How designers can start using AI at work today

AI text-to-image tools can feel'magical' at first glance but have many problematic aspects in their training data and implementation right now that require solutions (and law changes) to make them more ethical and viable to use for commercial work. If you are happily avoiding producing full-blown illustrations with these tools, there are plenty of more ethical, smaller ways to include them in your process for a product or web design. Here are a few you can use today, and a direction I could see things evolving in future. If you're designing any kind of app with profiles or a social element (which let's face it, are a lot of consumer-facing apps these days), then avatars are likely something you work with quite a bit. It can sometimes be a bit painful to get realistic-looking mockups with placeholders or stock photo models, which is where AI can help.