A Rude Awakening

I woke up one day and there was an announcement within the company I work with that everyone had to start using AI in their work. Claude Code had become so good recently that entire projects that would take about two weeks or more could now be done in an afternoon. While the biggest impact was meant to be seen in the churning out of code, it wasn’t long before the developers started producing frontends that looked pretty well-designed out of the box.

I lead the design team and it seemed like my entire team’s value was being questioned. When someone attacks you, the natural instinct is always to defend yourself. While I pushed back and pointed out the gaps that was in the outputs produced by Claude, (all true by the way), it was also clear to me that there was going to be a point in time when I would be hard-pressed to find issues with the outputs. The writing was on the wall: Adapt, or die!

The Democratisation of Authorship

So I took a step back and tried to figure out what’s actually going on. Engineers were building frontends. Product managers were producing prototypes. Designers were producing code instead of designs alone. There were even marketing people producing websites. But was the output produced good? No. But will they get better over time? Absolutely.

I still remember the day when I first used a printer. I had to get word processing software on my DOS machine, I think it was a program called Word Star. I used that to write out “Welcome to the Fete!” in the largest font that was possible to produce with it. I then printed it out on this dot matrix printer that I got access to at my cousin’s place and I was amazed by the signage that got printed in about 10 minutes! It was exhilarating. Thinking back on it now, the banner looked pretty bad and it wouldn’t pass any graphic artist standards. But I think the excitement was largely driven by the fact that I could do all this myself without going to a specialist banner maker and paying the “big bucks” for a banner that I couldn’t afford as a 7th grader.

I feel we are at a similar point in time today. The authorship of websites, applications and other software has become democratised. The skill barrier that existed before has largely been taken down. With the advent of course on YouTube, this was already the trend, but there was still a barrier as one had to still learn to use the tools. Today, anyone who can manage to type, or even talk to a computer can now produce a website or an app if they wished to do so. Exciting as it is to see our ideas come alive, let’s be clear that only the baseline has been raised, not the top-line. AI tools at the hands of an expert would produce much better outputs than someone who doesn’t have that domain knowledge. That gap will always remain. But we need to be careful to assess whether that gap is pertinent. We’ll come back to this point.

The Question of Taste

What will set designers apart in the future? I’ve previously maintained that “Taste” is one such quality. But I’ve seen what’s possible with AI tools and don’t hold that position anymore, because taste is a learnt skill. And if it can be learnt, AI will learn it.

For example, as a lay person in the world of Japanese art, I can’t distinguish between Studio Ghibli’s original art and the synthetic ones produced by AI trained on it. The stuff that was produced when it became a meme from OpenAI’s profile photo project was very convincing. But what’s more, AI engines are good enough to simply copy an existing website or application as is. You can simply provide it some example images and it will dutifully render a new copy of it. No Figma or VS Code skills required for that.

So, if the output from this is indistinguishable from the human generated version, by definition, it cannot be the differentiator. So, what then? If taste can’t be the human moat, what can. I thought about it and realised we were asking the wrong question. It isn’t about looking for the space where AI cannot compete. Instead, we should instead be asking what can we do with AI that we couldn’t do before. Because that’s a question that will yield useful answers regardless of what else AI will become capable of in the future.

The 8K Television Argument

The most sold resolution of televisions today are 4K. That’s simply because the eye cannot reasonably distinguish between individual pixels at resolutions higher than 4K. So, 8K, while technically superior, is just not worth the premium as it doesn’t qualitatively improve our lives.

The analogy can be seen in enterprises as well. Based on constraints like time and money, the output that “does the job” produced faster will remain more useful than something superior but takes a lot more to produce. This will inevitably be the case with the outputs produced by AI. They will become good enough in most situations.

So, code produced by designers to create websites or apps will meet that standard. These apps will excel on the design end because it’s a designer wielding the tool and will be good enough on the rest of the fronts.

I use coding as an example skill here, but the argument holds for other domains as well. Marketing, sales, finance, operations, product management, etc. will all be fields in which designers can now participate and contribute to in a bigger way than before. But zoom out and you’ll see that the same is possible by people in other fields too. And that, I think is the larger point to pay attention to here — the lines between functional domains is being blurred.

Beyond the Function

Intelligence, labour and coordination has been human driven since the beginning of the human journey. With AI, that fundamental idea has changed. They can think, execute and coordinate faster and in some ways better than any human ever. This is going to change the nature of organisations if not societies.

Jobs that were centred around skill, the domain of “how” something is done, will no longer be around. But this isn’t something that should give us pause. Being a painter in the past meant that they’d create their own paints, starting from the raw materials. They’d make their own canvases, frames and a whole slew of other jobs. It was only after all this that they could paint and express what they wanted to. Painters don’t do that today. Most buy their paints and canvases from a store and focus on the challenge of the blank white space.

Our futures as UX designers or designers in the broader sense will probably follow a similar path. The harder question has always been the “why” behind it all. We need to go from the brush and the canvas to the very reason for painting at all. Incidentally, that’s the real moat, “UX designer”, or not.