I Thought AI Was Cheating

To be honest, my initial resistance to AI wasn’t rooted in fear. It was rooted in confidence. Confidence in the traditional design process, in the years of craft and training behind it, and in the honest to goodness belief that no AI was actually going to be able to out-design a human who actually cared about their work. That wasn’t ignorance per se. I had conviction. And conviction isn’t wrong just because it can change or adapt over time.

The idea that AI could someday threaten the existence of Figma felt absurd to me at the time. Figma was the tool. Advanced design systems, collaborative, fast, purpose built for designers, and constantly improving. The idea that a generative AI tool was going to walk in and make it irrelevant felt like tech hype more than reality. I’d seen tech hype before. I’d seen Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, and Sketch, all come and go from being the product design tool of choice.

But there was something else underneath my skepticism. Something closer to a values question than a capability question.

Design is hands on. It always has been. It’s trial and error, iteration, the slow accumulation of decisions that add up to something that works. There’s a craft to it that takes time to develop and time to execute. Using AI to shortcut the process felt like cheating. Not cheating a client or a user necessarily, but cheating the design process itself. Cheating the craft. Skipping the steps that we’ve learned and relied on for years for producing effective designs.

And I think a lot of designers felt that way too. Many still do.

Here’s the thing about AI that doesn’t get talked about enough. It isn’t black and white. Just like design isn’t black and white. There are real downsides. Data usage and privacy concerns. Deepfakes. The homogenization of websites when everyone is prompting from the same models. These aren’t fringe concerns. They’re legitimate, and designers who raise them aren’t being dramatic or resistant to change. They’re doing what designers do. Thinking about the human on the other end of the experience.

And then there are the layoffs.

Creatives got hit hard. Not just at one company or in one sector but across industries. In 2023 alone, designers were among those hit hardest in the tech layoffs, with nearly 15% of designers surveyed that year reporting they had been laid off. Design teams that took years to build were gone in an afternoon. By 2024, designers were taking significantly longer to find new work than just a few years prior. More competition. More applicants per role. More selective companies. The field that was in very high demand not that long ago suddenly felt unstable in a way it never had before.

The timing wasn’t lost on anyone. AI capabilities went up. Design headcount went down. Whether that’s a direct relationship or convenient coincidence for cost cutting leadership is yet to be determined. But the lived experience for a lot of designers was the same. In a short period of time, we went from being in demand to being questioned.

So the question sitting underneath it all, the one that’s on all designer’s minds is this. Do we embrace these new tools for speed and efficiency and to make leadership happy? Or do we continue doing things the way we always have, slower but familiar and backed by our years of experience and expertise?

I don’t think that’s a question with one correct answer. I think it’s a question every designer is going to have to answer for themselves. What I can tell you is what eventually shifted it for me. But that story starts with a pause I didn’t necessarily choose.