Image generation has really picked up very quickly in just the last two years. It's performing very well compared to five years ago. It's getting better at a faster rate, and it's generalizing into other modalities as well. We're starting to see things like not just creating a single image based on a prompt but also creating several images together, based on a prompt, that are all coherent. You could think about a page from a comic book, for example, and even creating whole videos based on descriptions of the features of the objects in the image and also how they're going to interact over time.
This is really a space with a lot of expansion. This has created a lot of uncertainty for creative workers in the economy. The most obvious example is with tools like Midjourney or OpenAI's DALL-E, which are image generator platforms. What do these tools mean for the future of work for graphic designers? It seems there's a risk that graphic designers could be completely automated, but I actually don't think that's what will happen. What I expect is that these tools will make ideation, which is just one step in the creative process, much faster and much more scalable. Graphic designers will become more efficient. Maybe they can offer their services for a lower price per contract, because they're able to do this ideation so much faster. From the economics literature, we know that when there's this scaling in productivity, the scaling of demand doesn't always have to be linear. It's sometimes the case that you can get more demand as a good or product becomes easier to produce.