slop machine
When Adobe folded their AI image generation stuff into Photoshop a few years ago, I had a bit of a tinker with it at work. I found a picture of some colleagues and, with some prompts, turned one into a Viking, another into a medieval minstrel and a third into a bass player in a wetsuit standing on a surfboard.
I showed this to my boss and remarked that pretty soon, people like me - who have spent years learning to use photo manipulation tools - will be surplus to requirements. He laughed but kind of agreed, which made me a bit nervous.
On Friday he got in contact about some design work he wanted doing. So we had a meeting and he showed me the designs that he had "created" using ones I had previously done for him, that he had fed into AI.
They were terrible. Images were blurred; none of the wording was in English; there were inexplicable things, weird shaped things appearing all over, even odd bearded gnome-like figures that didn't feature in my work. Basically it was a dog's breakfast, lunch and dinner all in one hard to swallow mess of a design. The only thing going for it was that there was kind of a coherent style around it.
He explained that he thought it would be a five minute job for AI to create useful graphics from my designs. In reality it took him two hours to get to a point where he just gave up in anguish.
He closed the meeting by reminding me of our conversation about how AI would do me out of a job; "Nah, mate. Your job's safe" he assured me with a resigned laugh.
So I spent this morning cobbling together some artwork for him, but using my design skills (but also - for expediency's sake - a metric tonne of Adobe Stock vectors, seeing as he needed it a week ago).
Hell, I even used 60 of my Adobe AI credit allowance to generate some small detail that's hardly visible, just as a point to the machine; sure you can do art stuff, but leaving it in the background is the second option to not using it at all...