ChatGPT Images 2.0 has people declaring the death of graphic design… again

Another day, another generative AI update that’s led to a chorus of loud voices on X declaring the death of graphic design. ChatGPT Images 2.0 was unveiled this week, representing OpenAI’s “first image model with thinking capabilities”. The results are certainly impressive, but should designers be worried?

Images 2.0 is much better at rendering text than previous models, and as such many of the demos have included the tool generating desktop screenshots, restaurant menus and handwritten documents. But weirdly enough, it’s football posters that have become the lightning rod for a debate about the future of graphic designers on social media.

“With both the intelligence of OpenAI’s reasoning models and a vast understanding of the visual world, this model moves image generation from rendering to strategic design, from a tool to a visual system, helping people turn ideas into outputs they can understand, share, teach with, and build from,” reads OpenAI’s blog post introducing Images 2.0.

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For whatever reason, there are countless posts on X declaring graphic designers are “cooked” or whatnot, along with various AI-generated images of sports posters. You know the type – dramatic compositions with floating heads and lots of text, the sort of thing Fifa might post on social media (hopefully without forgetting Ronaldo).

The images are certainly impressive, except for one thing: they’re all the same. ‘Thinking’ or not, Images 2.0 is still mimicking one very particular style for all of these prompts. At a glance the images might look striking, but there’s a hollowness that doesn’t take long to materialise. Plenty of designers have taken to X with their own similar work created without AI, it certainly contains more soul. And most importantly, each looks like it was created by a different designer.

The concern, of course, is whether that soul will remain important to clients. When a simple prompt can create an image that looks like the one in your head, the one you’ve seen before, it could be tempting to go down that much quicker and cheaper route. But as these ChatGPT’s football posters show, that could be a one-way ticket to homogeny central.