LUCY ON ILLUSTRATION The first time I used Midjourney, I thought I’d have to put away my pencil case. It spat out a watercolour image that I had prompted five seconds before, and it looked like an authentic painting, down to the textured brushwork and stylised perspective.
I’m a designer by profession and an illustrator by choice. I love to see my work appear in the wild, on food packaging and on restaurant Christmas cups. But it’s the challenge and the craft that brings me the most joy.
Yet fast forward a few months – I was asked to create some straightforward watercolour renderings of everyday objects. The kind of thing that AI can generate in a few seconds. And did.
AI took care of the prescriptive churn quickly and… adequately. It didn’t work with imagination – how could it? – but the time it saved let me put more energy into the conceptual part of the project, the ideation, storytelling, abstraction and experimentation. The finished work was all the better for it.
All tooled up
AI helps me up my game and produce my best work. It buys me more playtime, and playtime is the number one factor that lets my creativity flow. It allows happy accidents, those visual discoveries that only come when you have time to take risks. With AI taking care of the routine, there’s room for other ideas to thrive, with more time and without repetitive demands cramping my style.
For me, generative AI is an amazing creative springboard, a studio assistant that lets me select and refine through a human lens, considering a host of brand, contextual and legal considerations and constraints.
It’s a shift in process we all have to get used to. I’m still an illustrator, never an imaging director or prompt engineer, but the tools I use have changed. Artists, designers and illustrators have referenced others’ work since the dawn of civilisation. And though there are still legal and IP challenges to be settled, it’s here and it will only get better. So, how do we make sure that a human creative voice is still going into the work?
Authentically human
After all, as humans, we want to connect with other humans. The only way to cut through the uncanny valley of AI-generated noise around us is to highlight the joyful parts of the creative process that result in true authenticity.
Generative AI works by duplicating existing patterns that correspond to the prompt that it receives. Blending its catalogue of millions of cottages and trees and roads and clouds. That’s not how I create.
If I see a scene I want to paint, the mental prompts I give myself are narrative and human.
Who lived in this medieval cottage over the centuries? What romantic letters are contained in this red Victorian pillar box consumed by entwined red roses? Why has this lawn only been mowed on one side? Did the neighbours fall out – “They’ve not done our bloody side again!”
Adding narrative and personal reflections into my illustrations is how I add human authenticity, as well as embracing wonky lines and the imperfect nature of hand drawing.
The challenge to me is to harness AI in a way that supercharges my creative process. I don’t want to be replaced, so I’ll focus more on the things that make me irreplaceable. The tasks that develop my creative voice and make me authentically me. They are still the things that bring me joy.
SOPHIE ON COPYWRITING
Every time I open LinkedIn I’m greeted by a new post from a self-styled “AI expert” heralding the death of copywriting. I’m told that “it’s only a matter of time” and that I should “upskill or die”.
A recent op-ed in The New York Times even said: “Right now, [AI] performs like a highly competent copywriter, infusing all of its outputs with a kind of corny, consumerist optimism that is hard to eradicate.”
It’s not making me feel very cheery.
When ChatGPT was first released in November 2022, I was reassuringly underwhelmed by the writing quality. No matter how detailed my prompt, the content generated was usually flat, clichéd and derivative. Trying to wrangle a passable output felt like gentle parenting an overeager assistant who needed painfully detailed, step-by-step instructions that took more effort to explain than simply doing the work myself.
But AI moves fast. Since 2022, OpenAI has released five new “coding models” – each marketed like Apple’s iOS updates, with flashy new features designed to supercharge and optimise and elevate and… you get the picture. The latest, GPT-5, “[…] is our most capable writing collaborator yet”.
That claim is not far from the truth. Today, most large language models (LLMs) can produce clear and competent prose that’s grammatically and stylistically correct, reads OK and could (on a superficial level) answer your average copy brief.
There’s a separate debate to be had over what constitutes good writing. But most word nerds worth their salt know that a sure-fire way to delight readers is to break the rules. To seek out unexpected connections between ideas. To turn that phrase on its head and put that word where it doesn’t belong.
AI can’t do that because it’s essentially a sophisticated autocomplete tool. It’s predictable by design. Emily M Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, describes LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. She argues that they can only mimic human content, without understanding meaning. So what? ChatGPT has been trained on thousands of sources, many of which are rife with misinformation and bias. If what Bender claims is true, ChatGPT can’t interrogate what’s true, ethical and even lawful. I don’t need to explain the impact that could have.
Machine yearning
I’ve wrestled with the urge to outsource tough tasks to AI. When I’m staring, paralysed, at a blank page and a flickering cursor, trying to extract a single, competent thought can feel like drawing blood from a stone. But wait! Here’s a tool that can save me from all that time-wasting and soul-searching. And yet…
Writing is thinking. It’s not just about cobbling words together in the right order. I tend to chafe at the claim that AI will help me work smarter and free up my time to focus on “real” creative tasks. Every headline, brochure, article and script I’ve laboured over – even stuff considered ‘grunt work’ – has strengthened my capacity for creativity. And that’s a skill that matters more than ever if I want to keep crafting weird, wonderful, authentic, boundary-pushing work that’ll stand out in a sea of unoriginal, AI-generated slop.
When I choose to walk somewhere, it’s not always because it’s the most efficient way of reaching my destination. It’s not always enjoyable; sometimes it’s cold or wet or my shoes hurt, and I wish I’d just driven. But it’s good for my health, and sometimes I’ll stumble upon a route I’ve never explored before, or a beautiful view, or a hole-in-the-wall café that looks shabby but serves great coffee.
The hard work involved with writing doesn’t keep me from new ideas – in itself, it’s the exact process I need to discover them.
You and AI
AI is new and fascinating and disruptive and terrifying. Despite my reservations, I’m genuinely intrigued to see how it’ll reshape how we live, learn, work and play. But we shouldn’t let our excitement cloud our scrutiny. AI requires vast, power-hungry data centres to run smoothly – that means more emissions and less natural land. It’s been trained on unlicensed and copyrighted content. It’s known to hallucinate data and facts.
Is there a “write” way to use AI? For me, it’s sparingly – and mindfully. That might not protect me from eventually being replaced. But if AI ever does do creativity better than humans, then my biggest concern won’t be whether it can write ads. In the meantime, I’ll make sure to mind my Ps and Qs on all prompts, so when our robot overlords do take over, I might have a fighting chance.
