AI- It’s going to take my job! - A journal entry
When I started designing, all I needed was Adobe Illustrator, a shaky Wacom tablet, and a deep sense of creative dread. Fast forward to now, and suddenly, I’m competing with a robot that can whip up a logo, generate ten color palettes, and write a brand manifesto in less time than it takes me to even open Illustrator.
Thanks to AI, the design world has gone from obsessing over every detail to simply perfecting the prompt.
As a 25-year-old designer who’s dipped toes in both freelance chaos and agency life, I’ve watched AI crash into our industry like an overconfident intern, except this intern never sleeps, doesn't need payment, and somehow always pleases the client. It’s weird and unsettling.
Okay, let’s talk logos, shall we?
Remember when logo design used to be this kind of sacred art form? We’d moodboard for hours, overthink every typeface, and argue about kerning and tracking. Now, AI platforms out here are spitting out decent enough logos in seconds. Sure, they lack soul and feel a bit generic. But to some clients, especially those who see “Canva as the future”, they’re more than good enough.
And I’m sorry but don’t get me started on clients.
Nowadays, instead of asking for revisions, some of them come with AI-generated inspiration. Which is just a polite way of saying: “I asked ChatGPT to design it for me, and now I want you to just make it real, professional, and legally safe.” Someone once asked me to “Make this AI-generated flyer look more human.” Hmm of course, I’ll just throw in a messy love life, some questionable tattoos and a spotify playlist called Productive but Sad.
AI image generators like Midjourney and DALL·E? Oh, they're fun… until they start replacing concept artists. I tried one of them out of curiosity. Typed in “surreal desert landscape with floating eyeballs, dreamy lighting, 4K resolution” and damn! It was great.
My first thought? Wow, stunning.
My second? This thing is going to take my job.
My third? Wait… I can charge for this?
The irony? We all gave in. At first it was just to speed things up, then just for some quick inspiration, and now I’ve got entire folders named ‘Midjourney References’ like it’s totally normal. So here I am collaborating with the enemy.
And you know the worst thing? AI has made me so horribly lazy. Why bother drawing this when I can prompt it in 5 words. I used to sketch out concepts, hunt for references, and passionately argue with myself about composition. But now my creative process has slowly evolved into copy, paste, tweak, overthink, and pretend I did it all by hand.
But I’ll admit, it’s not all bad.
AI has genuinely helped me work faster. Need mockups in five styles? Boom. AI. Need to generate dummy text that isn’t Lorem Ipsum? ChatGPT. Need to pretend I’ve got my life together in a professional email? ChatGPT again.
And yet… there’s this kind of sadness. Like watching someone auto-tune a heartfelt song. The craft, the weird little quirks, the 100 messy layers in PSD files, the unnecessary but deeply personal use of a specific Pantone shade, it’s slipping. When clients don’t understand the value of human touch in design, AI starts to look like a shortcut. And we, the flesh-and-blood creatives, start to look like a luxury.
But here’s my hot take: AI isn’t here to replace us, it’s just here to take out the creative trash we never wanted to deal with anyway.
Endless resizing? Tedious banner adaptations? Instagram carousels with “Live, Laugh, Launch” quotes in six aspect ratios? Who would miss that?
But the weird, messy, gloriously irrational part of creativity, the spark that makes a design feel alive? That still belongs to us. You can’t prompt instinct. Not yet, anyway.
No machine can understand the cultural nuance of typography like a designer with sleep deprivation and a deep-rooted trauma from Helvetica. No AI knows why this one specific shade of green gives you emotional flashbacks to your childhood bedroom. And no prompt will ever replicate the strangely satisfying pain of pulling an all-nighter to animate a logo reveal that only lasts 3 seconds.
So yes, AI is here. It’s fast, efficient, and mildly terrifying. But it can’t replace the beautiful chaos of a designer’s brain just yet. I’m still here, just with a few extra AI tools quietly working behind the scenes while I pretend it was all me.
And if AI ever does become self-aware, I hope it remembers it picked up a bit of taste from the designers who trained it. Until then, I’ll be here, designing, adapting, and occasionally crying into my laptop when the client says, “Maybe you should AI it and make it pop”.
