Where a human would need to understand and reverse engineer a distinctive style to recreate it, AI image generators simply create randomized mutations of it. Often, the results will look like obvious copies and include errors, but other graphic designers can then edit them into a final product. Among graphic designers in China, there’s a joke that using an AI image generator is like gacha, referring to addictive games where users spend money to receive randomized items and find out what they won. “There is now a significant misperception about the workload of designers,” Erbing says. Erbing, like other designers, hopes AI image generators can become more useful to graphic designers in the future, and notes that people’s perception of their usefulness outpaces their actual application.