The other myths that we’ve covered in these articles have been around for a while. In fact, many of them are remnants of old ideas that used to have some validity. However, at this point, we’re going to run into a missed truth that has only become prevalent in the past year. Namely, the idea that you don’t need a web design team at all because artificial intelligence (or AI) can handle the job for you.
We’ll be one of the first to tell you that AI can do some truly amazing things. And it’s exciting to think about where the technology might go in the next couple of years. It’s probably a little scary, too. But regardless of which end of the emotional scale you drift toward, the fact remains that as of today – and probably for at least the next few years – artificial intelligence isn’t going to be the best answer to all your web design problems.
There are a handful of reasons that we can use to make this case, and none of them start with us being in the web design business. If anything, we’re optimistic about the future. For the moment, though, we’re telling business owners to keep their expectations for AI web design in check. To understand why, you need to know a bit about how it creates things in the first place.
How AI Design Tools Work
The current iteration of artificial intelligence apps work off of models that are predictive. That means they study and analyze existing content, usually in the form of text, images, and video. Then, using what they have observed from original sources, they “predict” what a user will want.
To help put this into the proper context, imagine for a moment that we were to send you to art school and teach you the basics of paint, color, and composition. Then, when you graduated, we asked you to re-create something in the style of Rembrandt or van Gogh. Probably, you could give us a rough approximation.
Artificial intelligence tools do the same thing, but with their own strengths and weaknesses. In terms of strengths, they can crawl or “study” hundreds or thousands of images at a time. Some of the apps can crawl virtually anything on the web. In terms of weaknesses, though, machines always default to algorithmic production. There isn’t any new inspiration added.
Because AI creativity is based on percentages and probabilities, it can sometimes generate errors that don’t seem to make a lot of sense to a human mind. For a simplistic example, it could study 10,000 images of arroyos and decide that the most average color between red, white, and pink could be an off-putting beige. An actual human artist would never make that mistake, but a formulaic piece of software can’t tell the difference. It’s programmed to predict interest and response without having the intuitive tools to understand them.
As a side note, the same dynamic has plagued predictive text software. Because these tools are programmed to use authoritative language regardless of the source, they can sometimes generate articles and other resources that are inaccurate but sound confident. That can leave users reading pieces that read like expert-written information but are actually spreading falsehoods. You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, of course, but that advice is only going to become more important going forward.
On the whole, predictive modeling is a very clever way to introduce machine learning into our world. However, as a creative process it can generate some difficulties. That leads us to the two big issues in hoping that artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for custom work.
AI Designs Aren’t Original or Effective
Given that AI can already generate copycat video, text, music, and images, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that there are apps you can use to generate quick websites. As standalone achievements in the field of programming they are amazing. It’s incredible to think that such a thing could even exist in our lifetime. As practical resources, however, they fall short. They won’t be putting companies like ours out of business anytime soon.
The problems with AI-generated web designs can basically be boiled down to two issues. The first is that they aren’t original. The second is that they aren’t effective. Obviously, these two difficulties go hand-in-hand. However, I’ll start by tackling them one at a time.
It doesn’t take much explanation to understand the issues with originality. Because machine learning apps can only create websites by drawing on other websites, what’s really being generated are sophisticated copies… or in some cases, copies of copies. When that happens, each new version is less original and lower quality than the last.
Making a generic duplication of your competitor’s website isn’t a great way to get ahead in the digital world. Even if the ethical considerations don’t bother you, the possible penalties should. Recent lawsuits are testing the theory that using software to scrape and reproduce someone else’s content and designs amounts to a copyright violation. Additionally, Google, the other search engines, and even social media sites are working hard on new algorithm updates that detect and remove artificially generated material.
These trends might continue to pick up in the future. Certainly, none of the major tech companies want to be found liable for damages relating to theft and copyright violations. Additionally, it’s often the case that real human users – the type that actually purchase products and services – don’t get value from information that has essentially been duplicated. Lower value means less engagement, which keeps users off of platforms. To put this another way, search and social companies might ignore a website that was created with AI because it’s in their own interests.
That brings us to the issue of effectiveness. Although you don’t necessarily want your website to be too different from anything else on the internet, it shouldn’t look like something that was created by studying the average website in your industry, either. That’s just not going to help you stand out with your customers or clients. At best they’ll think you know better than anyone else in your business. At worst, your pages will just seem like they are “off” somehow.
In fact, even though AI tools have only recently started to move into the mainstream, this problem is already getting worse. That’s because there are plenty of marketers out there using artificial apps to put out huge volumes of low-value content as quickly as possible. That material is being scanned and crawled by other AI tools that are making copies of the copies. If you have ever seen what happens when you take a photocopy of a photocopy, then you know where this process is going.
This brings us back to the point. A piece of technology can be exciting without being ready for everyday use. It’s probably the same reason we don’t have self-driving cars just yet. It’s incredible that we have apps that can give a good approximation of human creativity. In some cases they can even fool your eyes at first glance. But, if you’re looking to grow your business, then having a website that looks generic, contains spelling and programming errors, and might violate copyright laws isn’t a good start.
Might artificial intelligence replace human designers, programmers, and copywriters someday? Could that day even come in the next decade or two? It’s certainly possible. However, if you were to ask us what the most likely short-to-intermediate outcome will be, we would say that humans are still going to be driving the process for a while.
The Future of AI Design Is Exciting
Artificial intelligence is an exciting trend, and it seems likely that it will only become more fascinating as the field advances and users try new things. We would speculate, however, that the day when we see fully automated marketing services with no human intervention is farther away than you might imagine.
In the same way that search engines and social media didn’t put salespeople out of business, designers, programmers, and marketing specialists are likely to continue driving growth in our industry for years to come. Some of this has to do with the fact that there will probably always be some shortcomings to algorithmic learning. It’s difficult for machines to imitate and predict human behavior, regardless of how many lines of code you give them. It’s also true that humans like to interact with other humans. Sometimes, imitating that back-and-forth (for instance, with the use of chatbots) makes things more frustrating rather than less.
Still, it’s a virtual certainty that the world at large – and the web design industry in particular – is going to go through some significant changes as a result of artificial intelligence. You probably don’t want an AI app designing, writing, or coding your next website from scratch. But that doesn’t mean your creative team won’t be leveraging these tools to help them plan, test, and execute different strategies.
