MARCH 2025

AI AND DESIGN: THE MACHINE AS CREATIVE? A FALLACY.

Artificial intelligence is making its way into the world of design – with the promise of speeding up processes, optimising ideas, and democratising creativity. Algorithms design logos, compose layouts and select colours. Yet, while AI is celebrated as progress, one fundamental question is pushed to the background: What is design – and what is its essence?

The debate surrounding this issue is not new. The digitalisation of the 1990s already sparked an outcry: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign – tools that simplified the creative process and redefined craftsmanship. But there is a crucial difference: These programs support the human and do not question aesthetic decisions.

AI, on the other hand, goes a step further. It generates designs independently, proposes “optimised” solutions, and no longer merely acts as a tool, but as a seemingly creative actor. The consequences? A homogenisation of design. Relying on algorithms leads to variations of the same thing – anaemic, pleasing design solutions that feed off existing patterns. AI is not an artist, but an archivist. It combines what already exists, but the creative moment – the bold break, the radically new – remains foreign to it.

Even more concerning is the creeping disenfranchisement of the designer. Those who blindly rely on AI forget how to think creatively themselves. What starts as relief becomes dependence: One algorithm selects the colours, another suggests the composition – and eventually, one's own intuition seems superfluous. AI does not make one more creative; it makes things more convenient. But design that doesn’t challenge us is ultimately just decoration.

Finally, the ethical question: Who owns a work generated by AI? The designer, who creates it with a few clicks? The machine, which calculates it? Or the countless artists and designers whose works the AI has used as training material without permission? The romantic notion of a fair partnership between human and machine is naive. It is already about control and dependence – about an industry that wants to automate creative work in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

The designer of the future must therefore not only be able to work with AI – they must also be critically aware of it. Technology can inspire, but it cannot replace. Creativity needs mistakes, detours, resistance – all things an algorithm cannot provide. Anyone who refuses to recognise this risks betraying the essence of design: its humanity.