Earlier this week, I spoke to a young designer who works in UI and UX. He asked me for some career advice as he has a hard time finding his footing in today’s world. It was a lovely conversation; he is easygoing and articulate. In the middle of the conversation, I asked him to show me his portfolio. He sent me a link to his website – and everything on there could have been generated by a sophisticated AI model (and possibly better). I told him that I fear for him if he doesn’t find his point of view – his edge, something people sometimes simply call “taste” or “style.”
He is not alone. And it’s not just individuals – the same is true for companies.
AI feasts on the average – it’s how the models operate. Trained on all of humanity’s knowledge, they average it out. In the process, they produce amazing things – because, face it, in the vast majority of cases, average is totally fine, and often what we want. That also means AI is already better than a lot of us at a lot of things. But average comes with its quirks (all those em-dashes and the triplets in AI writing, or the “Claude” design aesthetics of AI-generated websites), and you tend to know it when you see it.
AI doesn’t make work worse; it just sands off the edges.
But, of course, the problem is that now everybody (and their dog) can produce perfectly fine, average work – for significantly less money. This means that all those jobs for people who delivered “okay” work are gone. Why would I hire this young designer if Claude Design can churn out the same website for a fraction of the price in a mere hour or two? Scale this up and you see that this is not only a problem for the young designers out there – it’s a problem for many companies. How many companies do you know that produce totally fine, average work you’d gladly have paid for in the old days? Not just your graphic designer, but your accountant, the agency that helps you with your marketing and PR, your financial advisor, the lawyer who drafts your will or fights for your traffic ticket. All average, and, quite frankly, all gone.
We hear a lot of talk about “human in the loop” and, more recently, “human in the lead.” What the people who talk about this miss is the question of “how many humans” are going to be in the loop/lead? And, quite frankly, it is a dangerous statement to make, because it lulls us into a false sense of security. Humans will always be the ones checking the work of AI and making the final call. Yes, sure. I believe that too. But how many humans does it take to do this? How many lawyers does a law firm truly need if the AI agents do most of the work and the humans just check it? We already see Angel Zhen, the one-person accounting firm handling more than 300 clients nationwide – by smartly leveraging AI. Zhen is one of a rare breed of people who has taste, a point of view, and knows how to leverage AI to his advantage.
This brings me back to the young designer (and your organization): The best piece of advice I had for him is to work feverishly on developing a point of view, a style, to have taste. That requires, in his case, a lot of hanging out with other designers and debating their work, spending time in museums and galleries, and thinking hard about every detailed design decision he made in his work. The same is true for many companies – to stand out, you need humans (your people) to have taste and a point of view. Invest in this now, as AI is already pretty good at many things and will only get better. Give people time to hone their edge, have them debate their work, and reward the distinctive over the merely finished. Taste is what makes you known, and as my former colleague at Mozilla, Asa Dotzler, put it: “Be known, or be nothing.”
@Pascal