I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because more and more businesses are posting work that’s obviously AI-generated. I’ve also talked to plenty of clients who genuinely feel like they’ve got an entire creative department living inside their laptop. Remember that guy Brendan? Yeah, Brandon? – in marketing? Well, he’s making the corporate TV spot over at Starbucks right now.
It feels liberating to them, some even feel pride and a sense of accomplishment in the end result.
But there’s a downside.
In many cases, it’s cheapening the very thing those businesses are trying to sell.
And you know what I’m talking about ↓ 🤮
It’s objectively awful and everyone is doing it.
And this one from Claude’s new design system (yawn) I mean, how many whitepapers do we need?
AI used to give itself away with weird hands, globbly wordmush, and inconsistencies. Now they tend to generate an eerie vibe that tells us something isn’t quite right, it isn’t quite human — and it’s creepy. Like staring into a shark’s eye.
But even with all of that, AI is absolutely changing the design industry. Some jobs aren’t coming back.
The work that’s disappearing
Template-driven social graphics have largely become Canva projects.
Wix, Squarespace, and AI website builders are producing “good enough” websites without a designer ever opening Photoshop or Figma.
Need a stock photo? AI can generate one.
Need captions, vertical crops, or a quick promo video? CapCut and a dozen other tools can handle that in minutes.
A lot of work that used to land on a junior designer’s desk has already been automated, and that trend isn’t slowing down.
If your value proposition has always been “I can make decent-looking things quickly,” that’s becoming a much tougher sell.
So how do you stay relevant?
AI doesn’t have taste.
It has patterns.
Left on its own, it gravitates toward the average. The same compositions. The same layouts. The same color palettes. The same visual language everyone else is generating.
That’s where people still win.
Good design has always been a series of choices.
The color you weren’t supposed to use—but did.
The type pairing that somehow works.
The illustration that’s a little imperfect because it was made by a person instead of averaged by a model.
Those decisions aren’t accidents. They’re judgment.
AI can imitate a style surprisingly well.
It struggles to imitate a point of view.
A point of view isn’t a filter or a prompt. It’s thousands of tiny creative decisions shaped by experience, instinct, and knowing what feels right before you can explain why.
That’s the part that’s hardest to automate.
So stay opinionated.
Stay specific.
Stay a little unpredictable.