Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the writer known for his aversion to noise, joked that a living typist was much less intimidating than a machine: 'A machine with its serious, silent demands strikes me as exercising a greater, more cruel compulsion on one's capacities than any human being.' In Kafka's case, the machine was the typewriter (he claimed he was even afraid of the telephone). Today that machine is the computer. It operates silently but does it make silent demands? While there are those who depreciate the use of the computer for ideation, the fact that you can type a request into a machine, in normal conversational language, and it outputs something close to what you asked for, is pretty remarkable. Yet AI can give users false confidence, giving them the sense that if AI - with access to billions of data points - can come up with new ideas, they must somehow be better. But then ideas have never been in short supply. The problem for most designers, and their clients, is the uncertainty - which ideas are best, which ones are worth investing in? So will human creativity always prevail? But with humans in competition with AI, how can we tell?
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