We talk a lot aboutArtificial intelligence lately, and I must say that it still went over my head. Indeed, human creation has been assisted, even replaced, by computers for a long time. Which says a lot about our intellectual laziness, but how could it be otherwise with all these wonderful tools at our disposal?
Only, recently, I started testing a banal image generator offered by an internet browser. And there, I was amazed by what this tool, freely accessible to the greatest number of people, was capable of. Using very simple command prompts, it produced designs not only attractive from an aesthetic point of view but also coherent in terms of their functionality, even their stylistic language.
Around the same time, BMW revealed the first images of its new 1 Series, hopelessly conservative since mixing influences from Ford Fiesta and Kia Ceed. A design that is not unpleasant but outdated from the moment it appears, especially when we see what a general public AI is capable of. Besides this confirms what I think of a Bavarian design that has been searching for years, alternating between heavy look proposals with caricatured details and desperately plan-plan bodies.
I have just as many in the service of other manufacturers (Ferrari and Lamborghini for example) and I have some concern. If designers are not capable of doing better than AI, what will become of them? A falsely naive question actually. Because designers don’t have free brushes, far from it. Apart from the fact that the vast majority of them come from the same schools, where they had the same teachers, they are then often subject to the dictates of marketing, while having to deal with strong legal constraints (notably in terms of crash tests). , aerodynamic and industrial (assembly must be possible and inexpensive). A puzzle !
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All in a context where, due to the irruption of China, new models abound, making everyone’s ability to stand out from the crowd even more complex. Worse still, if a manufacturer marks the retinas with a particularly attractive and innovative design, it will very quickly be copied, recycled by an AI, and finally trivialized. Unless it can only correspond to a manufacturer with an extremely strong brand image. But that was before, almost all of them having diluted, even sacrificed their values on the altar of profitability.
Here, I am only expressing the point of view of a boomer, an old car enthusiast who likes to have the choice, not in the date but in the technologies, the designs, the concepts. However, enthusiasts are becoming rarer and the new generation, when it is urban, no longer sees the car as anything but a consumer item used to get from A to B. Moreover, there is less and less question of buying a vehicle than of renting it, provided that she has a driving license.
From there, the Will builders still want to spend hundreds and thousands on design?, to pay people to do what an AI is capable of? I want to believe it, to tell myself that designers will go out of their way to ridicule these purely digital creations, but even if most of them are certainly capable of doing so, I very much doubt that they will have the leisure to do so. Too expensive !
On another side, other professions will appear, who knows. For example, at the very high end, we can imagine a AI operator (formed by a brand) which will be aimed at a clientele wishing to have a specific bodywork designed but meeting all standards, which will then be manufactured by a 3D printer to be adapted on a generic technical basis, operating with batteries naturally. All in a few weeks, even a few days. A revolution that only old people like your fifty-year-old servant will be moved by!
Moreover, these AI operators could come to produce mainstream designs which would be developed in real time by a panel of potential customers/tenants selected by a dedicated marketing department. Goops.
Until that happens (we hope not!), we still have many old models, quite a few recent ones and a few modern ones to enjoy. And who knows, in the future, journalists with a bad mind will also be replaced by an AI capable of sarcasm…
