The creative risk with AI isn’t that it makes things, it’s that it makes things fast and fast is seductive in a way that can quietly hollow out the work without you noticing until you’re three projects deep and nothing feels like you anymore. That’s not inevitable, but it’s worth watching for. Proceed with caution when folding some AI into your process. Authenticity cannot be faked or manufactured in a processor.

We believe something happens in the messy, inefficient part of the creative process that AI can’t replicate. The thinking that occurs while you’re making. When you’re sketching thumbnails by hand or trying to figure out why a layout isn’t working, or going down a weird reference rabbit hole, that’s often where we believe the real creative development happens. That’s where you have the chance to build intuition, taste, and a visual vocabulary that’s distinctly yours. If you outsource all of that to a prompt, you may be skipping the gym and wondering why your creative muscles aren’t growing.

There’s also a real conversation to be had about where these AI tools get their imagery. Models like Midjourney, DALL·E, and ChatGPT were trained on enormous datasets of images and text. Images and text created by human beings, many of whom never consented to their work being used as training material. That’s not a hypothetical ethical concern. It’s an active, ongoing legal and moral debate in the creative industry, and if you’re a designer, it’s worth knowing that your fellow designers are on the front lines of it.

Using AI-generated visuals for commercial work, especially when those visuals may have been influenced by a living artist’s distinctive style, doesn’t sit in murky ethical territory, it is unethical. Not necessarily illegal, depending on the jurisdiction and the situation, but worth thinking carefully about before you hit export.

Then there’s the homogenization problem. AI image generators are trained on what already exists, which means they tend to produce what looks like the average of everything they’ve seen. If everyone is using the same tools with similar prompts, the visual landscape can start to flatten. It can all start looking like a tech startup designed by a committee of algorithms: clean, competent, and utterly forgettable. Whether that happens to your work is, again, entirely up to you, but we don’t want that for you, so please resist.

Here’s where we get practical, because “have complicated feelings about AI” is not actually a creative strategy.

We believe the designers who navigate this well tend to share a few things in common. They use AI as a starting point, not a finishing one. They stay in the driver’s seat. They’re clear with clients about when AI tools are part of their process. And they maintain a distinctly human point of view, which means continuing to develop their own creative voice rather than outsourcing it.

Treating AI as a collaborator (rather than a replacement or a shortcut) is the frame we believe serves creatives best. You wouldn’t let an intern make final decisions about a brand direction without your input. AI can be a very fast intern, one that requires even more editorial oversight than the human kind.

And on the question of other creator’s work: we encourage you to be thoughtful about prompting AI to mimic specific living artists’ styles. Stay aware of the sourcing debates. Support the conversations happening in the creative community about regulation, attribution, and consent. Your voice matters in that space, even if it’s just staying informed.