Topic:
Artificial Intelligence
Year:
18 December 2025
AI is everywhere right now. You can’t move without someone telling you it’s about to change everything, steal your job, or design a brand identity while you’re still in your undies eating porridge. If you work in anything creative, designers, brand designers, art directors, photographers, you’re already deep in it whether you like it or not.
Personally, I don’t think AI is the scary T1000 terminator everyone makes it out to be. For me, it’s just a tool. A powerful one, sure, but still a tool. If you use it properly and don’t let it do the thinking for you, it can be great. It helps you move faster, explore ideas quicker, get unstuck when your brain feels like your mums overcooked broccoli. Sometimes you just need something to bounce off, and AI is basically a very eager intern who never sleeps and doesn’t complain.
The thing is, it doesn’t have taste. It doesn’t know when something feels right. Rick Rubin talks about creativity being about taste and intuition, and I agree with that. AI can throw a thousand ideas at you, but it has no clue which one actually matters. Deciding what’s good, what’s dull as dishwater, and what’s absolute nonsense still comes from experience. That part hasn’t changed.
Where I start to feel a bit weird about all of this is when I think about younger creatives and new graduates. When you’re starting out, you learn by doing things slowly and badly. You learn how to articulate ideas, how to art direct, how to explain why something feels wrong even when you can’t fully justify it yet. That stuff takes time. If AI starts doing too much of that heavy lifting too early, I worry people won’t build those muscles. It’s like skipping leg day and wondering why you can’t stand up properly.
People with experience will probably be fine. We already know how to judge work, push ideas, and call bullshit when something looks good on paper but feels dead in reality. AI can actually make that easier. But breaking into the industry might get harder. If companies can get something that’s good enough in five minutes, they might not bother giving juniors the space to learn, fail, and figure things out.
I don’t think AI is the enemy. Ignoring it would be stupid. But blindly trusting it is probably worse. It’s useful, it’s exciting, and it’s here to stay. Just don’t let it do all the thinking for you, or we’re all going to end up designing the same slightly soulless stuff, and no one really wants that.
Author:
Alex Edwards
Designer & Art Director
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