Shahid Mansuri
Future graphic designers will perfect more websites than they will create. They will fix websites created by AI programs. And if advances in AI technology continues at the current pace, web designing as a job will extinct from the job markets.
Web developers shouldn’t worry about their jobs though. As machines will start producing websites at industrial rate, quality analysis and control teams will have a larger role to pay. They will have more websites to test than ever and stricter quality guidelines to maintain. As a result, web app development company will hire more QA/QC professionals.
In a way, AI will create more jobs than it will replace. Web designers don’t need to panic as long as they are fine with a slight change in their job role.
Now the question arises, how will AI machines and programs will create unique, humanly websites as per the client’s recommendation. There are many factors, skills and abilities that sets the fate of AI web building system in the real world.
Cognitive Abilities
With cognitive abilities machines can create designs too. A design is just a figment of an artist’s imagination, which he draws from his surrounding—what he sees and listens–and is a direct outcome of his social and mental state.
Machines today can see and listen too. They can perceive their environment with the help of sensors and things (Internet of things) and, thus, can simulate imagination and use it to its advantages to create beautiful websites graphics. In addition, a machine connected to the internet has the access to the same pool of reference designs a human has.
So when you tell it to create a graphic of flying car to put in a website, the machine already knows, thanks to machine learning, what a car looks like and what wings are for on a airplane. It can look up the internet for a car and an airplane. It will then combine those two assisted by smart image processing algorithm to create a flying car.
Context Awareness
A major difference between a dumb program and a smart algorithm is this that dumb program will trigger the same sequence of events, regardless of the context. If it’s asked to fill in a graphic with red, it will fill it with red. A smart algorithm on the other hand is contextually aware. That is, it is aware of the entire web design and its theme. It will fill the graphic with a suitable shade of red, not just any red. It will pick a shade that suits the context better and goes well with the final web design. In fact, a smart algorithm in an AI engine will suggest an entirely new color if it thinks red doesn’t fit in the design. This is all possible because of the cognitive abilities showcased by AI systems.
Once the designer is confident of the machine’s ability to color matching, a web developer can ask it to make color correction on an entire batch of graphics to be placed in a web design.
Batch processes will save a lot of graphic designers’ time. Designers can use the spare time to come up with new ideas–something machines and programs are quite incapable of yet.
Context awareness will also play an important role in the event the written text and graphic below it are out of context in a web design. It can fix the graphic according to the text or vice-a-versa.
Symmetry Building
Design inconsistency is one of the biggest reasons behind the failure of a website. The problem is some inconsistencies are so subtle that they don’t catch attention of the designer but will ultimately hinder with user experience.
Machines are much more capable than humans in detecting asymmetries in computer graphics. Modern AI programs can not only detect asymmetries but also can fix them in a web design or computer graphics. If the picture of human face in a website has his nose displaced, AI can detect that in seconds because of cognitive abilities. It will flag it as asymmetric and will fix the nose using a combination of machine learning and context awareness skills.
Pattern Recognition
Modern AI algorithms can tell an image from another, no matter how subtle the difference in the images is. Images are made of up tiny pixels. Each pixel constitutes its property and is conspicuous in creating the final piece of graphic. A program although can’t see an image like a human do, it can read pixels and can tell difference between two pixels.
If you show it a dozen pictures of apples, it will read the pixels on each picture and try to find a pattern. Once a pattern is established, it can use it to find any untitled picture that has apple in it.
Likewise, AI systems can be trained to find patterns in similar websites. For example, every search engine has a search bar and every flight booking website has flight booking form. AI can look for these HTML blocks to tell a search engine website from a flight booking website.
Now suppose you have created a flight booking website but forgot to add ‘round trip’ radio button. An AI system will remind you faster than a human that the ‘round trip’ button is missing in the website.
Self-Learning Algorithms
With the help of self-learning algorithms, AI would soon be able to create entire websites. No need to buy a WordPress theme or write endless amount of coding. For example, if a business wants to build a website to compare flight ticket rates, it can train its AI system in building flight-comparison websites in few simple steps.
The business will feed the AI system with the links to top flight-comparison websites. The AI program will go through every website on the list, and will try to find a pattern in them. Once the pattern is established, it will update the algorithm to the pattern and mark it as ‘flight comparison websites’ skill.
With the help of the new skills, it can now create unique flight-comparison websites at industrial rate.
In a nutshell, the program will first find a pattern in the samples, update the pattern as a skill, and recreate the pattern in different variations to create unique websites.
