The rise of AI in design: protecting creativity in a rapidly evolving landscape

The creative industry's existential crisis

The design and creative communities are experiencing unprecedented anxiety. Many professionals fear job loss as tasks that once required hours of meticulous work can now be accomplished in minutes with AI. Whilst efficiency itself is wonderful, there's a troubling aspect to this evolution: creativity is fundamentally built on personal skill and experience - elements that form an individual's unique style.

When someone can upload your work to ChatGPT and replicate the style you've spent decades perfecting in just three minutes - without your knowledge or consent - why would clients hire you? This reality is genuinely frightening for creators. Your output isn't just being used to train foundational models; it can be copied almost instantly to create variations of your work.

What exactly.ai stands for:

At exactly.ai, we understand that clients aren't simply looking for images. They hire creators for their ability to craft visual languages that help brands grow.

We aren't just another tool provider - we're a cooperative of more than a hundred thousand uniquely talented art directors and designers valued for their expertise and creative vision.

We're building AI because we must empower creativity, not destroy it. We refuse to stand by as the industry collapses and professionals lose their livelihoods because they can't match AI's pace.

Empowering creators, not stealing from them

Exactly.ai offers individual creators a genuine way to monetise their talents using AI. We help art directors and illustrators train AI models specifically on their own portfolios. We rigorously verify that the images used for training belong to them and that the output truly represents their unique style.

The images they upload, the models we create for them and the images our clients generate with those models all belong to the illustrators whose portfolios were used for training.

We then publish these models and connect them with clients seeking to generate images in the style of top creators.

When a client generates an image in the style of our creator, they pay a licence fee to use this image. We don't offer unlimited rights to AI-generated images because the crucial creative input comes from a human creator.

Clients understand they cannot use generic AI images from other platforms, and they see exactly.ai as the only AI solution they can confidently use for final products because we provide clear rights and strong creator protection.

Protecting our creators

We are fiercely protective of our creators. We don't allow people to use the styles of those we represent without paying for their intellectual property.

We take a rigorous approach to protecting creators who publish their styles with us. Every day, we encounter cases where people attempt to train models on images generated with our public models. We do not allow this practice and remove such models to safeguard the copyright of creators we represent.

Let us be absolutely clear: We do not permit using images produced with someone else's style to create variations or derivative models. This approach violates our values and the rights of our creators.

The future of creativity

Currently, we're living in a kind of digital Wild West where theft is rampant, but this won't continue forever. Stolen images won't help you build a sustainable brand, which is precisely why human creators will remain essential, regardless of how sophisticated AI models become.

Image credit: artwork on this page was created with Alisa Krasnikova's model Simple Lines