Humans and AI in communication design

Running an impact-focused organization means you’re often working in a resource-limited environment. Every day, you must decide how you’ll manage your budget and team’s capacity. It makes sense to consider time and money-saving tools to operate more efficiently. And now, thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can experiment with various productivity-boosting tools.

The iilo team has been actively exploring the use of AI in communication design and this blog post captures our experience, both the pros and cons, so far. Since we’re deeply committed to running our creative services agency ethically and transparently, we hope this information will help you make more informed decisions about using AI in your next communication design project!

How AI can be applied in communication design

Communication design encompasses everything from copywriting and social media content creation to branding, logos, and graphics. It’s a strategic process involving research, design, development, testing, and feedback to convey messages effectively to a target audience. 

Given the multidisciplinary nature of communication design, AI tools can offer a variety of benefits:

• Efficiency and productivity: AI tools can automate repetitive tasks like resizing images and formatting documents, so designers gain time to focus on more creative tasks.
• Preliminary ideation: AI tools can help with research and prompt creative ideas to redirect or build on.
• Personalization: An important goal of communication design is to connect with target audiences, and AI can quickly analyze large datasets to suggest design elements that will appeal to target audiences.
• Collaboration: AI-assisted project management and meeting tools can help team members work more efficiently toward common goals.
• Accessibility: It’s easier to create accessible content when AI can support inclusive design practices, like providing optimal colour combinations and alternative text for images.
• Cost-effectiveness: AI can streamline processes like video editing, thus reducing manual labour and resulting in cost savings.

How iilo has used AI to improve efficiency and accessibility

iilo is a virtual-forever creative services agency that works with clients across Canada. Hence, our geographically distributed team loves finding innovative ways to collaborate. Plus, anytime we can work more efficiently, we pass on cost savings to our clients! 

Before we started exploring any use of AI tools, we created an ethical AI policy to guide our activities (more on that later). 

Here are some ways we’ve improved workflows with AI tools:

• Taking detailed notes: AI notetakers such as Fathom and Otter.ai not only document what was discussed during meetings, but they also summarize important points so it’s easy to locate key information in the transcript.
• Speeding up tasks: As the demand for social media content increases, AI tools help us to work smarter, not harder. For example, Opus.pro cuts longer videos into share-worthy snippets. It picks out content that’s most likely to get engagement, cuts out filler words, adds captions, and provides a transcript of the clip.
• Improving readability: Writing in plain language helps to connect with a wider audience. Apps like Hemingway Editor offer suggestions for writing clearly and concisely, so more readers can understand our communications. 
• Sorting and tidying information: While we don’t rely on ChatGPT for writing, we find it can be a great assistant for generating ideas, tidying up “brain dumps,” and sifting through large amounts of information.

Problems with AI in communication design

While the AI boom has been exciting, in our opinion, many technologies are still in their early stages, and the outputs don’t meet industry-level quality standards for communication design. For example, inaccurate information generated by AI tools is a top challenge cited by the Government of Canada.

Effective communication design is about connection, which originates from nuance and warmth — elements that AI isn’t currently able to produce. Before anything is shared publicly, humans are still needed to act as the final fact-checkers.

Another problem with AI is that it can only create from the data that has been supplied, and it doesn’t understand how its output may be interpreted in a larger cultural and political context. In other words, AI can be insensitive and out of touch. This is a huge risk for values-based organizations.

In contrast, when the iilo team works on a communication design project, we’re full partners in your success. We start each new engagement by getting to know you and your organization’s vision so we can develop messages and materials that truly align with your values and goals. We have a tight quality control process to ensure what you share publicly is of high quality and resonates with your target audiences. AI simply can’t replace caring people putting their hearts and minds together on a project. 

Ethical implications of AI

It’s important to consider ethical implications as AI applications continue to skyrocket. Privacy and copyright infringement in particular are real concerns for creative workers. Recognizing that some artists’ works are being used by generative AI companies non-consensually, organizations are stepping in to give artists a voice. For example, Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC) and le Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV) have released recommendations regarding AI and visual artists. The hope is that artists will be compensated fairly while AI technology advances.

As more people rely on AI in communication design, there’s also a risk of stifled human creativity and bland messages that look and sound similar everywhere. Biases in AI algorithms can also perpetuate harmful stereotypes and patterns. That’s why it’s more important than ever to support human creativity and education on unconscious biases.

Developing our AI policy

We know our clients appreciate iilo’s way of doing business ethically and transparently. To stand confidently behind our values, we began the process of developing an AI policy this year to address the following questions:

• How will we safeguard client information?
• How can we be transparent about how we use AI?
• How can we acknowledge that AI features are increasingly embedded in the tools we use?
• How can we ensure that clients continue receiving original designs and deliverables?
• How can we keep producing work that’s inclusive, respectful, and in alignment with iilo’s and our clients’ values?
• How can we support our team to learn and develop AI best practices together?

This isn’t an exhaustive list of questions, but we consider it a start. Our interim policy was created with our team, and is a living document that we’ll keep updating as our understanding and use of AI evolves. Currently, iilo applies AI tools mostly for project management, research, and ideation, and we make sure to track our AI prompts for transparency. We’re committed to delivering original work to clients, so we don’t plan on exploring image generation tools for our client-facing work. 

Ultimately, iilo was founded to provide well-paying work to women and underrepresented people in the creative services industry. As much as we love the efficiencies that AI tools can provide, we’ll always offer a home to creatives and deliver original communication design work to clients, produced by the iilo team. 

We believe that by using AI alongside communication design principles and considered AI policies, we can ensure the world stays accessible, inclusive, and vibrant in the age of AI. If you’d like to work with a team that strives to balance the benefits of humans and AI in communication design, let’s connect.