I Use AI. I'm Not Happy About It.

I want to say something out loud that designers keep whispering to each other in DMs:

Most of us are using these tools more than we'd like to admit, and enjoying it less than the LinkedIn posts suggest.

I open Claude before I open Figma some mornings. Not because I want to. Because the work moves faster when I do, and the work has to move faster, because everyone else's work is moving faster, and somewhere along the way the entire industry agreed to this race without anyone calling a vote.

I am a reluctant user. I am also a daily user. Those two things sit on top of each other like a stack of unread emails I keep meaning to deal with.

The design industry's discourse around AI right now is a binary disaster. One side is selling courses on "10X your design output with AI" like they've discovered fire. The other side has already written the eulogy. Almost nobody is writing the post I actually want to read, which is the one from the people in the middle... the ones who use the tools, don't love using the tools, and aren't going to pretend otherwise just because the social circuit decided enthusiasm was mandatory.

So here's that post.

Why I keep using them anyway

Let me get this part out of the way, because I don't want to be dishonest about it.

The tools are useful. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. Claude is a faster copywriter than me. Figma AI can spit out twenty button variants in the time it used to take me to argue with myself about one. There's a version of my job that became measurably easier in the last two years, and I'd be a worse freelancer if I refused to use any of it.

I keep using them because the alternative is pretending the river is flowing the other way. It isn't. Clients expect more in less time. Competitors are shipping faster. The bar for "what a single designer can do in a week" went up, and it's not coming back down.

That's the case for. It's real. And it ends there.

What I actually feel about it

Mostly I feel tired.

I feel tired of every tool I open trying to autocomplete my thinking. I feel tired of the suggestion bubble that appears the moment I pause, as if pausing is a bug to be fixed instead of the entire engine of creative work. I feel tired of being nudged, helped, accelerated, optimized, and assisted by software that has decided my hesitation is a problem.

I feel suspicious of how good it is at sounding like me. I'll write a paragraph, run it through an LLM for a sanity check, take a suggestion or two, and three weeks later I cannot tell you which sentences I wrote. That's not collaboration. That's a slow erosion of authorship I am opting into one shortcut at a time.

I feel sad about what it's doing to the work. Every landing page is starting to sound like every other landing page. Every illustration style is starting to look like every other illustration style. There is a house voice emerging across the entire internet, and it is the house voice of a model trained on the average of everything. We are building, at extraordinary speed, a more boring world. I recently had a client that used their own AI model to write all their copy. It was straight garbage - jargon filled, “what the hell are you trying to say” nonsense.

I feel angry about the creative people I think aren't being talked about. The illustrator whose entire body of work was scraped without consent so someone could prompt their way to "a logo in that style." The early-career designer who can no longer get the entry-level wireframe work that used to be how the rest of us learned. The writers and researchers and artists whose labor sits inside every model like a fossil with no name on it.

I feel uneasy that the most reliable way to feel productive in 2026 is to outsource a small piece of my brain to an LLM. I don't love what that does to the brain over time. Nobody does. Almost nobody is willing to say it.

I feel embarrassed, honestly, that I am the loud, “AI can’t do it all but I can” in every meeting I attend.
I haven't reconciled that. I'm not sure I'm going to.

The part the “Pro-AI” troupe won't say

The most uncomfortable thing about this moment isn't that AI is going to replace designers. It's that AI is, very quietly, making a lot of us worse at our jobs while we feel like we're getting better.

The model gives you an answer. You accept it. Some pass it off as their own thought. The dopamine arrives. The work goes out. The client is “happy” enough. And the small voice that used to say "is this actually good, or is it just done?"... that voice gets quieter every quarter, because it never gets exercised anymore.

Craft is built in the friction. Taste is built in the hours you spend hating your own work. Judgment is built in the slow accumulation of trying something that doesn't work and figuring out why. None of that survives a workflow where the tool always has a faster answer than your own thinking does.

I am not nostalgic for harder times. I am, however, increasingly aware that some of the friction we are automating away was the entire point.

What I do about it

I haven't quit. I'm not going to. I'd be lying to you and to myself if I claimed otherwise, and the whole point of this post is to stop lying about it. I almost did this year but took a long vacation to Europe instead.

But I've started drawing lines. Not industry-wide lines. Mine.

AI doesn't get the first thought. I write the bad draft myself. I make the ugly first wireframe myself. The tool can help me improve what I made... it doesn't get to make it for me. Because the first draft is where the actual thinking happens, and outsourcing that is outsourcing the part of the job I'm being paid for.

I read what I'm about to ship out loud. Every word. If a sentence sounds like the internet instead of like me, it gets cut. This catches more than I'd like to admit.

I take days off from the tools. Whole days where I open Figma and a notebook and nothing else. The first hour feels slow. The second hour feels like remembering how to think. I cannot recommend this strongly enough.

I tell clients what I used and how. Not because I'm legally required to. Because if my work product is partly machine-generated and I'm charging human rates for it, hiding that is a small fraud, and small frauds compound.

I'm honest with myself about why I'm reaching for the tool. Sometimes it's because the task genuinely benefits from acceleration. Sometimes it's because I'm avoiding the harder version of the thinking. Those are different reasons, and only one of them is a good one.

Where this leaves me

I am using a set of tools I have real reservations about. I am charging clients for work that is, increasingly, a collaboration with software I didn't build, trained on labor that wasn't credited, producing output that is starting to all look the same.

I am also paying my bills, doing work I'm mostly proud of, and trying to be honest about the part I'm not.

If you're somewhere similar, using the tools, doubting the tools, suspicious of anyone who isn't doubting them... I'd love to hear about it. The DMs are open. The tools, frankly, can wait. Especially if there is grass to touch.