It’s time to put you into your work
AI will do more and more of the work. What it can’t do is decide what’s worth doing. That part is yours.
When the camera arrived, a lot of people assumed painting was finished. Why spend weeks on a portrait when a machine could capture a face in minutes?
Painting didn’t die. It changed direction. Once the camera took over the job of recording what things looked like, many painters moved towards what a camera couldn’t do: light, mood, the feeling of a moment rather than its exact shape. And the camera opened doors of its own. Photojournalism, documentary work and photography as an art form all grew out of the thing that was supposed to end art.
I think about that a lot now, because I use AI in my work every day.
It’s good. It drafts faster than I do. It explores ten directions while I’m still on the first. It turns a rough idea into something that looks finished in seconds. The tedious, manual parts of design are already shrinking, and they’ll keep shrinking.
But “looks finished” is the trap. AI is very good at producing the average of everything it has seen. Ask it for a headline, a layout or a strategy and you’ll get something competent and familiar. It reads well, and it could belong to anyone.
What it can’t do is decide. It doesn’t know which of the ten directions is right for this user, this business, this moment. It doesn’t know what to leave out. It can’t tell when something is technically correct and still wrong. And it doesn’t carry the responsibility when a decision fails.
That part is judgement. Judgement is built from things no tool has: your experience, the mistakes you remember, the users you’ve watched struggle, your taste, and your willingness to say no.
So the useful question for anyone in creative or knowledge work is which part of the job was ever really yours. If most of your value came from producing, from pushing pixels, writing first drafts or knowing a tool better than others, that value is moving to the machine. If it came from deciding what’s worth making and why, it’s about to matter more.
That’s why I see AI less as a threat to designers and more as a filter. It takes away the parts of the work anyone could do, and leaves the parts only you can.
The tools will keep getting better. Learn them, use them, and let them do the heavy lifting.
Then put yourself into the work: your perspective, your judgement, your reasons for doing it this way. Nobody can automate that, and it’s the part people remember.