I've been thinking about AI a lot lately. And my honest take is — it's both exciting and terrifying at the same time.
As a web designer, AI has already changed how I work. I can't fully explain how, but I feel it. Things that used to take time now don't. Questions I used to sit with now get answered in seconds. And somewhere in that convenience is a quiet discomfort I can't shake.
Because here's the thing — the more I use it, the more I wonder what I'm actually learning. AI raises a question that nobody wants to say out loud: why learn when you can just prompt?
That question hits different when you're a beginner. When you're just starting out and you see what AI can produce, it's easy to wonder whether it's even worth going through the struggle of learning. Whether the hard part is even necessary anymore.
"AI always puts you in the common."
But I think that's exactly where AI gets it wrong about creativity. The results you get from AI are the higher probabilities of what most people have already accepted. Not what's new. Not what's different. Just the most familiar version of what already exists. And when it comes to entirely new ideas, new aesthetics, things that have never been done before — AI hasn't really been helpful. Because it can only draw from what already exists. It has no instinct. No taste. No lived experience to pull from.
There's also something deeper here. Most of the frameworks, libraries and languages we use today are inherently flawed — and it's that friction, that imperfection, that pushes humans to be creative. Tailwind exists because someone got frustrated with writing CSS. React exists because someone got frustrated with the DOM. The best tools we have were born from human frustration and human creativity finding a way around a problem.
AI suggests the result is what matters. But for me — and I think for a lot of creatives — the fun and the fulfillment comes from the process. From figuring it out. From the struggle that eventually becomes understanding.
Can AI replace creatives like me? Maybe one day. But right now it can only replicate what's already been done. And I'm not interested in making what's already been done.