I am a lifelong designer and artist, and many of my artist friends are very AI-resistant and I get it, especially for personal work, but not for design work.

In a competitive market like UX/UI design, using AI is not a real debate. If your peers ship 3–5× faster with decent quality, you look slow, even if your ideas are better.

However, when using AI, it’s important to carefully consider how you want to integrate it into your work. Use AI deliberately while safeguarding the unique qualities that make you valuable. If you fail to do this and let AI take the reins entirely, you will be contributing to the slop I see more and more every day.

It has always been important to find your voice, your meaning, your point of view. In the AI era, it is essential. The default output will be AI-assisted mediocrity produced at a massive scale. Some people are using AI to imitate humans with real skill rather than amplifying their own unique skills: AI remixes, splices, and stitches together ideas like Frankenstein. Without a strong underlying voice, that is all you get.

I have designed user interfaces for 20 years. When AI tools appeared, I had a moment of fear. Tools like Builder.io or Claude Code made it seem like UI design would become trivial. But when I watched someone without real design skill use them, the illusion fell apart. At first glance, the UI looked fine: patterns, components, modern styling. After a few minutes of use, the emperor had no clothes. No structure. No judgment. No skill, and everything was inside out and backward, with no real understanding of users. Good design is grounded in human-centered research and a solid, time-tested process.

Use AI as a force multiplier for your voice, not a replacement for it. But you cannot multiply by zero. Your voice comes from experience, process, grounded opinions, style, and time spent doing real work.

How do you accomplish getting a unique voice if you do not have one? If you want a unique voice, you have to earn one through hard work and experience. Then you need to use AI the hard way: as a force multiplier for your process and voice, not a replacement for it.

AI is most powerful when it amplifies judgment and perspective, and when it sits alongside experts.

The hard way is still the right way: build the experience first, develop your own point of view, then use AI as a force multiplier for your process and voice, not a substitute for either.