
AI will enable predictive design in creatives - konsalexee
https://uxdesign.cc/how-ai-will-enable-predictive-design-in-creatives-267e7d28fd32
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jameslk
I explored this space in depth a while back. The problem with approaching the
creative side of advertising is that it's an arms race. There's a reason
creative agencies don't work with clients that compete with each other: you
cannot share what worked for one client with another, otherwise it becomes
less effective for both. Once you find a formula that works, everyone copies
it, and it's no longer useful (i.e ad blindness). You can treat this as an
optimization problem, but then everyone will do the same. Those who stand out
will be doing something different, using different methods to draw attention
that is not automatable.

Also, there's usually not enough data available for making very good
decisions, especially if it's based on longer but better signals of ROI, such
as LTV or sale conversions. A long sales cycle means you might not have data
for optimization until 60 days later.

Finally, another problem is that AI can lead to deceptive or manipulative
design (think dark patterns on steroids). That isn't just an ethics problem,
it's a problem that could lead to lawsuits (e.g. false advertising,
advertising the wrong things to protected classes of people, etc)

In general, it's hard to optimize problems which involve others optimizing
against you.

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woodpanel
> _it 's an arms race_

I can echo that, which is why I doubt that neither advertising nor design can
become fully automated by AI

I could see 2 things happening in this space:

1) AI may make ordinary advertising more accessible for smaller budgets

It'd be similar to bootstrap or material design, in that they help non-design-
driven products with not looking obviously cheap. But after adoption of said
frameworks, products will look more alike. Hence the need for differentiation
to gain more attention.

2) Given the said need for differentiation most revenue lies in the
combination of inputs by humans and AI.

For example when given the fundamental parameters that define a brand's design
language, an AI could iterate on that to churn out new designs that continue
this language with the human fine tuning the direction.

An AI then could also deliver options of where to steer the design language in
general, e.g. for car-designs:

a) add an aston-martin-like front grill (go with the general trend)

b) do the exact opposite of a)

c) allow just small changes to current design language and never mind the
competitors

etc.

~~~
konsalexee
>1) AI may make ordinary advertising more accessible for smaller budgets

That means that the big players with large budgets will need to step up their
game. As I see it, automation enables right now smaller budgets, so A.I. and
in general machine learning can step up the "rich" guys game.

>2) Given the said need for differentiation most revenue lies in the
combination of inputs by humans and AI.

I wrote in the article the definition of Predictive design.I quote the
definition below.

"In Predictive Design, data is collected, a statistical model is formulated,
predictions are made, and the model is validated (or revised) as additional
data becomes available."

That means that A.I. in design will not work without designs created by humans
and in general curation by humans. Unsupervised Designing is actually
something I believe will never happen. You stated correctly that most revenue
lies in the combination of inputs by humans and AI, cannot agree more!

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rchaud
Don't we already have something like this in the "What kind of website are you
building?" joke, the one with the 2 very similar Bootstrap-y layouts?

The type of design discussed here isn't "predictive", it just skews closest to
"best practices", which itself is an absurd constraint to place on something
that's "creative".

Honestly, I see AI helping the design process by automating usability testing,
converting user test videos into transcripts and flagging specific timestamps
for human review. It won't go so far as to actually generate the design,
because no designer wants to redo a machine's work once stakeholder feedback
comes in.

The job of the designer has never been solely about developing the design.
It's been about understanding the client's industry, needs and budget, and
creating something that works with those constraints, that everyone can sign
off on. That's a very human process, and humans aren't going to want to be
taken out of the discussion by an "AI-powered" anything. See the earlier
article about IBM Watson's overpromise on healthcare.

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hammock
What's the joke?

~~~
abj
Different kinds of sites would be Facebook (tons of features) versus a local
dentist's site (one page Bootstrap site with hours). The joke is that when
people ask,"What kind of site?" they're actually asking,"What kind of
Bootstrap site?" Both example Bootstrap sites are the same (just styled a
little differently).

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egypturnash
"Predictive design" sounds like a really good way to make even _more_ bland,
generic work.

Which I suppose makes it easier for someone who's actually honed their craft
into something distinctive to stand out from the crowd, but...

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randcraw
I think this is perhaps the principal near-term threat of AI: to commodify
people into stereotypes.

Pretty much all AI algorithms seek to classify their data (us) into a smaller
more manageable number of categories. AI methods work best when each of us
'consumers' fits neatly into one of these classes (whether predefined or
emergent; each class's origin doesn't matter). Upon implementation, you
_shall_ become a label, so that future interaction with the AI can assume you
to be a "Class 137" and lock you into a simplified model (with all your
features having low value eigenvectors conveniently excluded). Deviation from
this norm will _not_ be tolerated, simply because there's less profit in it.

Blah. If anything, better AI models of the world need to capture more subtlety
leading to better user-driven customization, not less. For Predictive Design
not to become yet another Big Brother, it needs to reflect each individual's
unique constellation of attributes, not the single dumbed-down class they were
labeled into.

