I read something today that perfectly captures how I feel about artificial intelligence.
According to reporting from The Verge, Monotype (a company I do not like) is really pushing the idea that AI is “coming for our fonts.” Which is a gross way to say that AI is coming for type designers, which is a gross thing to publicly get excited about.
Apart from the fact that we continue to discuss AI taking our jobs and our humanity from us (as though it’s desirable), the other problem here is that this future isn’t real. At least, not now:
AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through “intelligent agents and chatbots” and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn’t certain, possibly as part of proprietarily trained apps. Indeed, how any of this will work remains nebulous.
Why Monotype would want to push any of this is beyond me. The Verge mostly attempts to draw similarities between today’s AI proclamations and the effects of industrialization on typography in the early 20th century. The metaphor is completely broken, because unlike these AI proclamations, the effects of industrialization were actually real.
And then, the money quote. This is in reference to Zeynep Akay, director at typeface design studio Dalton Maag:
“It’s almost as if we are being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our creative skills are ephemeral.”
It is exactly this! In a rush to get investor dollars, every company in the world is trying to tell professionals in every space (but particularly in white collar information work) that their jobs, livelihoods, and skill sets are irrelevant in the coming tide.
The current chatbots are useful tools, but any company claiming they’re “replacing” workers with AI is attempting to paint a narrative about layoffs with a different colour. The tool just isn’t there. It’s especially not there for any work that requires creative thought, and because the entire AI chain is more or less word prediction based on prior knowledge, there isn’t much chance AI in its current incarnation could design anything actually new.
To put it bluntly, I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that AI is designing typefaces for us any time soon.