No, you probably won’t lose your writing gig to a robot. For now.
What an AI design stunt can teach us about human writing
I want you to close your eyes and imagine you’re a large Russian business. (No, not that kind of business. A legitimate business.)
Like AvtoVAZ.
AvtoVAZ makes Ladas, the ultimate people’s car.
So you’re the head of marketing at AvtoVAZ and it’s time for a rebrand. You hire Art. Lebedev Studio because frankly they’re the best. They’ve done a lot of work for plenty of other legitimate businesses inside and outside Russia, memorable graphic design that pushes the envelope.
Right away, a designer from Art. Lebedev Studio named Nikolay Ironov emails you. You run through Ironov’s creative brief. Ironov then proceeds to produce a boatload of excellent designs for you. Super quickly.
Despite his breakneck work pace, Ironov’s style speaks to you. You eventually settle on the set of designs that will become the new face of AvtoVAZ. You’re in production the following week: website overhaul, logo, type, animations, business cards, signage. Ironov delivers everything, and you love it all.
Your boss loves Ironov’s work, too, and from what you can understand from your social traffic, so do your customers.
Two weeks later, you get a call from the director of Art. Lebedev Studios. His name is Sergey Kulinkovich.
Kulinkovich wants to tell you something. Something he’s sure you won’t mind, but something he felt the need to point out because he’s a gentleman at heart and true gentlemen never keep secrets.
Nikolay Ironov, your prolific, talented designer, Kulinkovich says, is really a bot.
Remember, you’re the head of marketing at AvtoVAZ. A lot of thoughts are probably running through your head.
Here they are in order of importance.
Am I an idiot?
Do I have no taste?
Could I have found another robot, a much cheaper robot, to do the same work?
Will my customers realize my logo was designed by a cyborg?
Do I tell my boss?
And then there’s this: How did a robot design anything? Which, of course, opens up a huge can of worms even Ironov’s human helper, Sergey Kulinkovich, might not be able to answer.
But since the can is open —
Can robots really do that?
What’s real? What’s fake? If you can’t tell the difference, is what’s fake really real? Philosophical conundrums like this make great movies (Orson Welles’ F is for Fake is one of the best), but they’re rare in the world of content writing.
And yet the kinds of questions the Nikolay Ironov experiment is asking us aren’t just graphic design questions. Writers should be paying attention, too.
Because, no, robots can’t replace writers in 2022. But you may actually, not too far in the future, find yourself explaining something like that to a potential client who would be more than happy to hire their own Nikolay Ironov to write their copy for them.
Output makes perfect
If you want to get an idea of why Nikolay Ironov isn’t a designer, imagine a rogue code-like entity swallowing the entire Noun Project icon database. Then picture it swallowing a brand name and some meta descriptions of the brand it lifts from Google.
Now watch it turn that word salad into logoforms that approximate the thousands of vector images it just gobbled up.
What happens next you won’t be able to see, but Nikolay will execute some algorithmic hocus pocus programmed by Art. Lebedev Studio and spit out some color schemes and fonts to match its drawings.
All of that, according to The Next Web’s Thomas Macaulay, becomes “an endless range of logo options for the client.”
Or in Sergey Kulinkovich’s own words: “All these systems combined together [convert] a client’s text brief into a corporate identity design pack archive. Within seconds.”
Oh, that kind of bot
If part of this process sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’ve been through it a thousand times already on royalty-free image search engines like Unsplash or Pexels.
You type in a keyword or two to find a visual for an article you’re writing — “moody pink sunset,” say, or “dreaming of tomorrow” — and the Unplash search bot spits out its own endless series of photographic solutions to your problem.
Sometimes it gets it right. Most of the time it gives you one image out of 40 that may be able to stand in for the particular idea you had in your head, the idea that summed up, at a glance, the concept of your writing.
Nikolay Ironov is the Unsplash search bot’s cleverer, more ambitious demon offspring.
However, here’s the thing. Even if the whole Ironov episode seems like an elaborate Russian swindle on par with the ingenious fake Czech marketing campaign Český Sen — in other words, a campaign designed to rile up gullible designers and make its own clients look like the equivalent of tone deaf music critics — Kulinkovich claims that his intentions were honest. Not only that, he says that that many of the clients who worked with Nikolay Ironov left the studio happy.
And if clients are happy, isn’t the creative doing its job?
Yes and no.
Taste is taste. Experience is experience. Not all companies are blessed with enough of either. Who’s to say, for example, that in the pinball room of some Silicon Valley start-up, on a foamy pink bean bag molded to the contours of his protein-enhanced backside, the next 30-year-old tech billionaire CEO wouldn’t turn down a logo inspired by modernist graphic design giant Paul Rand?
Then again, Paul Rand never spat out “an endless range of logo options,” did he?
That’s because Rand was working with two human assets Nikolay Ironov doesn’t have and can’t understand — at least not yet. Two skills it’s awfully hard for plenty of humans to understand, but that underpin both good design and good writing: intent and empathy.
The human toolkit
You remember what Nikolay Ironov did with his creative brief? He closed his eyes and swallowed it whole.
Let’s say you had to come up with a logo or a slogan for the same project. What would you do with that brief?
I’m probably not going out on a limb to suggest that, first, you would use the brief to figure out a direction or two to start moving in. Then you would choose the best one and feel your way forward with the client and your team. Intent and empathy, in other words.
Intent is moving deliberately towards a creative statement. Empathy is understanding enough of your audience’s needs, fears and aspirations to make that statement concrete and meaningful.
This is how it works.
Remember that image of the “moody pink sunset” you needed for your article a few paragraphs back? That search term is only a rubric for an idea or feeling you can’t really put into words. Those three abstract words are the closest you can get to that idea with language.
For the time being at least, when you feed that description to a search bot, you’re always approximating a solution, arriving by algorithm at a hack that works one in 40 times.
Discuss that idea with a designer who can meet you halfway, on the other hand, and you’re moving with intent towards a shared vision. Add the empathy you need to switch shoes and see that vision as your audience would and you’re moving more clunkily, yes, and far less prolifically towards a better creative solution.
Wrapping up
Good web writing takes a lot of things, but the key ingredients — intent and empathy — are currently not available for immediate download or wholesale ingestion. (Sorry, Sergey.)
Until they are, and the future progeny of Nikolay Ironov have made us all obsolete, I would say that the only thing Art. Lebedev Studio’s experiment has revealed about the design field is that mediocre design may be a little more difficult to suss out than lukewarm writing.
