Empathy in the age of AI: Bringing the human element to technology 

Gustavson: We're at a crossroads now of what happens with AI. How do we use it in the best possible way? We've already seen the good and the bad bits in terms of what happens around it. You can use it for visual purposes, or to make yourself more productive using tools like Claude or ChatGPT to improve your own life in a way. Some people have said it's quite a scary time.

Where do we go from here? From a creative perspective, what will die because of that? Will junior designers be made redundant because AI takes over? Nothing probabl that drastic, but there's a lot of big questions around it.

Gustavson: AI should always be an accelerator rather than a showman. It should serve you. And I think once that mindset is set, you can control it and it becomes a lot less scary.

It could be the case of showing a designer, for example, what difference it can make to their day when it comes to making their routine tasks faster, which allows them to jump into the more fun tasks, and actually liberate their creative experimentation time as well.

Gustavson: Absolutely. In my opinion, empathy is not something you're born with. I think it's a learned skill. It's like a muscle. You practice it and you become better at it. The minute you stop practicing, you're going to lose it.

That’s where using and talking to AI every day becomes dangerous, because whatever comes back is ‘false empathy’. You start to rely on AI to handle the empathy side of things. There’s a paradox there, because people can begin to feel like AI offers more, whereas when you’re speaking to a real person, they might be busy or tired, so you don’t always get as much back from them.

AI is available 24/7 and it’s always going to be nice to you. But at the same time, the more you rely on that, the more you start outsourcing the empathy side of things. To me, that’s a big no-no. It’s one of the core skills we have as human beings – empathy, and the ability to genuinely relate to other people.