¡Ay, ay, AI!

Over the next few weeks, I am going to use this blog to capture some of my thoughts and experiences diving a bit deeper into AI. Up to this point, I have been a pretty casual user of AI. I would use it to help draft emails, cover letters, and the like, or use tools like Perplexity to provide richer summaries of technical or historical topics.

I tried using it in my job, but my few forays into using it for work always left me feeling a bit underwhelmed. Even though I worked in a pretty well-understood industry (video streaming), when I would try to use it to work through use cases, or suggest feature improvements, the output always felt junior-level at best. The use cases were ones we had already come up with ourselves or were irrelevant to what we were working on, and the feature improvements were similarly limited to things that any member of our team would have come up with.

Given this, I have been a bit struck by the absolute mania that has taken over the discourse on LinkedIn and other design channels. Somewhere along the lines, we have gone from “AI could be a useful tools in our craft” to “let’s throw all of our chips in on AI practicing the craft.” I tend to be a fairly skeptical person, and suspect that the stridency and absolutism I am seeing is a product of professional anxiety and insecurity, moreso than any indication that AI is now capable of creating design of great elegance or sophistication. Which is not to say that that anxiety and insecurity isn’t justified. Many of these tools implicitly, or sometimes even explicitly, suggest that our role as designers can now be done by a Product Manager+AI, and I have been around long enough to know that justifying the work we do has always been a major part of the job and we haven’t ever had competition quite like this.

This was the first image ChatGPT spit out, and is perhaps the perfect AI generated image to capture the themes of my exploration. No notes.

So, with that in mind, I am going to dive into designing with AI to explore what is out there and investigate how these new and powerful tools might serve the craft I love and help me to become a better designer. My hope is that by exploring what is out there, using it in my design practice, and putting together some workflows, I will be able to better identify where the use of AI will improve the craft of design, and begin to grapple with some of my concerns about how, without major changes to how we operate design teams, we will train young designers to think through design problems rather than offloading that initial work to AI.