IS A ROBOT GOING TO TAKE MY JOB?
- Raffles Jakarta
- Sep 23, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 24, 2025
Let's cut to the chase. It's the question lurking in everyone's mind, the whisper in the back of every creative professional's head: with AI getting so ridiculously good, are our skills becoming obsolete? It's a valid fear. We're living in an era where the impossible is becoming a daily headline. The ground is shifting, and it's moving fast. You can now type a sentence and get a symphony, a paragraph, or a film. This isn't sci-fi; it's the 2025 toolkit. The capabilities are staggering.
The New Gods of Creation: A Look at Today's Tools
This isn't sci-fi; it's the 2025 toolkit. The capabilities are staggering. Look at these examples nowadays:
For the Filmmaker (Veo): Google's Veo isn't just making clumsy clips. It's a text-to-video model that understands cinematic language. You can ask for an "aerial shot of a coastline at sunset" or a "time-lapse of a flower blooming," and it delivers stunning, 1080p footage. It can even generate synchronized audio, from dialogue to ambient noise. The barrier to creating high-quality motion graphics and video content is evaporating.
For the Musician (Suno): Suno AI lets you generate entire songs—complete with vocals, instruments, and genre-specific styling—from a simple text prompt. Need a soulful blues track about losing your keys? A high-energy synth-pop anthem for a product launch? It's no longer about needing a band and a studio; it's about having an idea.
For the Coder (GitHub Copilot): This is the "AI pair programmer" that lives in your code editor. It doesn't just autocomplete a line; it suggests entire functions and solutions in real-time based on the context of your project. It's like having a senior developer whispering the answers over your shoulder, massively accelerating development and debugging.
This tech isn't just in labs; it's in the wild. Look at Nike. For their "Never Done Evolving" (https://www.akqa.com/work/nike/nike-50th-anniversary/never-done-evolving/) campaign, they used AI to analyze decades of footage of Serena Williams, creating models of her at different stages of her career to have her play a match against herself. This wasn't about replacing a creative team; it was about using AI to execute a creative vision that would have been impossible otherwise.
The Vibe Shift: Collaborator, Not Competitor
Okay, so the tools are powerful. Terrifyingly so. But here's the script-flip: AI is not your replacement. It's your new collaborator, empowering you to achieve more than ever before.
Thinking of AI as a job stealer is like a painter in the 1990s fearing that Photoshop and a Wacom tablet would render their skills useless. Did it change the workflow? Absolutely. Did it automate tedious tasks? Yes. But did it replace the need for an artist's vision, their understanding of composition, color theory, and emotion? Not a chance.It elevated the artist. It allowed them to work faster, experiment more wildly, and focus on the high-level creative decisions instead of the manual grunt work. This is the same vibe. AI is the most powerful tool we've ever been given. It can generate a thousand ideas in a minute, render a complex scene in the time it takes to grab a coffee, and code a functional prototype overnight. The creative professional of the future isn't the person who can manually do all that work; it's the person who can expertly direct the AI to achieve their unique vision. Your value is shifting from labor to leadership.
The Wild West: Controversy and Intellectual Rights
Now, let's not pretend this whole scene is just sunshine and good vibes. There's a heavy side to this wave, and it's causing some serious wipeouts. The biggest issue? How these AI models are trained. Most of these god-tier AIs learned their skills by scraping billions of images and texts from the internet. That includes a massive amount of copyrighted work from artists who never gave their permission and aren't getting paid.
Artists are seeing their unique styles mimicked in seconds by prompts that literally use their names, and a number of lawsuits have been filed against the major AI companies. It's a massive ethical and legal gray area. The courts are still catching up. The US Copyright Office has made it clear that a work generated entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted because it lacks "human authorship." But how much human touch is enough? If you tweak an AI image in Photoshop, is it yours? The lines are blurry, and the creative community is rightfully concerned that their work will be devalued and exploited. This isn't just a tech disruption; it's a fight for the value of human creativity itself.
Mastery Over Usage
This brings us to the core of the matter. There's a vast difference between using these tools and mastering them. The journey to mastery is a path of growth, learning, and endless possibilities.
Anyone can type a prompt into Midjourney. However, the real power lies in understanding the logic underlying it. A perfect example of this is the "Generative Florals" project created by one of our own DMD students. This isn't an app that just calls an AI model. It's a custom-built system that uses creative coding principles to generate beautiful, unique, and ever-changing floral patterns from scratch.
The student didn't just write a prompt; they wrote the engine. They understood the algorithms, the math, and the aesthetic principles needed to create a system that generates art.
This is the DMD philosophy. We're not just showing you how to use the latest app. We're trying to inspire you to build the next one. You're learning the fundamentals of creative coding, algorithmic thinking, and system design. You're not just the person who uses the paintbrush; you're the person who can build a better one.
So, is a robot going to take your design job? Not if you're the one telling the robot what to do. The future belongs to the creative directors, the system architects, and the visionaries who can harness this incredible new power. And that's precisely what we're building here, a future where your role is secure and your potential is limitless.
Source Code (released as public on GitHub): https://github.com/milicen/generative-florals
Christo Wahyudi RAHARDJO
Digital Media Design Lecturer
Further Readings:
Comments