AI might be coming for your job, but it can't take your creativity

AI is here, it’s loud, and it’s got Opinions™ on your workflow. One minute you only use models like Midjourney for “inspiration.” Next thing you know, your client is asking if you can “just use ChatGPT to make that website copy or bit of social content.” Designers: here’s the uncanny valley of creative automation. It’s shiny. It’s fast. It’s kind of terrifying. Especially when Bill Gates says only 3 jobs are safe from it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: AI tools can be incredibly useful. Adobe Firefly, Copilot, even those cursed Figma plugins — they can speed up the boring stuff. Need a mood board? Boom. Need 20 logo variations? Here you go. Want to see what an Elk looks with spaghetti earrings in the style of Thomas Gainsborough? Don’t ask why - just type it in, and you got it. (Hoop, dangle or stud?)

But here’s the thing: while AI can spit out something, it can’t tell you what’s good. It doesn’t understand nuance. It doesn’t care about brand or emotional equity. That’s your job.

Worse, the more we rely on AI, the more everything starts looking… the same. Prompt in, bland out. Scroll Instagram for five minutes and you’ll see what I mean: a million slightly-different AI logos and surreal renderings of floating people with extra fingers.

It can be for fun, for sure, replacing smiling family members with dog heads, but it’s not work, it’s not professional, It’s the visual equivalent of a dry-bone sandwich brought at the petrol station. Technically food, but is it nourishing for the body or soul?

And then there’s the ethical stuff. Most of these AI models were trained on yours or other people's work (and weirdly enough on its own work - through training on and amplifying its own AI-generated content that is already flooding). And all without consent. While you were out there trying to make some kind of career, someone was scraping your Behance portfolio into a dataset, and now it’s being sold back to you.

Add to that the loss of creative fulfillment, the legal grey zones, and the looming fear that your next job interview will involve prompt engineering rather than sketching, and yeah — there are pitfalls (maybe pitfalls is the biggest under exaggeration ever given the industry changing potential of the tech - but more on that another time).

So what do we do? What can we do? We use AI, but don’t marry it. Let it be the admin assistant, not the boss or the creative. Use it to explore, iterate, and play, have fun with it but keep the human in the loop. Your instincts, taste, ethics, and experience are still the sharpest tools in the box. In short: AI can make the work faster, but only you can make it matter.