And nothing of value was lost

Like most Product designers, I've been particularly pre-occupied with what the rude arrival of AI will mean for the rest of my career. We are told pessimistically how much the quick automation of "good enough" design production will decimate the design industry. No junior jobs that can be done better by a human, no leadership jobs to pass on value by upskilling them to be the next generation of seniors.

This is a very convenient vision of doom for those who need to profit from AI – wiping out a generation of designers and institutionalised knowledge will make "good enough" the only option. However I think it's also worth asking if AI is a transformational technology, an accelerator of what was already happening, or merely the beneficiary of an incredible amount of worthless data sloshing around.

Product design is a relatively young career, and the last two decades are best looked as a sort of boom, that has tailed off as macro-economics have favoured the safe and measurable over invention and verve. If we look at other creative disciplines in similar panics about the impact of AI, we might ask the same thing – did we ever believe that these careers would exist for decades to come?

• Musicians being able to sell their music, and claim royalties for second hand performances of it, is a model barely over a century old. In recent decades you could even make a decent career of playing other peoples music as a performance. Streaming put paid to this, when everything that ever had been recorded was available for barely any cost.
• CGI artists are looking at the ease in which lavish effects can be created with AI – but barely three decades ago, they were the interlopers, sidelining practical effects and squibs. Over time, their work became a creative discipline, and an industry, but just like music, the free libraries filled with objects and pipelines became streamlined and productions templated
• Photographers used the internet to promote themselves easily, some even creating a secondary income source by providing licensible library images. Again, over time, well you know where I'm going with this

So here we have it – the immediate success of AI has been synthesising all this freely available data, distilling "good enough" to its true essence, and reducing the value of work from pennies to zero. And so in design, when for nearly two decades, bootcamps have been churning out UX designers using a boilerplate processes to produce commercially acceptable work; filling dribbble with unasked for redesigns; Nielsen Norman have provided an easily googlable solution to almost any common problem; and other platforms offer cheap, globalised design as a commodity, of course we would end up in the same place

Employed designers in this new world have two roles. Firstly to be the experienced arbiters of what is actually good, and reject what is good enough. Secondly, and more hopefully, return to solving novel problems, and bringing human expression to the world arround them. Looking through a nineties illustration annual, or the internet wayback machine as naff as some of the work appears, one can see how comparatively recently the homogening of design in search for predictable growth has set in. This is no longer good enough.