With smartphones in the pockets of two thirds of the world’s citizens and computers in nearly half of all homes, digital design has overtaken print as the dominant medium. Design software has kept pace, improving by leaps and bounds, and much of that design innovation depends on the use of artificial intelligence.

Through machine learning, software makers like Adobe have automated the most tedious processes to make design work easier and faster. Before smart selection tools, for example, if you wanted to replace the background of an image in Adobe Photoshop, you had to spend a lot of time carefully outlining the subject. Just tracing a person’s hair could take hours. But thanks to Auto Selection and Select Subject, that process now takes just a few minutes (with a little refining)..

The Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop is another great example of AI we now take for granted. When you want to fill in an area in an image, instead of using trial and error to match the color and tone, you can instantly and seamlessly fill it with content sampled from another part of the image. This is because the app is performing incredibly fast calculations based on the values in surrounding pixels.

Just as these AI-powered features have become indispensable for designers, amazing new generative AI tools are finding their place in the designer’s toolset.

In recent years, computer scientists have developed AI models that have made the wide-scale use of generative AI possible. Trained on millions of data points, these models learn how to generate images based on simple text prompts.

The more data they’re trained on, the better these models get, so that now you can generate impressive images just by typing a few words into a prompt field. You can experiment with new ideas, explore different color palettes, expand images, generate backgrounds for product photos, and more, faster than ever.

Learn more about the impact of generative AI on creative work.

Whether you’re using AI or generative AI, this technology can help make your work easier, faster, and more fun, and it might even help you discover new artistic directions.

• Greater efficiency: AI tools can help you automate repetitive tasks like separating subjects from backgrounds, resizing images, and applying consistent styles, so you can focus on more complex and creative work. These tools also spare you the physical and mental strain that come with peering at the tiniest details on your screen to select the right pixels or match fonts.
• Unlimited creativity: Generative AI is a great brainstorming tool. You can try new ideas and concepts faster than ever, so you can explore your wildest ideas and see how they work with an ai art prompt.
• Greater accessibility: With automated accessibility checks, AI can find issues with readability, color contrast, and more. It’s faster and more reliable than checking accessibility yourself.

Here’s just a sample of what you can do with graphic design using AI.

With Generative Fill, you can now add or remove content in your images with a simple text prompt. If you want to swap a briefcase for a surfboard, or remove a distracting person from the background, you can do it instantly. You can also expand the canvas or change the aspect ratio with Generative Expand. (Gone are the days of squeezing text into an image that doesn’t have room for it.)

In addition to generative AI tools, Photoshop has other AI tools like Face Aware Liquify that automatically detect faces and facial features in an image. With intelligent controls, you can manipulate facial features accurately and easily. If you need to draw unique curves, the Curvature pen tool uses AI to allow you to create paths intuitively and simply push and pull segments to modify them.

New generative AI features in Illustrator can make it a lot easier to work with scalable images. Now you can transform a simple text prompt into a fully editable vector graphic with Text to Vector Graphic. With Generative Recolor, you can use text prompts to experiment with different color palettes. So just type your inspiration, like “pumpkin spice” or “spring wildflowers” and see what happens. Also, the new Retype feature allows you to select static images or outlined text and quickly identify matching fonts from Adobe Fonts.

Other AI features in Illustrator include a global editing feature that automatically identifies similar vector shapes in a document so you can edit all shapes at once. Puppet Warp lets you make changes to objects without redrawing or modifying each anchor point, so you can create variants faster. And with Content-aware Crop, you provide an image and get AI suggestions on how to crop it.

With the Adobe Firefly web app as your AI image generator, you can create images in any style and in a variety of aspect ratios with a text-based AI graphic design prompt. Use it to try new ideas, get out of creative ruts, or to start a new design when you’re pressed for time. You can also use Firefly to create unique text effects and add or remove objects with Generative Fill. You can also find these features in Adobe Express.

Firefly’s generative AI models are designed to be commercially safe, which means you can create content with confidence knowing that you can use the content in both personal and professional projects.

Thanks to AI, you can paint digitally with Live Brushes that look, feel, and act like the real thing. Create watercolors that bleed in real time or build up paint thickness for a 3D effect.

Powered by Adobe Sensei AI, Content-Aware Fit saves you time and steps fitting graphical content in InDesign documents by identifying the best portion in your content and fitting it into the frame automatically.

Adobe Sensei machine learning automatically applies tags to photos, so your keyword searches instantly pull up the images you’re looking for — no manual tagging required. Also, with Auto Settings, you can get automatic suggestions for edits to contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, saturation, and vibrance. And you can select Enhance Details to recover fine details that often get lost in digital image processing.

AI even has a role to play in Adobe Stock. Adobe Sensei can speed up the entire search process with smart search features, so you can find the images, audio, or video you need fast.

Everyone’s talking about AI right now, but you have to try it for yourself to get a true sense of the possibilities. Think of AI tools as an extension of your natural design skills and the experience you’ve developed as a designer. They just allow you to apply your talents more efficiently so that you can go from vision to iteration faster. With these tools you’re still a graphic designer, but you’re also a creative director, using AI to help build upon and perfect your unique vision.