This week I designed a business card for a hiking group I’m a part of. As someone with very little design experience, I used the opportunity to put my toe into the raging torrent of AI-everything.

I was able to get several very nice mock-ups from DALL.E. There were several #ChatGPT add-ons (I’m not sure what they’re called) that helped you design cards. They pretty much all pointed you to commercial services to finish the job. None of them pumped out a finished product.

Despite the appealing visuals, the #AI struggled with the text, hallucinating information and producing fuzzy lettering.

Faced with these challenges, I considered various options: I could pay for one of the AI-driven services recommended by ChatGPT or revert to a more traditional approach, reminiscent of the 2000s, by using Open Office for a hands-on design.

I struck a compromise and ended up doing the layout by hand using staples.com’s online program, borrowing ideas from DALL.E’s good first swags.

I had a related experience yesterday: I tried using one of the now ubiquitous AI-Chatbots on a medical website… it was pathetic, inept and a waste of time. I ended up calling a customer service /person/. He was confused by my issue that was not on the call script, but he was able to /understand/.

This blog post was proofread by ChatGPT. Some suggestions for flow, grammar and style were incorporated. Again, decisions where made by a human as to what changes to incorporate.

The moral of the story: AI helps, but for some jobs, you still need a lot of human judgent, creativity and “manual labor”.