Not just Namecheap, there are so many other options. We're not trying to replace designers or these free websites. We're providing an alternative that we believe is better because of several reasons.

- Our system figures out your needs by just looking at the description you provide. You don't have to select anything else to create very relevant logos to your brand. This is not the case with other websites where you have to provide plenty of information or at least do significant customizations. - Not one of these websites are generating icons from scratch. We will in a couple of weeks/months. This is going to be a very exciting feature that will set us apart. Let me know if you want to talk about this in more detail. - Our system learns as more people create logos. We have a feedback loop that continuous retrains the models to improve the logo creation process. In a few months, our logos will definitely be way better than free websites and other competitors.

Finally, at the end of the day, we still offer an alternative that we think has better features. If someone chooses to use a free website, by all means.

"Our system matches keywords to clipart" seems like a more accurate description, it's not really designing anything, is it?

If I try to make a coffee shop logo, it won't design me a brand-new cup or bean graphic, as far as I can see, it'll just apply existing stock clipart?

edit: I ask because I genuinely can't tell if its generated on the fly or is existing human-designed vector art

That's a good example of disenchantment in AI. It's not magic, but seems to be, so the more it's understandable, the more people tend to claim it isn't AI. I like how your comment pins this on the nature of designing -- Herb Simon gives a good definition of design in "sciences of the artificial" and this system seems to be designing. Not drawing, but designing.

AI has always been a sliding scale. A calculator is AI if you want to call it that. But when we start invoking terminology that evokes human-like creativity, things start to break down because we don't understand that kind of creativity and we have never built a machine capable of it. People like to bring up chess and Go in these conversations, because "people thought those required creativity". In reality, we found out that brute forcing a bunch of data through a computational statistics program ended up working, so those games actually didn't require creativity. This logo system is not doing anything remotely worthy of being called "design", unless you define that word to be utterly devoid of the implied creativity of a intelligent, sentient creator.

> In reality, we found out that brute forcing a bunch of data through a computational statistics program ended up working, so those games actually didn't require creativity

The assumption you are making, if I understand it, is that creativity needs to work like human creativity not just look like it. Similarly, design isn't design unless it works like human design, which involves sentience.

I'm just not sure that these assumptions are fair to make when we are discussing meaningful advances in artificial intelligence.

Right now, yes. But the main reason behind having a generic product is our long term vision. We wanted to get our initial product out and immediately start working on other features. One feature that will answer your concern here is icon generation from scratch using GAN architectures. We're working on it and it'll take some time but as soon as it's live, not only will you be able to use existing stock clipart, you'll be able to generate logo concepts from scratch.

This is by no means the final product that we want to have in a year or two. There was a reason we named the website "designwithai". We kept it generic because there are so many features that we're gonna add that are purely AI driven.

We can always talk more about the other features we're thinking about.