AI and the Plight of the Creative

Soooo…It's 11pm and you're scrolling. Every other image in your feed is AI slop. A brand you used to admire just launched a campaign that was obviously generated by AI and nobody seems to care. Someone at work sent you a "concept" they "made" in ChatGPT. And somewhere out there, a junior designer is wondering if this is still the right career path for them…or if there is even a path left.

I've been doing this for over 13 years in agencies, in-house teams, for brands you know, and brands you don't. Believe me when I say I get it. The plight is real. But I have a (hopeful) prediction about where this goes.

We've panicked before

Photography became publicly available in 1839 and painting was declared dead on the spot. Instead, painting became impressionism, surrealism, and everything after. Desktop publishing launched in the mid-to-late 80s (with Adobe Illustrator in '87, and Adobe Photoshop in '90) and...well, the panic partially came true. Typesetting, a whole skilled trade, basically vanished. But designers who learned the tools absorbed that work and got faster. Then Canva showed up in 2013 with a lower entry point and "anyone can design" marketing. It was said it'd be the end again...except the bar just got higher and the good designers got busier.

The tool doesn't kill the skill. It eats the production layer underneath and the skill moves up a floor. Every single panic ended with the people who could do what the tool couldn't becoming more valuable. I think this round plays out the same way. Just maybe a bit faster.

The slop flood is a setup

When anything can be generated, sameness becomes free. And free sameness is worthless. Nobody pays a premium for something everyone can have. We're watching the value of generated mediocrity collapse in real time in your own feed. That AI look we all recognize now is the signature of zero effort, and people are learning to scroll past it.

And it's gone beyond scrolling. I've noticed a trend on social lately where people are straight up refusing to attend events that were advertised with an AI generated flyer. It seems to have started with artists and designers (of course), but others are catching on. Brands that get "caught" fully generating their ads are being publicly shamed into writing apologies. I'm not for public shaming…but it says a lot about how the general population actually feels about this stuff. People know and people care.

So what's actually scarce? Intention. Proof that a human with taste made a bunch of deliberate decisions on purpose.

The music industry already ran this experiment for us. Streaming made music infinite and basically free. Then vinyl sales went up. When something gets too easy, the ritual becomes the luxury. A physical object with real art on the cover, the inserts, sometimes the vinyl record itself. Film photography is having a similar moment, and yet we all have a camera in our pocket with a hundred thousand photos we never look at.

Human-made is turning into a luxury good. I didn't study economics but that's just supply and demand.

We've heard it before: AI is a tool

I use AI fairly often, so let me deflate the hype a little. The reality is way more boring than the LinkedIn thought leaders want you to believe.

Here's what it's genuinely good at in my personal workflow: research. Summarizing a 40 page brief into the four constraints that matter. Brainstorming. Naming my layers. First-pass site audits. Alt text. Drafting the email I've been overthinking for three hours. Spreadsheets. CSS for some fancy effect I'm trying to pull off.

Now wouldja just look at that list. That's some tedious stuff nobody got into design for.

When I treat it as what it is, a fast assistant that's occasionally confident and wrong, it can hand me back some time. And that time can go back into to the reasons I fell in love with design in the first place. Concepting. Art direction. Color. Designing a web experience that tells a brand story.

When used correctly, it might be the first tool of my career that gives creative hours back instead of eating them. Well, second. Figma. Remember designing entire websites in Photoshop? lol yeesh

Being realistic

Whenever I talk about this, someone always goes "AI is just getting started, give it a few years and designers are cooked." …and to that I say "you suck" and also…maybe it does get better. But even a great AI designer will have patterns, and humans are the best pattern-spotters on earth. We'll always be able to tell.

I'm also not pretending this correction is painless. Production work is shrinking in some areas and some retainers are drying up while the market sorts itself out. But it also might be short-lived. That flyer backlash proves that people are already pushing back.

So my advice is pretty simple. Keep working on your skills. Don't be afraid to use AI where it genuinely makes you more efficient. But don't feel pressured to generate slop for the sake of it...or to spend hundreds of thousands of tokens on something you could've made yourself in an hour.

For the newbies, developing taste is still vital. The grunt work AI can do now is the same grunt work that trains your eye. You don't develop taste by prompting. You do the boring stuff a billion times until you understand why one option is great vs. good. It's paying your dues, in a way (I hate that term), but it's part of the process of becoming a great designer. Don't skip it just because you can.

And those of us further up the ladder have to be willing to teach anyone who is willing to learn.

Judgement and experience are a bigger part of the job now

When execution gets cheap, judgment becomes a much bigger part of the product. Honestly, it always was...for creative directors. Knowing what to leave out and noticing when the spacing is lying to you. Knowing when to break the system you built. It's what great creative directors have always been paid for, and it's a skill usually honed over 10+ years into a career.

The popular take right now is that this is suddenly everyone's job…that every designer needs senior-level judgment on day one because AI handles the rest. But that take devalues true experience. Nobody will hand that to you on day one and no one ever did.

If you're a junior designer, your job is the same as it's always been. Learn the tools, including the new ones. Figure out which ones actually work for what, and which ones are a complete waste of your time. Keep honing, just like the rest of us did. The judgment comes with the years and repetition. And while you're building it, lean on your creative director.

So the way through this is fairly old-fashioned. Learn the tools with humility, hold your standards without mercy, and keep a human art that keeps your soul lit. Mine is photography. I walk around with a camera and practice an art form that requires no brief or client feedback.

The renaissance

Back to 11pm, scrolling through the slop.

What you're doing is watching mediocrity stop being worth paying for. It hurts right now but the slop flood is doing us a brutal favor. The slop will flop, if you will.

I think we're early in a renaissance for human creativity. The people who use AI for the mundane, and spend the hours it returns sharpening the things it can't do will notice it first. And the invitation is open to everyone: give people a reason to want the human-made thing.