A writer gets a designer’s perspective on AI tools.

The writers and editors on the Dragonfly team have been talking about our use of AI tools for the last year. But what about our design team? 

Just as in the world of words, AI tools are now available that promise to make graphic design faster, easier, and more accessible to more people.

The question is, will AI-aided graphic design also be better — or at least, as good — and just as ethical as original human creation?

I recently sat down with Dragonfly’s design manager Casey Crary to ask these questions. Unsurprisingly, the answers aren’t completely clear.

Exploring the art of the possible

Casey began by walking me through the new AI-enhanced interface in the Adobe Creative Suite. The AI engine — Adobe Firefly — is built right into the design programs they use every day: Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. 

Casey showed me the prompts she used to ask for an illustration of a cargo ship loaded with shipping containers, which she thought would work well in a recent client project. By ticking off the appropriate checkboxes in several available menus, she was able to ask for the ship as part of a scene, rather than sitting alone; specify its orientation and direction; indicate the color palette she wanted; and describe the general style she was after. In under a minute, the tool produced three images for her to choose from, and she selected the one that best fit her overall vision.

But the tool isn’t perfect. Casey still had to put in several hours to retrace parts of the image to fix some oddities. 

“Most of the time, you can’t just use the output as-is,” she explains. (Which sounds familiar; I’ve never simply cut-and-pasted from ChatGPT into my written work.) Design AI tools can generate weird artifacts, like lines that don’t go anywhere — similar to when you import a photo through Illustrator’s “Live Trace” feature and expect the software to give you something great on its own. Usually, it’s pretty wonky. 

But even with a wonky start, Firefly gives you a fully editable vector file, so if you have the know-how to tweak it — and that’s the key part — the AI tool still saves time by giving you a base to start from instead of a blank page. Casey notes that the imperfect Firefly-generated illustration saved her a couple of hours, which ended up saving a few hundred dollars for the client.

And now for the ethical questions

Casey admits that Firefly offers practical value, even with its imperfections. And, as with any new technology, the kinks will almost certainly be worked out. The real question becomes, what happens then? 

For starters, there’s the “funny feeling” that some level of plagiarism may be going on behind the curtain. Casey did some research on that question, and read that Firefly trains itself on licensed content already purchased and owned by Adobe, or on images with expired copyrights. While that made her feel a little better, it didn’t entirely satisfy her conscience — a feeling shared by many in the creative community. As Casey points out, no matter where the “source code” comes from — even if it’s from images rightfully owned by Adobe — no actual human artist was directly compensated for their work when she had Firefly generate that cargo ship. That would not be the case if she’d purchased an illustration or a photo from a stock imagery site. “It feels like you’re choosing AI over a person,” she says.

There’s also a difference between using an AI tool to accomplish the same thing, faster — like having a starting sketch to build an illustration, or using a plain-language prompt to remove a background from a photo, rather than taking three or four more clicks of the mouse to “do it yourself” with Photoshop’s magic wand tool. But having AI create something for you, start to finish, when you have no design training or talent at all? That’s a different story altogether. 

“Art is made by humans, by definition,” says Casey. “Does art made by robots have the same value?” 

While she acknowledges that graphic design for commercial communications is a bit different than art for art’s sake — in the same way that B2B content writing isn’t the same as writing a novel — she says the necessary utility of business communications shouldn’t edge out talent. 

“People come to Dragonfly for our design work because they appreciate what we bring to it,” says Casey. Unlike previous graphic design tools, even software suites as sophisticated as Adobe, generative AI can create finished masterpieces from scratch for users who have never held an Apple Pencil.

All of these realizations recently made one graphic-design software leader — Adobe’s chief competitor, Procreate — uncomfortable enough to announce that they were refusing to incorporate AI into their creative platform. And many creatives applauded them for it. 

“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. There’s an obvious parallel with the opening statement of Dragonfly’s own AI use policy: “Dragonfly Editorial is powered by human creativity, human identity, and each of our unique human lived experiences.” 

The bottom line

While Casey and her creative team will continue to explore the possibilities of AI, “I don’t know if I’m 100% all in on this wave, because of these broader implications,” she admits. “If there are efficiencies to be had through AI, we’ll look at integrating them into our workflow, especially if we can pass savings on to our customers” — while still being able to produce original work they can be proud of. 

“One of Dragonfly’s core values is integrity,” Casey points out. “I think we need to continue the conversation about what that means in the age of artistic AI.”