Please don't take offence by this, but:

If AI models can generate designs faster and produce work that is "good enough", what is the actual future of design tools and the design profession in your opinion?

I've tested this myself with some frontier models and the results are kinda impressive enough that it raised the question if design skills are already obsolete. If that is the case, what use are these tools now?

> If AI models can generate designs faster and produce work that is "good enough", what is the actual future of design tools and the design profession in your opinion?

Maybe I caught ai psychosis with the release of the latest opus / sol models, but I'm thinking that there is very little future for it. There's also no future for almost all software that isn't super entrenched or in areas heavily regulared by law, like finance.

A few days ago there was a post about people cloning Photopea by just pointing the model at it. The (not very technical) gamer community is spitting out cross-game mods like putting Mario in Elden Rings every other day. Most SaaS that targets consumers is dead in the water; you can replace the user-hostile monthly subscription that siphons data off of you and tries to upsell you by just asking an llm to reimplement its functionality, and all it costs is some tokens. Most people won't do it on their own, obviously, but I don't see why they wouldn't choose one of the myriad of replacements off of Github. The only issue is discoverability, but it will happen with time.

For myself, I managed to reverse engineer all electronics devices I tried--you'd be surprised just how much functionality is possible through USB for devices like Rodecaster 2, despite allegedly none of it being possible according to the manufacturer. Old printer doesn't work on MacOS 27? Just ask ai to build the drivers. App I miss from windows? Just ask AI to make a version that runs on MacOS. A childhood game that I'd like to run on linux, but Proton can't do it? Just ask ai to make it work. Hell, add some new functionality that lets you rebind keys and add 4k 120fps support while you're at it.

It's magic, and it will kill most of the software industry before long. If the current rate of progress continues nothing short of a whole OS will be unattainable by mid-2028.

Good enough is not really good enough.

I've seen a lot of "really cool unique designs" that are obviously just a digested regurgitation of amalgamated corporate slop. Anyone wanting an actual unique design language needs to hire actual designers.

Those designers may use AI tools but the tooling isn't to where they can be completely replaced. I challenge anyone to show me an e2e LLM design toolkit that can actually replace a designer, not just one shotted "wow that looks so cool" character designs.