Design doesn’t need to end like this

Coming out of Config 2024, the “conference for people who build products” hosted by Figma, the conversation about AI and design has reached a new pitch.

While AI-assisted search and layer renaming drew cheers, designers are decidedly more mixed on the Make Designs feature — which generates high-fidelity UI from a simple prompt — and news that unless they opt out, Figma will begin training the feature on their work.

Reactions on social media have the energy of frogs just noticing the waters around them getting increasingly hot, trapped in the same pot writers and visual artists have been stewing in for a while. Is this the end of design as practiced by human beings? Are we, as designers, cooked?

A second wave of reactions loudly answer, “No,” with all the confidence of Google AI telling you to put glue on your pizza. AI is just a tool. Designers do more than generate pixels, and machine learning won’t make that obsolete. AI doomers are just whining when they should be adapting.