{"id":3381,"date":"2026-08-26T17:36:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T15:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=3381"},"modified":"2026-08-26T17:52:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T15:52:23","slug":"do-visual-designers-generate-better-ai-pictures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2026\/08\/26\/do-visual-designers-generate-better-ai-pictures\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Visual Designers Generate Better AI Pictures?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>Do Visual Designers Generate Better AI Pictures?<\/h1>\n<p><em>Yes, <\/em>in a way, but what do we mean by &#8220;better&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/jesperjuul.net\/text\/unseenhand\/\">The Unseen Hand: The Influence of Visual and AI Literacy on AI Text-to-Image Generation<\/a>, and its partner article <a href=\"https:\/\/jesperjuul.net\/text\/algorithmic\/\">Algorithmic Creativity<\/a>, we studied a question on everybody&#8217;s mind at the moment:<\/p>\n<p><em>If an &#8220;AI&#8221; can create content, such as images, from a typed prompt, do design skills still matter? Or do technical skills matter even more?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In collaboration with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moodvisuals.com\">Mood Visuals<\/a>, we asked students from a technical university and a design school to fulfill a brief of creating a &#8220;brutalist medieval castle.&#8221; We then tracked the prompts that students were using, and the experts from Mood Visuals rated the images on both aesthetic quality and on how well they fulfilled the brief.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-3385 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1-450x269.jpg\" alt=\"Mood Visual Brief\" width=\"450\" height=\"269\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1-450x269.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1-150x90.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1-768x460.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1-1200x719.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brief1.jpg 1336w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 85vw, 450px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As you can see in the paper, we had some hypotheses, but the main takeaways were the following:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">student groups created images which were rated as having equal visual appeal<\/span>. Having visual skills (&#8220;visual literacy&#8221;) did not improve the aesthetic quality of the images.<\/li>\n<li>But: <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Students with visual skills (&#8220;visual literacy&#8221;) were much better at fulfilling the task<\/span>.<\/li>\n<li>Visual design students also used a larger vocabulary, including more adjectives, and tried more varied prompts.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>From this small study on the use of AI to generate concept art, we can see the outline of what AI image generation does (at least for the moment):<br \/>\n<strong>AI image generation <em>has<\/em> the democratizing effect of allowing everyone to create visually appealing images, but to create something that fulfills a task or is appropriate for a given situation continues to require expertise.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Alessandro Canossa, Lisa Toender, Lucas Fellner, Jesper Juul, Willem Maden, and Jichen Zhu. 2025. \u201cThe Unseen Hand: The Influence of Visual and AI Literacy on AI Text-to-Image Generation.\u201d IASDR Conference Series. <a href=\"https:\/\/dl.designresearchsociety.org\/iasdr\/iasdr2025\/fullpapers\/337\">https:\/\/dl.designresearchsociety.org\/iasdr\/iasdr2025\/fullpapers\/337<\/a>.<\/em><br \/>\n<em><a href=\"https:\/\/jesperjuul.net\/text\/unseenhand\/\">https:\/\/jesperjuul.net\/text\/unseenhand\/<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do Visual Designers Generate Better AI Pictures? Yes, in a way, but what do we mean by &#8220;better&#8221;? In The Unseen Hand: The Influence of Visual and AI Literacy on AI Text-to-Image Generation, and its partner article Algorithmic Creativity, we studied a question on everybody&#8217;s mind at the moment: If an &#8220;AI&#8221; can create content, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2026\/08\/26\/do-visual-designers-generate-better-ai-pictures\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Do Visual Designers Generate Better AI Pictures?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3381"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3393,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions\/3393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}