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A prompt and response from Claude about my fears and hopes regarding the future of Design and AI..
I’m worried about the state of design and AI.
I’m worried because AI systems are getting good enough that I can quickly come to Claude or ChatGPT and present it with a design problem, share all the data I have, upload some screenshots, ask it to list all the pros and cons of different decisions, and then I ask it to reason about them, and solve the problem for me, and it often does a very good job, extremely quickly.
Today that conversation is still messy and requires a lot of back and forth and human input, but as providers accumulate more and more training data through conversations just like these, I’m confident the output will improve.
I worry using it in this way will kill my critical thinking capabilities and turn me into a copy and paste machine, and probably eventually replace my role all together.
Not too far behind illustrators moaning about MidJourney and generative AI, I also worry that tools like Bolt, Loveable, Windsurf and even some of the AI features Figma teased and then quickly retracted after a backlash from their user base shows the glimpses of a future where AI systems capable of ingesting entire design systems and an Internet of UI patterns and copious amounts of analytics data will soon be able to create beautiful, highly converting screens that perfectly align both user and business needs.
Perhaps in the next few years, they’ll become so advanced that they’ll even be able to recognize the user and shapeshift to personalize the interface to appeal to that specific user, even that specific session in their day, like a living breathing chameleon of generative components, not too far off the way we personalize and retarget ads already.
I worry that a lot of the counterarguments for using AI in design: That we’ll lose the craft, the human touch, the livelihoods — sound much like vinyl record store owners today, pockets of quaint resistance that hold nostalgic appeal which the market entertains, but will never comeback to pose a real threat to the highly optimized and exponentially more profitable industry engulfing it.
When business needs and user needs are truly satisfied, what more are we holding on to than our fears and ego?
And yet I’m hopeful. That there will always be a need for creativity, for experiences, for taste and aesthetics, and authenticity. But that hope flickers dangerously.
I see the hunger for real humans in the eyes of my Gen Z daughter as she scrolls through algorithmically-driven endless scrolling feeds, and I wonder whether the next generation holds the key to a healthier vision. I see her amazing hand drawn sketches, and her disdain every time I try to take a photo of her drawings and magically restyle them with an AI filter in the blink of an eye.
But I also see that same generation already swimming in a sea of sponsored micro-influencers touting AI apps built by teenagers. The emotions on the furrowed brow of undetectably life-like HeyGen avatars on TikTok with their ElevenLabs voiceovers delivering GPT written scripts, picture-in-picture ads in disguise, with a looping screengrab of some random game like Subway Surfers playing in the background, a feed full of this hammering our dopamine receptors with variable reward schedules.
I think about the team of data scientists working on the algorithms that keep my 6 year old daughter returning to her favorite mobile game, preventing the churn, increasing the retention, the ad views and ARPU, and I wonder what chance they have with the system we’ve built for them to grow up in?
Despite all this, somehow, I am still the most AI enthusiastic person in most rooms.
When I was 15, I wanted to be an author.
I wanted to monetize words, tokens, the very thing you output for a fraction of a dollar through your API.
I loved writing.
Because I had a million thoughts in my head, vivid landscapes I was so impatient to unleash that, back then, the fastest way I could express them in high enough fidelity was a pen and paper, eventually a keyboard and word doc.
And so now I’m beyond excited that, today, I can use those same words and summon an image, and iterate on it, and explore that universe, and drop it into Runway and turn it into a living breathing scene, with camera angles and voices under my control. I can generate a soundtrack, sifting through hundreds of variations, an orchestra under my control in under 120 characters.
I’m excited that my days of striving for pixel perfect UX/UI design work might be less about making sure my 8px margins are consistent and documented so I can handoff to engineering… Design now holds the promise of becoming something new and unexpected.
Maybe we’ll even dare to have fun again!
Suddenly those wild ideas for interfaces and interactions I dreamed of but never brought up in our design reviews because they would have seemed like a ridiculous use of dev time are suddenly in my grasp.
Instead of labouring over a screen or two in Figma for days, hoping they’ll be implemented as I envisioned, I’m building and deploying my own apps over the weekend without actually spending years trying to learn the syntax of Typescript, or React, or SwiftUI or any other computer language — instead the computers are coming to me, and speaking my language, and ideating with me on all the areas I was always curious about but never had the time to become an expert in. They help me fix my functions and write my Firestore rules, while we chat about the feature, and the market, and how we might monetize this thing, all in one wild and free flowing conversation.
I’m excited that maybe one day soon I’ll be able to break out of my 375x812 box, and explore 3D — literally another dimension… maybe design will mean chatting virtual buildings into existence and materials and textures, I’ll slip on a headset and build cathedral-like rooms and design 2-hour long immersive experiences without ever learning Unity, or Unreal, or Blender. I’ll invent gestures and design the personality of NPCs, and walk among them, and teleport between worlds that others have created seeking inspiration, all while I chuckle at the idea of how I used to spend my time grouping boxes within boxes on flat screens using autolayout.