Seven billion classes. That's the ticket.

~~~
rhizome
And even then I get "recommendations" on sites for "Best Rap Right Now," which
is about as generic as it gets, a simulacrum of a science that was perfected
in the 1950s.

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tdaltonc
We're currently working on a similar problem. I think the most important part
of predictive design is personalization. The author doesn't explicitly call
that out, but I think it leverages one of the big strengths of AI/ML. A human
designer can't maintain even 10 personalized interfaces or mentally track
100-micro journeys. They also can't be present with every user to adapt in
real time.

An AI co-designer can. After a human designer outlines their intention the
define the boundary conditions, the AI can start running MVP's. When the AI
reports back on what results they're getting with different types of
users/context, the designers can dig in together and iterate on
"problem/opportunity" points in the product.

I'm very excited about this future.

Our page: [https://www.boundless.ai/](https://www.boundless.ai/)

~~~
eropple
So uh...I don't know how to put this in a way that might not come off as
hurtful, but I'm gonna try.

Do you somehow not look at this sort of massive data mining, this sort of
optimization for psychological assault upon people ill-equipped to defend
themselves--and this is effectively a given, because the systems you are
building are designed to exploit their brains and will _by design_ optimize
for maximal exploitation 'cause that's what makes your KPIs bigger--and ask
whether this is a good idea?

Do _you_ want to be downstream of this psychological onslaught?

Doesn't this horrify you?

Isn't there something better--for yourself, and for the world at large--that
you could be doing with such obvious talent?

~~~
eropple
So now I'm a little mad because this shit sundae gets worse.
[http://youjustneedspace.com](http://youjustneedspace.com) \- thus is you,
too. How much data is going out of that app to better refine and target your
"engagement" shit?

~~~
tdaltonc
All of it. We have a common data model for both are habit-building and habit-
breaking products. They learn from each other.

Sometimes you want to invite a new behavior in to your life, sometimes you
want to ask one to leave. We want to enable both of those behavior change
goals.

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Hoasi
Predictive design, optimized to create the expected.

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baxtr
As a side note: it has gotten to a point where I don’t want to read blog post
hosted on Medium, like this one. When I open the page, there are 2 banners on
top (Download app, privacy notice) and a huge one below (sign-up!), which
leaves 50% of the viewport for the article. So annoying...

~~~
konsalexee
To be honest I hate this too, but I have extremely more visibility than my
personal blog.

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beiller
Isn't "creative" kind of like doing something new, and AI - at least the kind
I've been messing with like tensorflow, kind of like training from existing
examples and unable to adapt to never before seen data. Aren't they kind of at
direct odds? If AI takes over creative tasks like producing art work, won't
original creative works become even more valuable and just create a massive
boom for creatives and somewhat eclipse the AI created generic junk?

~~~
SeanAppleby
AI can infer information about data that does not appear in the training set,
depending on the actual tech being used and what you are calling "new data".

An easy to grasp example from a while back in NLP is word embeddings.

We started out with vectors for each word in the training corpus, which meant
we had no information for words outside of the training set, like you say.

Then people came up with "character n-grams", which built vectors for
substrings, which allowed us to encode information for words outside of the
training corpus based on the vectors of the constituent substrings.

You could imagine a system that could deliberate across levels of abstraction
to find lines of analogical reasoning to connect things together in novel ways
that people would find surprising and interesting in similar ways to human
creative output, since it's all computation either way, but who knows how far
away we could be from making such a system that could actually generate
reasonable, surprising outputs.

~~~
beiller
I think we've all seen the state-of-the-art with words the system have never
seen before, and it's not very impressive. I think you confused some terms in
your comment. Word embeddings like word2vec, is a vector that considers
surrounding words typically, and is really just a way to compress one-hot
vectors into a smaller dimensional space. So it can infer from the surrounding
words that it is similar in position to another word in a given word sequence
but that is pretty much it. Generally you cannot vectorize a word it has never
seen in the fitting stage of word2vec. I think once you really start hacking
away at this stuff, you will someday come to the thought: is my "creative"
model over-fitting (repeating its trained inputs), or is this something
completely new generated? Where do you draw that line? A word embedding AI
cannot invent new words. It can make new word combinations, and even pick up
grammar rules, but the results suck. I have tried my hand at text generation
using LSTMs, and much smarter people than me have tried, and it's not looking
great. I will continue hacking away at it however :)

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echelon
I want to see this pushed even further! Film, game design, fiction writing --
all could use better tooling.

\- AI tools to aid in story construction for narrative plots.

\- Tools to do the planning a DP and AD would have to do on set.

\- Tools to automatically assemble rough cuts of films.

\- Story arc visualization and branch planning

Etc.

~~~
daniel-cussen
Then just make AIs that go to the theaters and watch the movie.

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mguerville
Beautiful.ai does automate the boring but necessary part of the presentation
design process (aligning and distributing objects, optimizing fonts etc.)

It's not truly creative but it enables creativity I'd argue.

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apocalypstyx
The dissidents of the future will be the ones who turn off spellcheck.

~~~
bredren
The revolution will be optimized.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The television will not be revolutionised.

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leowoo91
That went to grammarly advertising real quick.

