want to have a real conversation about this with no judgment because I feel like people are either “AI is the devil” or “AI everything” and theres very little honest middle ground
here’s what I actually do:
- chatgpt for brainstorming concept directions. like “give me 20 metaphors for cybersecurity.” then I take the interesting ones and sketch by hand. AI never touches the visual work.
- AI generated placeholder text thats better than lorem ipsum for mockups
- sometimes use it to draft presentation copy that i then completely rewrite
in all these cases the AI is a tool in my process not the process itself. like how id use google for reference images or coolors for palette ideas.
wheres the line for you? genuinely curious, no wrong answers.
I use it almost exactly the same way lol. Brainstorming and first-draft copy. Never for the actual design work.
The one area I’ve gotten more adventurous: I use midjourney to generate mood boards for client kickoff meetings. Not as deliverables, just as conversation starters. “Something like this vibe?” It’s replaced the 2 hours I used to spend making pinterest boards and honestly the conversations are better for it.
But I delete everything after the meeting. None of it ends up in the project. It’s pure ideation.
Nope. Nothing. Zero AI in my workflow and I’m not apologizing for it.
Not because I think it’s morally wrong or whatever. I just find that my process — which involves a LOT of sketching and dead ends — is where the good ideas come from. Shortcutting that with AI-generated concepts would make my work worse not better, because I’d anchor on whatever the AI shows me instead of discovering something unexpected through the messy process.
This is a personal preference tho, not a mandate. I get why other people use it differently.
I use github copilot for coding (i do web dev alongside design) and honestly the cognitive dissonance is wild. Copilot writes maybe 40% of my code at this point and nobody in tech bats an eye. But if i used an AI tool for 5% of a design project people would lose their minds.
Not saying either reaction is wrong, just interesting how different the norms are between industries.
I teach design and i encourage my students to experiment with AI tools BUT to always be able to explain and justify every creative decision. if you cant articulate why you chose something, whether AI suggested it or not, you dont understand your own work.
the students who use AI as a crutch produce generic work. the students who use it as one tool among many produce surprisingly original stuff. same as any tool — the quality depends on the person wielding it.
my hot take: the “did you use AI” question is going to feel as quaint as “did you use a computer” in about 5 years. tools evolve, creative intent stays. but right now in 2026 the anxiety is real and valid and we should talk about it honestly like this thread is doing.
for the record: i use AI for research, naming brainstorms, and occasionally to generate textures that i then heavily modify. everything else is manual.