If it's AI vs humans for design, my money is on humans

AI "writing" drives me crazy, and I run an AI company

I’m going to talk about something a little bit different today. I’m going to talk about design.

But in order to frame AI-in-design, let’s start with AI-writing.

I despise AI-written essays, emails, Instagram captions, and LinkedIn posts.

Mainly, content written by AI is most likely bad because it’s a sampling of the meatiest part of the bell-curve-of-copy. Since AI is probabilistic, it’s, essentially, writing from what what it thinks most people would have said next.

There’s too much great content out there to spend even a moment reading something average.

Even if you edit it, the best it can become is “okay-ish.” Worse yet, it’s so damn predictable.

How would you feel if you read an email from me about AI copywriting and it said something like “It’s not just average— it’s predictable”?

You’d know immediately that it was AI.

Someone I admire and trust from a brand a I love, about a month ago, sent out what was clearly an AI-written email with the following sentences in it (the bold = the AI giveaway):

“What’s really blocking progress isn’t technology. It’s the narrative.“

“Your advantage doesn’t come from more hustle. It comes from better thinking.“

“The next time you see fear spreading—through headlines, hearings, or a neighbor’s social post—remember the real narrative …”

It was so lazily written by AI that, mentally, I felt my trust in the brand slightly erode.

In my opinion, if the author was lazy enough to use AI to generate their copy, then why shouldn’t I be too lazy to read it?

I’ve become so fed-up with AI slop that, whenever I notice it, I either mentally, and sometimes audibly, scoff.

I feel very similarly about design. Our new website is done and live. 100% designed by a human. I’m hardly proud of that fact, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

Check out the (human designed) website

The design firm that I use, run by my (now) wife, doesn’t use AI. Interestingly, the design firm I use most often has to fix the designs that AI poorly created.

As an experiment, I gave our brand assets to Claude’s new design tool to see what it would do.

As part of our brand, we have a pretty detailed brand guide which I’ve linked here. The entire website linked above, as well, was designed, page by page, in Figma. So I gave Claude the brand guide and the entire Figma file.

Claude told me it would take 5 minutes to fully configure our brand in its system. 45 minutes later, it was finally done.

I wanted to compare Claude’s output to an asset that I had already had the designer create. So I gave it only the copy for our Automation Mining Capabilities Deck.

Remember, Claude had access to the entire website, which has the exact copy and images for the Capabilities Deck on it. Don’t take my word for it; check out the Automation Mining page.

After pasting in the copy, I asked it to please create the slide deck. In theory, if it had read the website and knew the brand, it should have generated something eerily similar to the human designer. It already had the template.

Let’s compare Claude’s version of the Process Workshop slide to the designer’s.

Website (which Claude had access to)

Designer’s (in the Capabilities Deck)

Claude’s

It got the colors correct, but that’s about where the positives stop. The more you look, the worse it gets. First, it changed the copy I gave it. Second, the graphic it generated looks nice at first glance but makes no sense. It’s certainly nowhere close to the graphic created by the human.

Let’s look at the next slide: the Prioritization Scorecard.

Website (which Claude has access to)

Designer’s (in the Capabilities Deck)

Claude’s

The human’s slide, while “busier,” is much easier to read and conveys the opportunities + their impact more simply. The AI’s is much more bland-tech-y.

When you look at the rightmost three boxes, they don’t convey the same meaning as the impact statements in the designer-created slide do. The AI’s slide is promising 2,000 hours saved + 20% increased capacity + 6 people freed up all on one opportunity. On the human-created slide, there are 8 opportunities with callouts on different opportunities.

You can imagine my surprise when I showed the Claude-created slide deck to the designer, who said “I’ve had other clients send me slides with exactly the same layouts and templates!”

Uh-oh. AI-design has tropes similar to AI-copy’s “It’s not X, it’s Y” or the now-basically-forbidden em dash.

So where does this land us? I think AI-design probably has a place, but, if your business has any sort of scale, I think that place isn’t public-facing.

AI is a good designer if you have bad design.

If you have never hired a designer, AI is better than that. But, functionally, there is little difference between Claude Design and Canva templates. It might be a bit more user-friendly than Canva to someone who truly wants nothing to do with design, but I wouldn’t consider it to be a step-up in design. If anything, I think Canva templates + a designer on Fiverr or UpWork might outperform Claude on most tasks.

AI is raising the bar for “minimum design.”

Just like PowerPoint templates raised the bar for presentations, which were previously black-text-on-white-backgrounds, AI is raising the bar for minimum-acceptable assets. Especially for internal use, AI is a great tool. Claude is, unquestionably, better than a PowerPoint template. But, within 12 months, everyone will sniff out the Claude template format, and it’ll become the minimum. Just like everyone has sniffed out “It’s not X, it’s Y” when AI writes copy.

Wordpress templates did the same thing to websites. Before, all websites were ugly. Then Wordpress came out with standard templates, and a lot of companies use them. But, instinctively, you know when a company used an out-of-the-box template. It doesn’t feel unique, because it’s not.

Public-facing AI design is probably a scarlet letter

I run an AI company, and if even I scoff at lazily-done AI, how will the average person voting against data centers and afraid of AI stealing our water feel?

Your design is most peoples’ first impression of your brand

We want people to see our brand and feel accessible and trustworthy, like a guide who’s been here before and knows the way. The people that have commented on our updated brand have said as much. I think that the future is very bright for great designers. More than ever before, they’ll be needed to help differentiate businesses away from competitors both using and not using AI.

If AI-first design becomes a scarlet letter, and I reallllyyyyy think it will, then your brand might not just suffer, it might be called “lazy.”

And your customers might find themselves a bit too lazy to care.