“I don’t have time, the deadline is tight” — results always matter, and yeah, we need to pay bills. Optimize what can be optimized, automate what can be automated. But with criteria.
Often it will make sense to use it, sometimes not. Why not? Will you know how to answer? Because, although AI is a means, it has been seen as an end. It is everything.
AI is the beginning of a discovery that “helps you” understand the need, and it guides you towards a means by which it itself produces the end result.
We meet, learn, and gain mastery through the means, through the process, through pain, through doubt, through what happens during and what remains afterward.
“But the market is pressuring, and I need to use AI for everything” — yes, we can’t afford anarchy, but, again, everything comes back to omission, conformism. It’s not because we can that we should.
We need designers who at least know when it’s not the right time to use a generative tool, even when they need to.
If we use tools without any criteria, we go from being designers to being operators.
How can we still call ourselves designers if we authorize an “Always Allow”, if we don’t even bother to consider the minimum number of choices? Besides, if we’re going to have the effort of deciding and dealing with the consequences of those decisions anyway, why use AI, right?