Articles · AI Design
Why thirty AI drafts don't make the work any shorter
Exploration and mass production go to AI; direction and final checks stay with people. A boundary I only saw after months of use.
Translated from the Korean original. Read in Korean
Type one line of prompt, wait a few seconds, and the drafts come pouring out.
The first time I saw that screen, honestly, it scared me a little. What happens to my job now?
But after a few months of using these tools, something strange happened. I had far more drafts than before, and I was still leaving work at the same time. Some days I left later.
I'd get thirty images and flip through them for ages. All of them looked plausible. Not one was something I could send to a client. Only after living in that odd stretch for a while did I understand: there's work AI takes off your plate, and work it leaves exactly where it was.
The time in front of a blank screen
The biggest change is in how things start.
Sitting in front of an empty artboard is the most daunting, most wasteful part of design work. AI fills that gap well. When there are three possible directions, generating one image for each makes the thirty minutes I used to spend explaining them in a meeting disappear.
The point is that you don't generate those images to use them. They're material for starting a conversation. "This way, not that way." Nothing gets that sentence out of people faster.
The tasks that take a lot of hands but almost no judgment have shrunk too. Removing backgrounds, upscaling low-res images, turning one banner into twelve aspect ratios. Jobs I used to hold onto for an hour are done in minutes. Whatever anyone says, that part is a clear win.
And then it gets stuck
Ask it to make the same thing again, and it starts to drift.
Get a character you like, ask for another pose, and you get a subtly different person. The eyes are a little off, the hair a little longer. For work where consistency is the quality, like a brand illustration set or a campaign series, that's fatal.
"Just tweak it a bit" doesn't work well either. I want to trim 4px from the right margin, and the generator redraws everything from scratch every time. Half of design work is revisions, and this is where the most time leaks away while you wrestle with the tool.
Korean text is still a long way off. Final consonants vanish and letter parts scatter. For anything with lettering, it's faster in the end to generate without text and set the type yourself.
Then there are numbers. Trim lines, real-world measurements, contrast ratios, anything that has to be exactly right, AI gets plausibly wrong. Obviously wrong would be better. Plausibly wrong slips through review.
So this is how I split it now
Lay out the flow of a project and the places where AI fits become fairly clear.
I use it heavily in research and exploration. The output gets thrown away anyway, so there's no pressure. I don't use it at the moment of choosing a direction. I think the right order is to decide what to make first and then look for material, not to pick from whatever was generated.
When it's time to actually build, I go back to the tools I normally use. AI only plays assistant, cleaning backgrounds or raising resolution. Then when the stage comes to stamp out many sizes for many channels, AI's share goes back up. The final check is done by a person: lettering, the number of fingers, the logo's shape, dimensions.
Deciding the direction and checking at the end. Hand those two over and things go wrong.
On the other hand, if you keep doing exploration and mass production by hand, you'll fall behind. In the end it's about where you use it.
What I look at first when choosing a tool
When a new tool comes out, I read the terms before looking at the output. Some services write different rights for images made on the free plan and the paid plan. I also check whether my uploads are used for training and whether I can turn that off. For a tool I'd upload client files to, that's the most important thing.
Next is the file. A tool that hands you a single PNG and a tool that gives you layers or vectors leave you with completely different amounts of work afterward.
Last, whether it works inside the tools I already use. Features that live inside Figma or Photoshop end up getting used; features that need one more tab end up forgotten. There's a list by type under AI tools.
An eye for choosing
The better the tools get, the more I feel the center of gravity of skill shifting.
It used to be that the skill was in your hands, in getting the picture in your head onto the screen. That barrier is lower now. What's widened instead is the gap in deciding what to make, and in the eye that picks one thing out of everything that pours out.
Choosing one image out of thirty is harder than making thirty. No prompt solves that.
That eye comes, in the end, to people who have looked at a lot. So the more I use AI, the more time I spend looking at references, not less. The words I put in prompts come from there too. I wrote about that separately in Putting "make it feel right" into words.