I use AI every day.

I want to say that clearly, up front, because I think there’s a version of this conversation that positions designers like me as AI skeptics, people who feel threatened by the technology and dress that threat up as a philosophy. That’s not what this is.

I use AI to adjust colors in images. I use it to pressure-test ideas, to draft structures I’ll rewrite in my own voice, to speed up the parts of the work that don’t require my specific judgment so I have more time for the parts that do. It’s in my workflow the way a pencil is in a drawer, ready when I need it, useful for exactly what it’s good at, and completely beside the point when the task calls for something else.

That’s the thing about tools. They don’t have opinions about when to use them. You do.

THE PENCIL ANALOGY

Some people can make an extraordinary drawing with a pencil. The same pencil, in someone else’s hand, produces something unrecognizable. The pencil didn’t change. The skill, the eye, the intention behind it, that’s what changed.

AI is the same. It’s a tool of extraordinary capability that produces wildly different results depending on who’s using it, why, and with what understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve.

The question was never whether AI is good or bad. The question is: do you know what you’re trying to make, and does AI help you make it, or does it make the decision for you?

Those are very different things.

A REAL EXAMPLE

Last month, I was working on the Beacon of Hope Counseling website, a therapy practice with six therapists, each of whom had written their own bio. Six different people. Six completely different approaches.

One wrote in first person, warm and personal. One wrote in third person, formal and clinical. One used both, somehow. The tones ranged from inviting to resume-like. The structures had nothing in common. Read together, they felt like six different practices sharing one website.

Rewriting six bios from scratch, in a consistent voice and tone, while preserving what made each therapist distinct, that would have taken me hours. Instead I ran each one through AI to normalize the structure, align the grammar, and bring them into the same tonal register. Then I edited each one again, by hand, to make sure the person inside the bio still came through.

What would have been a half-day task took under an hour.

That’s AI doing exactly what a good tool should do: handling the mechanical, repetitive work so the person using it can focus on the judgment-dependent work. The judgment in that case, knowing what tone was right for a therapy practice, what warmth level would make a parent feel safe, what details to keep and which to trim, that was mine. AI didn’t make those calls. It gave me a better starting point to make them from.

WHERE AI HELPS

Used well, AI accelerates the parts of creative work that don’t require your specific perspective:

Normalization. Like the bio project, bringing inconsistent inputs into alignment before the real editorial work begins.

Ideation. AI is genuinely useful for generating options. Not final answers, options. A list of headline directions. A few different ways to structure an argument. Raw material to react to, push against, and edit into something that actually sounds like you.

Research and synthesis. Summarizing, organizing, pulling patterns from large amounts of information quickly.

First drafts of mechanical content. Terms and conditions. FAQ structures. Meta descriptions. The functional writing that needs to exist but doesn’t need to sing.

In all of these cases, AI is compressing time on work that has a relatively clear right answer, or at least a close enough answer that getting there faster leaves more room for the work that doesn’t.

WHERE AI HURTS YOU

The problems start when AI stops being the tool and starts being the decision maker.

When it replaces the thinking instead of supporting it.

The most dangerous use of AI in design and branding isn’t bad output. It’s output that looks good enough to ship without anyone asking whether it’s actually right. A homepage that’s well structured but says nothing specific about your business. A brand voice that’s professional but could belong to anyone. Work that passes a quick glance but fails the deeper question: does this feel like us?

AI optimizes for the most common answer. The most statistically successful pattern. That’s useful when you want a starting point. It’s a problem when you mistake it for a destination.

When it removes the specific in favor of the general.

Your business has specific qualities, a specific client, a specific voice, a specific reason someone chooses you over the alternative. Those specifics are where your brand actually lives. AI doesn’t know them. It will fill that space with the most average version of whatever you asked for, because average is what the pattern suggests.

The result is a website, or a brand, or a piece of content that is technically fine and specifically nobody.

When it’s used to skip the conversation.

The most valuable part of any design engagement isn’t the design. It’s the conversation that happens before it. The questions that surface what a business actually needs to say, who it’s talking to, and why anyone should care. AI can’t have that conversation. It can simulate one, but simulation isn’t the same as understanding, and understanding is what makes the difference between a website that looks right and one that works.

THE HONEST VERSION

Here’s what I actually believe: AI is making certain parts of this work faster, cheaper, and more accessible. That’s mostly good. It means more businesses can have a functional web presence. It means designers can spend less time on the mechanical and more on the meaningful.

But it’s also flooding the internet with content and design that looks finished without being considered. Websites that technically exist without really saying anything. Brands that have all the components of an identity without the coherence that makes an identity actually work.

The difference between those two outcomes isn’t the tool. It’s whether someone with judgment, taste, and real knowledge of the business is involved in the decisions that matter.

A pencil doesn’t make you an artist. A camera doesn’t make you a photographer. And AI doesn’t make you a designer.

But in the right hands, as part of a process that still puts human thinking at the center of the decisions that require it, it makes the work faster, and occasionally, it makes it better.

That’s all any tool is supposed to do.