AI Gets Interesting When It Gets Boring

At the minute, AI is still the story. Everyone has an opinion. Whether it’s brilliant, dangerous, lazy, revolutionary, stealing jobs, saving jobs, ruining design, improving design, or producing another six-fingered woman holding a coffee cup.

And because AI is involved, that becomes the argument.

Not whether the work is good.

Not whether the idea makes sense.

Not whether it actually solved anything.

Just: Was that done with AI?

Which is a bit like looking at a poster and asking whether it was made in Photoshop before deciding if you like it.

It’s a tool.

And the more I use it, the less interested I am in AI itself.

I don’t need it to design things for me. I’ve got Illustrator and Photoshop for drawing shit, and I’ve been doing that long enough to know what I’m at.

Where AI has become genuinely useful is all the stuff around the creative work.

Research. Writing. Planning. Organising ideas. Lead generation. Working out systems. Taking that pile of half-formed thoughts bouncing around my head at 3am and turning them into something I can actually understand.

Because having your own business is fucking incessant.

There is always something else. Accounts. Leads. Emails. Website. Proposals. Follow-ups. Content. Some app you apparently need because another app has just informed you that your entire business is dangerously under-automated.

I’m a designer. My brain is visual, curious and fairly happy wandering off down strange little roads.

Business tends to prefer folders.

AI has helped me build the folders.

Not by making decisions for me. The judgement is still mine. The prompts need context. The answers need challenged. Plenty of it gets rejected.

But it has given the mess some structure.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking very much about the fact that I was using AI.

Which might be the point.

AI gets properly useful when it stops being the fucking point.

Nx