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This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reinamoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo.
Today's episode is AMA, Ask Me Anything, where we answer questions from our listeners.
Instead of just answering them by myself, we invite them to be on our show and make
that into an open conversation. This is part 2 of AMA with Leah Safina,
a digital product designer based in Hawaii, so if you haven't listened to part 1,
please do have a listen. In this episode, we go into Web3,
AI, and how those new technologies might affect our professions.
So, let's get started.
AIの仕事への影響
I wanted to talk about innovation, and you had a really interesting article recently
on your observations on the shifts that AI is going to make. And I really love how you put it
as a new upgrade to the human OS operating system of how we're working. What do you feel,
people in my position, in kind of design leadership, but senior than mid-level, but
working in this, in these roles dealing with innovation, what would you say comes to mind
for you when we think about AI and how it's going to disrupt our work as designers and design leaders?
The first thing that I would say, I think it would be the race to the top and the race to
the bottom at the same time. And what I mean by that is anything that can be repeated by a human
being, a task that can be repeated, will be replaced by AI. So that's the race to the bottom,
right? So if you find yourself doing similar things over and over and over,
then that's probably a way for AI to replace what I meant by the race to the top and race
to the bottom at the same time. If you want to stay a designer, if you want to stay a creative
individual who produces stuff, then we have to keep raising our bar because otherwise the good
and the bad news with AI is that the bar for what's considered average has just gone up,
you know? So everybody can do pretty good things pretty similarly. And what becomes more important
is how, what you're outputting, how is it different from something else or everybody else's output?
新しいデザイナーの時代
That, I think, is the key. So Ray, as you mentioned, for a lot of people, text-based
AI tools are top of mind. But of course, there's quite a lot of other tools, visual and
supporting and design that are also being developed. As we know, Figma is pushing significantly on their
efforts to bring AI to the design tooling. There's also a company called Reloom that
approximately a week ago launched a new tool that completely automates everything for designers from
text-prompted sitemaps that then they turn into wireframes. Those, in turn, you can import into
Figma and it will create design. And the only things that you have to do is select the colors
and typography. And it also connects to Webflow so it can export your Figma designs in the code.
So with that in mind, when we think about the new generation of designers,
they will not be able to have a trained eye or a trained hand that you can only get through
repeating certain things for five years, for 10 years. What would be your take, Ray, for
the creative leaders right now who are managing younger designers in helping them out guardrailing
and still being able to evolve themselves as designers without missing out?
One analogy that I look at is photography. So for instance, like portrait painters.
Before photography was invented, there were painters who specialized in painting portraits.
In 2023, can you name one portrait painter? But there are hundreds and thousands of
portrait photographers. And product design, as we know it, or just design in general,
as we know it, might go the way of portrait painting from the 19th century. That's the
bad news. The good news, I would say, is if it had not been the invention of photography
and the fact that a machine could reproduce a portraiture in a very realistic way and in a
very quick way, that might have brought the death of portrait painting. At the same time,
I don't think a Picasso would have come about if photography was never invented. I think
that new technology forced human beings to mutate, to invent something new. So say,
for instance, cubism that happened at the beginning of the 20th century and the middle of
the century. An art movement like that, one way or another, either directly or indirectly,
forced humans to be more creative, to give birth to new forms of expression.
So the bad news is that I think design, let's say product design, what we're talking about here,
might not be the future for human designers. But then I'd also bet that there's somewhere else
if we are clever, if we are creative, and if we are resilient enough that we can invent
a new type of design where we as human beings can be relevant and these repeated tasks can be done
by Figma AI. Of course, it creates a certain feeling of future nostalgia. We're not past
the hump yet, but we're already nostalgic of it, right? And the designer's craft, the feeling of
certain things being gone and not being able to bring them back. But I think photography was
such a good example because there's still a lot of people who get out on film photography,
on exposure and all of these aspects. So I'm sure we will have people still who do everything by
hand. But another thing that I noticed, I recently was working on a chat-based AI tool
where, as a designer, your constraint is your chat with the bot. And you're able to put this
tool into e-commerce, sports, into all types of industries, into finance, education.
And with that, what I noticed, my role as a designer there was very much guided with words.
So I was less using my visual tool and more writing chat scripts that would lead the user
from one place to the other. So an interesting new pattern is that, as designers, we need to
pick up a new skill of being able to be narrative designers. And there's still no playbook of how
to approach it. The way that I use ChatGPT or ChatGPT-enabled tools is that I don't necessarily
AIの創造性への影響とアメリカの衰退
let it produce the final output. I use it to edit and generate and regenerate and just expand
my own creativity, as opposed to using it to give away my creativity to something else.
A couple of writers, one of the interviews that we've done for our podcast, PJPJ Berra,
and he's a published author. And he said that AI just doesn't give you the kind of originality
that human beings can. Maybe in the next 18 months, that might be very different.
