AI as a Partner to Creative Professionals
Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed from a futuristic buzzword into an everyday tool across industries. Its ability to generate insights, automate tasks, and produce creative output can be seen fields from medicine to UX and product strategy.
It doesn’t help that every time you turn around you’re presented with differing opinions. ChatGPT is coming to take your job. Or maybe people using ChatGPT are coming to take your job.
You can’t get a job interview if you don’t use AI.
You can’t get a job interview if you use AI.
The fact of the matter is that, for better or worse, artificial intelligence is impacting how most of us find and do our jobs.
But as AI tools grow more powerful and accessible, a clear pattern has emerged: AI delivers the best results when used by individuals who have a practical understanding of the domain they’re applying it to. It isn’t enough to throw prompts at ChatGPT or Claude and hope for the best. Context and judgement matter. We’ve seen a rise in the UX world of people talking about the concept of Taste and how much it matters. This, I would argue, is Taste. And Taste is what separates those that use AI tools from those that rely on AI tools.
AI Needs Guidance
AI systems, regardless of their sophistication, are still just tools. They rely heavily on the quality of input they receive and how that input is structured. Maybe you’ve heard of Garbage in/Garbage out. Well if your only input is “make me wireframes for a fleet taxi mobile app” you’re going to get some serious garbage out. Take the time to think through the data you want to provide the AI with. Are there examples of tone for a written piece of content that you’d like to mimic? Are there examples of page layouts that resonate strongly with you or the users? Feed it that information and be prepared to analyze the output for bias based on your inputs.
Tips on Using AI to Augment Your Creative Process
Ask the Right Questions: Experts understand the nuances of their field and can frame questions that lead to meaningful AI outputs. For instance, a data scientist analyzing customer churn knows the right variables to include and interpret in an AI model.
Validate Your Results: AI has been known to produce outputs that appear correct to a non practitioner but may contain inaccuracies or irrelevant details. Your practical knowledge ensures these results are critically evaluated.
Refine the Output: A UX designer leveraging AI to create wireframes knows how to refine those wireframes to meet user needs - something the AI can’t know. Taking the time to do your research and try to embody the needs of that user will pay the greatest rewards here.
Remember a person is going to be using your app or reading your prose, so a person is the best person to craft it.
AI to Prompt You - A Closing Thought
One of the most interesting ways I’ve seen creative staff use AI is as a prompt for themselves. The cold start problem is hard to overcome, regardless of how practiced one might be. Leaning on a tool like ChatGPT to provide you a start in a direction, any direction, can be extremely helpful. In full transparency I used GPT to provide me with a prompt for parts of this article.
I also let it give me a review of the draft to make sure I was hitting all of the points I wanted to.
AI should be used as a basis for helping you as a expert think, not as a one-stop-shop solutions machine.