To explore the commercial features of AI, Bill and I have also been playing with some of the free automatic logo creation features of website builders. Both Wix and Squarespace have these features, but since we went with Squarespace to create our project site, we’ve focused on the logo capacities of this company.
Squarespace has partnered with Noun Project and uses their graphic archive to make the logos based on the terms you input. For the logos displayed below, we used the terms ‘duplicate’, ‘upload’ ‘twin’ and ‘simulation’ as starting points. We then selected the graphics that were most relevant to the project.
While the outcomes look quite slick, the fact that the logo maker draws on freely available graphics does mean that it would lack true customisation.
We tried using Adobe Firefly to create a logo, but since the vector tool is still in development, we had to use the standard text-to-image option. The resulting images had a little too much detail and resembled an imaginary company in a dystopian futuristic computer game. Although, it could also be that my prompts were a poor fit for the outcome I was after.
Bill suggested we also try Microsoft Bing which has DALL-E 3 built into the chat feature.
For what we are looking for, the results were much more promising.
In the end we settled on a basic Bing Chat design, but realised that we would need to customise it in an image editor to better represent our ideas. Perhaps, we could have prompted Bing|DALL-E 3 to do it for us…but it just seemed easier for me to make the quick adjustments.
Above you can see our final ‘Simulated Selves’ logo design. We took the basic shape and adapted the right face section in an image editor.
Overall the process was very fast and it reveals that generative AI will likely become a key tool for industry image production as it will be able to fast track design outputs and streamline workflow. There is the danger though that slick generative AI tools will start to become more expensive and that there will be an expectation for greater productivity within workplace settings. This fast pace of production runs the risk that there will be proliferation of ‘thoughtless’ imagery reinforcing cultural and social stereotypes and biases. Of course, there is always capacity for critical intervention and no doubt forms of visual resistance and alternative generators will emerge.