These Ai designers might have the weakest foresight of all time.
I am a product designer who has woken up to this brutal reality of Ai and the dangers we face in terms of cognitive atrophy, laziness, and a reduction in dopamine not seen in the history of humankind.
Recently I have been hearing about design leaders inventing Ai systems, UI contracts and more to make their work “more consistent and faster to market”. These aren’t just to make sure the products they produce stay on brand or accessible… they allow anyone at an organization to create UX/UI products that look “good enough to ship”.
What a complete load of bullshit that is! Think about it… when developers made software back in the early 2000s, there was somewhat of a usability crisis for many tech products. Many developers had no idea how to make interfaces delightful for a user, or solve visual problems outside of the code base.
As a solution, the UX/UI profession was born and software started to be designed with accessibility and user psychology at the forefront of many choices.
Many tech teams used to empower designers to have a say in building the best possible experiences for a user. In fact, the case for that importance had to be built for over a decade. So why now are we all on board with everyone and their sister at the steering wheel of product design now with Ai?
What pisses me off the most is that all of this work that I am seeing produced day to day is sloppy, inconsistent and lifeless. There is no craftsmanship, and the work is not solving problems in the same way.
Think about this… companies and these new Ai designers say that Ai will speed up tasks and reduce redundancy. But there is a catch. All that “wasted” time moving blocks around a Figma board was well spent. Designers could get to know the problems and the users more with that time experimenting. They could get a feel for what they were making at a more intimate level. Having some Ai design tool plop out what it deems is acceptable removes that intimacy in knowing the problem designers want to solve. Not only that, but for all the other company stakeholders who can now become “designers”, they were hardly ever trained to think about user empathy or accessibility to begin with.
One other piece that bugs me about all this is job satisfaction. How are designers (and all other workers at heavy ai-usage companies) going to feel satisfied about what they are doing if everything is instantaneous and there isn’t a journey to a finished product anymore? Extended leave for mental health anyone? How can a designer feel empowered to stay at an organization if there is little to no job satisfaction, AKA, they hardly even made what was designed themselves?
Something to noodle on. Can’t wait to leave this shit industry.
Cheers
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