Question:
Hi, I hope to undergo a career change to graphic design. My question is, what are the chances of Artificial Intelligence taking over a design-related job, and how can it affect my employment?Answer:
Artificial Intelligence is likely to impact all of our jobs, just to varying degrees. Specific tasks that we need to perform in our jobs, skills required, wages, and hours will all likely be adjusted. There will inevitably be winners and losers from adoption of AI, just as computers and robots have substituted mechanical jobs but complemented high skilled jobs in the past decades. There is extensive academic research on impact of automation on labor market. While this line of research is not specific to AI, insights on how new technology affects jobs can be broadly applicable. This article by an economist, David Autor, overviews work on that topic: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.29.3.3.
While we are still learning about AI’s impact on the labor market, many predict that AI will have a larger impact on workers with higher wages and education, as AI can perform tasks related to learning, analyzing, predicting—all of which are skills typically required in higher paying jobs. On the other hand, AI’s impact on jobs that require human contact and creativity will likely be less, or at least more gradual. This Brookings Institution report overviews recent research on AI’s impact on different occupations: https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-jobs-are-affected-by-ai-better-paid-better-educated-workers-face-the-most-exposure/.
AI’s impact on graphic design jobs will also likely depend on your relative focus as a graphic designer. For example, website builders such as Wix have AI programs that create web designs for individual clients by learning about their tastes and contents: https://www.wix.com/blog/2016/06/wix-artificial-design-intelligence/. Automatic design services like this makes web design widely accessible, and may free you from having to perform certain routine tasks, while allowing you to focus on work that will cater to high-end demands for designs that must be done by humans through human interaction.
