DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can be a boon for industrial designers

Enlarge / A volcano-themed tissue box designed with the help of AI-assisted image generation (credit: Juan Nougera (CC-BY-SA))

Since the introduction of DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, there has been a fair amount of hand-wringing about AI technology—some of it justified.

It’s true that the technology’s future is unclear. There is great debate about the ethics of using existing artwork, images, and content to train these AI products, and concern about what industries it will displace or change. And it seems as if an AI arms race between companies like Microsoft and Google is already underway.

And yet as an industrial designer and professor, I’ve found AI image-generation programs to be a fantastic way to improve the design process.