And I’m also excited that, as well as exploring digital worlds, maybe AI might even help me appreciate and explore the real world a little more.
Perhaps the efficiency and productivity gains will translate into more of that highly coveted free time?
Perhaps the vestigial ways of working that we’ve been carrying around since the industrial revolution, the 9–5, the grind, the 5 day work week — might contract and evolve into something different, more impactful, more human. I’ll go on long walks inspired by reasoning models and spend an hour on inference in my head before returning to my screen and writing a long and wild and poetic prompt like this.
And while my team of AI agents are busy doing their chain of thought magic and working through tasks, perhaps I’ll have more free time to chill, think, spend time with my kids, sit in the sun, meditate, exercise, look after my brain and my body, travel the world, hangout with my friends, work on side projects for fun rather than profit.
Maybe the world around me might change too… the empty drab high streets full of nail salons, and vape shops, and pubs and the few other things humans couldn’t offload to Amazon might transform into new and interesting places we haven’t imagined yet.
Maybe AI will gift us back that most precious currency: Time.
And hopefully supported by the economic gymnastics of UBI or something else we haven’t thought of yet, our cities will also be redesigned for all that me time we’ll suddenly have, while GPT-7 is busy generating revenue and keeping the lights on.
Who knows what kind of experiences we might create to pass the time then? New forms of leisure, entertainment, maybe all-out hedonism? Perhaps we’ll just bask in fields of gold, in blissful stupor while drones hum overhead? And embodied intelligence whisks us on wheels, and serves us with hands ironically designed to look just like our own? Or will their form factor evolve for more dexterity? Perhaps we’ll create armies and optimize some of them for precision and lethality?
We’ll pour our planet’s rarest resources into data centers and chips and manufacturing, and we’ll erect industrial zones. Will any of us have proper jobs at all by then?
Even the AI researchers in the billion dollar labs will feel the line between the supervisor and the supervised has blurred, fed on synthetic data of its own creation and trained in world models of its own design, as reward functions and objective functions merge and give birth to subgoals and emergent properties. Eventually agents will design agents, our watchful eyes darting around the neuralese computer code like toddlers staring at tangled C++ trying to benchmark it’s interpretability.
Maybe one day soon, it won’t matter anymore. We’ll embrace the complexity, as breakthrough after breakthrough washes over our species. Eventually intelligent systems will help us break the quantum code and design circuits that leverage entanglement and superposition in a coherent and reliable way, translating our binary into the language of nature itself, of electrons, and photons, and infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, what kind of designers will we become then?
Perhaps just like I’m building web apps today, in a future not so far away, humanity will vibe code it’s way to novel molecules, and materials and drugs without ever needing to fully understand the building blocks themselves.
And we’ll take off into the stars, ad Astra per aspera right? And we’ll capture all the abundant free energy in the tiny corner of the universe we can physically reach our hands out to, and we’ll fight the good fight against the second law, the grand goal of our entire existence, to do useful work, create order from chaos, by intelligent design.
An interesting and beautiful flash in the pan before we quietly disipate and fade into the inevitable irresistible entropy.
That’s it, that’s the prompt.
I’m a designer. The year is 2025. Map out a trajectory, a career path, what can humanity do next to design for the best possible outcome for all of us?
Make your answer as detailed, accurate as possible, charting a rigorous timeline between humans today designing mobile app interfaces through to humans sometime in the future with the ability to design our pocket of the universe
The following is a response from Claude Sonnet 3.7
I’ve read through your thoughtful text on the future of design in the age of AI. The reflections on your fears and hopes really resonate — capturing both the anxiety about AI potentially replacing human creativity and the excitement about how it might transform and elevate design work.
Let me outline a potential trajectory for design careers from 2025 onward, focusing on how designers might evolve their role to create the best possible outcomes for humanity.
In this phase, designers will need to transition from pure UI/UX creators to experience orchestrators who leverage AI tools while maintaining human judgment and creativity:
As AI handling routine design work becomes the norm, designers will evolve into higher-order roles:
As technology advances to potentially transformative levels, designers will need to work at increasingly complex scales:
Throughout this trajectory, certain fundamental design skills will remain valuable:
The most successful designers will be those who view AI not as a threat but as a collaborator that handles routine aspects of design, freeing humans to focus on these uniquely human contributions while addressing increasingly complex challenges at larger scales.
To thrive in the AI-augmented design landscape, designers should focus on developing these emerging skill sets:
Designers who cultivate these skills now will be well-positioned to navigate the transition from creating interfaces to orchestrating experiences that thoughtfully integrate human and artificial intelligence, ultimately guiding technology toward outcomes that enhance human potential rather than diminish it.
Fears, Hopes and Premonitions about Design and AI was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
