Initially, like many others, Esther Rou Jiao had fairly shallow thoughts about AI. After completing graphic design, which felt too simplistic and likely to be replaced by intelligent programs, she transitioned to studying motion graphics, but that is another story. Esther believes the essence of graphic design lies in the aesthetics of collage structure, serving as the foundation of all design disciplines. The shifts in graphic design styles are relatively easy to trace and imitate. For instance, the recent trend of acid design following minimalism can be replicated in large quantities by focusing on a few visual elements. In commercial branding and posters, the selection and combination of elements such as logos, colors, fonts, illustrations/photography, grids, and icons can be used to categorize various styles and randomly combine them to create different visual effects. However, the final judgment of good or bad design still depends on the designer’s skills.
Esther does not have extensive experience in Chinese font design, but given the volume and complexity of Chinese characters, AI should be able to save a significant amount of time for font designers. However, font design should be one of the benchmarks that test the level of AI design. On one hand, AI and designers should have a cooperative relationship. Brand designs that previously required a team from a studio can now be completed by one or two people with AI assistance. The decrease in design costs should also lower the threshold for hiring designers across various industries and brands, potentially creating more job opportunities for designers.
Especially in commercial design, companies prioritize reliability, limiting the creative freedom that was once possible during academic studies. As a result, commercial design can be highly automated.
A crucial question arises: What were the initial fears about artificial intelligence? In a commercial society established by capitalism, human value has been replaced by commercial value. The worth of an individual is measured by their utility, and after three industrial revolutions, productivity tools have been iteratively upgraded. Artificial intelligence, as a tool that can design even better productivity tools, represents the ultimate tool humanity has created since the Stone Age. The fear lies in its potential to replace human utility entirely.
However, based on personal experience, Esther finds herself both reliant on AI for the time it saves and envious of its ability to blend styles. In the past, she took pride in creating unique style blends, which was the most exciting and addictive process that set her apart from other designers. Now, this skill has been proven to be replaceable and reproducible in large quantities within a short time. This realization suggests that the creativity developed in school has a utilitarian attribute and may not be the unique quality that defines humanity.
However, Esther has not been entirely unprepared for this shift. While learning motion graphics, one of the biggest challenges was translating imaginative animation into code. Moving away from the purely creative aspect, she had to think about achieving desired effects with simple layer animations. Over time, this training changed her creative process, making her approach various visual arts in a more logical and coded manner. She began considering which variables could be adjusted to produce different outputs.
In professional settings, design tasks are indeed mechanized. Conversations with friends in animation, particularly in 3D animation, confirm this notion. Many are responsible for a small part of the entire animation process and cannot fully engage in the creative process to experience the joy of creation. This highlights the psychological gap that new designers and artists entering the workforce must face—the creativity once taken pride in is difficult to fully express in commercial work.
To explore AI’s current capabilities, Esther experimented with Mid-Journey, her preferred program. The process is engaging, highly random, and has an element of excitement similar to gambling or card drawing. Despite preparing rendering keywords based on previous artists’ work and adding her own touch, the results remained unpredictable in terms of color and pattern blending. Over time, she entered a state of flow while working with AI-generated designs, feeling no disconnect between the AI-created results and her own contributions. These were still her creations. As she continued to experiment, she gradually stopped evaluating AI’s technical skills in graphic design and instead found joy in the curiosity and excitement of creating images through AI.
Esther believes AI is a liberation of creativity for designers and artists. Creativity is no longer solely in service of economic activity but transforms into a pure form of self-entertainment and self-expression. This shift represents two levels of purity: first, AI can replace the utilitarian aspects of design work, allowing creativity to return to its essence; second, AI enables the rediscovery of experimentation and play in visual effects.
The concern about AI replacing human designers, or any job involving mechanical labor, is not necessarily an issue with AI itself. Rather, it is a reflection on the direction of large-scale production under capitalism, which has led to the mechanization of human roles. The fundamental question then becomes: What remains after stripping away the utilitarian self? What defines the essential, spiritual nature of humanity?
These reflections led to Esther’s project, “The New Typeface.” In this experiment, she attempted to create a complete typeface using Mid-Journey. However, the results were unexpected—rather than a coherent typeface, the AI generated patterns that incorporated typeface serifs and structural characteristics. These outputs were fascinating, resembling blurred cognitions created by pure, emotional consciousness. As an ultimate tool capable of replacing human utility, AI should be highly rational. Yet, immature AI produces patterns that appear pieced together like dreams. This visual contrast between AI’s rational nature and the logic-driven language system of humanity intrigued her.
After obtaining a series of AI-generated patterns with typeface serifs and structural features, Esther sought to create something distinctly human. Human nature includes an element of uncertainty, as the future holds infinite possibilities. Even mistakes, often seen as flaws, can be understood as highly complex calculations reflecting human intuition. This represents the spiritual aspect of humanity. Esther does not believe in true mistakes, as errors are merely a result of binary thinking within human logic.
Visually representing uncertainty led her to think of the dashed lines used in sketches—intermittent lines outlining incomplete forms. In contrast to AI’s highly rational approach, which produces a sensuous interpretation of human text, sketching by hand using a computer appeared to be a better way to express the contrast between human and machine interaction.
Humans create tools, become enslaved by them, and ultimately, tools evolve into external extensions of the human body. This interplay between human and AI, this strange and reciprocal influence, is the result of the interaction between carbon-based and silicon-based civilizations.