A hall of mirrors
April 21st, 2026
What happens when everybody has access to a high-fidelity, low-cost design tool? Everybody uses it.
The danger isn't the tool. It's what comes after. Automation bias already leads us to rely too heavily, and too blindly, on whatever AI produces in the medium we know best — language. We accept faulty strategies, questionable assumptions, incomplete inputs, because the output looks and reads like something considered. Now apply that same bias to interfaces, brand systems, communication collaterals. The output will look pristine. The client will have no frame of reference to question it.
And when everyone is producing pristine-looking output without the criteria, craft, or strategic intent that design requires, the visual language of everything starts to converge. The same references, the same patterns, AI-generated design feeding into the training data for the next generation of AI-generated design. A hall of mirrors with increasingly smooth walls. The output looks finished. The experience underneath is suboptimal, generic, and getting more so.
Design value will decrease — not because design itself becomes less valuable, but because the average client will stop perceiving a need for the designer. They'll see a finished-looking thing and assume the work is done.
It isn't. AI design requires as much craftsmanship, strategy, and care as any other design discipline. The skillset will change. The skill itself won't.