The Future of AI is Yesterday

That’s right. As a designer, I bristled at using AI to design a logo in 2023 for my husband’s apparel company. I wasn’t having it. I did not want to be replaced and I had a lot to say about it. A lot. You can ask him. Ok, I sounded a little bit like my dad who refused to accept that a computer would ever be useful in graphic design when the Mac SE came out.

Three years later and my husband’s at it again. Orenna* is a joint effort. As he is wont to do, he worked with ChatGPT to come up with a concept. We agreed that it would serve as a placeholder while I built the website. I wanted to do our brand justice. I was going to do things the right way—I built my career on branding so I started a mood board. And that’s it. That’s as far as I got. I was too busy with freelance work during the day, and designing the website whenever I had time off. Several months later, he provided me with a replacement. Once again, I felt compelled to have the placeholder conversation. We agreed that it was a better placeholder than the previous and I acquiesced. We hadn’t launched our business yet—we could do anything we wanted.

I finished designing and building our website and noticed something strange had happened. Somewhere down the line, I started liking this AI design. I liked the concept but knew it needed help. I had to shush the voice inside me that judged using an AI logo when I was perfectly capable of coming up with one myself. The thing is, the idea was pretty cool. I shifted my thinking to accept that perhaps AI in this case, like it is in all the other ways that I interact with it daily, was a great assistant. So this assistant came up with a concept that I would clean up, and voila, everyone’s happy!

The moral of this story is that you can’t fight the future, especially if it’s already happened.

*Orenna is a registry app that makes water stewardship and ecosystem restoration claims verifiable.