on design behemoths like Adobe, has long argued that AI won’t replace human designers. AI models are trained on the “distribution of data” and typically create designs that people recognize as “average,” he said on a recent episode of “Hard Fork.”
The good news is that means creative jobs are safer for now. AI just means creatives have to learn new skills, like prompting or vibecoding.
As the Grammy-nominated musician Bas put it at a conference at Harvard in 2024: “At the end of the day, there’s going to be a certain level of human taste that’s still required to prompt the AI to create something that we’ll all enjoy,” he said.
“Let’s give it up for the human brain for now,” Ambrosino said.