My fear, what keeps me up at night is in the immediate future, in the next 12 to 14 months,
you know, bad players, bad actors will use AI to produce negative results, specifically in the US,
so that US as a powerhouse in the world will start to decline even more. When digital and
the internet specifically became known to the public, I think there was a lot of positivity
and hope. And a lot of these Silicon Valley companies, they claimed that they were making
the world a better place. That was like the cliche sales pitch to get VCs to fund their
companies. And, you know, even the biggest social media company that is claiming that
they are, quote, unquote, connecting people. Yeah, of course, you know, billions of people
are using the platform. But it's, at this point, very clear that that social media company didn't
make the world a better place. It's the opposite. Yeah, people are connected. That's good. But also
it just fueled this cesspool that is the internet into a spiral. The reason why I was extremely
excited about Web3, and especially this new notion of decentralized organizations that it created is
I felt it was bringing people together. It was a new way of bringing people together and giving
tools and independence to people's hands and really ability to connect in a new way. I used
to dream of this way where, you know, the rise of wallets, where if everybody had a digital wallet
that represents their identity, that holds information about them, their preferences,
their passions, their hobbies, and you would be able to connect it to any website and instantly
personalize it to what you can see. Anything from you connecting it to e-commerce and seeing everything
in your size to you connected it to a particular social media platform and being able to
instantly see people with similar experience or interests, right? When I first encountered AI,
AIと人間のつながりの将来
I did not want to work in AI. I thought that was a tool that would bring us more apart,
that would make us connect less, that would automate things too much and suck out creativity
and life out of things. It took a little bit of experience in using AI tools to really find
my own rules for myself. For instance, one rule that I have is I never start from AI. I always
start from analog thought that I had, and then I use AI to kind of spin it forward.
But I would say what keeps me up at night and what I'm afraid of is that too much of internet
is just going to become synthetically generated information, and we will only be left with small
islands of authentic human connection. But that's why the connection between blockchain
as a tool for authentication of humanity can help AI stay filtered. I have really high hopes
of merging these two technologies together to prevent us from drowning in a sea of
informational litter. So that was part two of AMA, Ask Me Anything, where I answered a question from
our audience. We talked about Web3, AI, and how those new technologies might affect our professions.
This is a topic that I've been thinking about pretty deeply in the last six to nine months or
so. Obviously, with Meet Journey arriving last year, ChatGPT making a fantastic debut in November
of 2022. And since then, the topic of the day around the world has been about AI pretty much
every day. Whether I'm in the US, in Europe, or Japan, this is something that I hear about and get
asked about a lot. Also, selfishly, because I built my career as a designer and as a creative director,
this is one of the professions that people are worried that might be taken over by AI.
And if I were honest, I do worry about that quite a bit for myself, for my company,
the people that I know, and people that I work with. But the thing is, it's a wave that we cannot
resist. And if you look at history, and as I used a reference from, say, photography,
what the invention of photography and the invention of cameras did to the painters back in the 19th
century. That doesn't mean that the painters at that time, and specifically portrait painters,
they did lose their job. But at the same time, it did take some time for the technology
to be adopted by a bigger group of people. And it did take some time for painters to find a new
direction. But I do think photography forced painters, artists, and human beings to think in
different ways and come up with a new style, like say, cubism. So technology does have a way of
taking away people's jobs. But at the same time, I do think it has a way to either force and or
to inspire people to come up with new type of expressions. I'll use another example.
Several years ago, there was a battle, there was a game of Go that was played between AlphaGo,
which is an AI enabled Go playing machine, versus a world champion of Go, which is a Korean player.
In the end, AlphaGo, the AI machine, did beat the human champion. But there was a lesson from that
series of games that the player, the human player, and the machine player played. What happened was
in one of the games, there was a move that AlphaGo made that everybody watching the game,
including the human champion, thought that it was a mistake made by the machine. But it turned
out that was a pivotal key move for the machine to beat the human champion. The human champion
took a break, went into the back room, calmed himself down, and came back. In the following
game, he made a move that also made other people, the spectators, think that the human player made
a mistake. But it turned out the unexpected move that the machine made inspired the human player
to make an unexpected move against the machine, and that confused AlphaGo. And that particular
game, the human champion ended up winning. So taking those lessons from, say, photography
AIの可能性
more than 100 years ago, or the game between AlphaGo and the human player, there are ways
that machines and AI can not only force, but inspire us to do unexpected things that we didn't
think of. So I think that is the way that we should be thinking about AI and see how we can remain
relevant. If you are listening to this on Spotify, there's a Q&A field, so please do send us your
questions and comments. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, and if you like our podcast,
please leave us a five-star rating. We'll be so grateful. In the next episode, we speak with Julie
Channing, the former and original CMO and the global VP of marketing of Allbirds. She was employee
number one of Allbirds, so she has some fantastic stories that you've never heard of anywhere else,
so stay tuned. I'm Reina Moro, and this is The Crane Mindset. See you next time.
