Design & AI

Image generation may have gone too far and if you're having a hard time telling what's real from what's not, you might want to start paying closer attention.

I say that with truth behind it. I've studied design and photography, absorbed perspectives from professionals who know design theory inside and out — how things are laid out, proportioned, and stylized with intention. When those principles get drilled into you, you develop an eye for what was made with purpose and what was just... generated or copied. The weight of a photo developed by a seasoned professional carries so much depth, even though it could be generated in seconds, you should be able to tell the difference. 

Take a recent example: a friend texted me a photo of herself posing next to a promotional graphic for a new establishment. No context given — but my immediate reaction was that the design was bad. Which was exactly what she was getting at. I had no personal inference, no reason to care either way. But it wasn't communicating what the business was selling. It read like nobody had stopped to ask what this place actually needed to say before deciding how it should look. And that absence speaks loudly.

You recognize this in yourself already. Walk through any art gallery, sculptures, paintings, artifacts — and you form an opinion whether you mean to or not. You might see something and think it's brilliant. You might feel nothing. But even that absence of reaction is a response in this context.

It works the same as when you look at someone and find them attractive, or don't. Design literacy works this way. Once it's in you, the reaction is automatic. What you’re understanding from the imagery is the story, the motivation, and the message. 

So why does this matter right now? Because the world is changing faster than most people are ready for. Technology isn't just moving quickly — it's restructuring how people live, work, think and eat. The algorithm of life is touching everybody, for better and for worse, and there are real livelihoods built on top of it, people feeding their income and their sense of self through platforms shaped by systems they don't fully understand.

Remember stock images? Designers once had to license photos just to include them in their work — copyright was a clear line. That line doesn't exist the same way anymore. AI doesn't steal your work outright, it's more insidious than that. It absorbs thousands of images, learns the patterns, the composition, the style — and generates something that owes everything to what came before it while technically belonging to no one. The original creators see none of the credit and none of the compensation.

I've seen this firsthand. I built something using Claude, and came across a Codex user with a strikingly similar interface — not in function, just in design. That's not coincidence, that's convergence. When everything draws from the same trained pool, everything starts to look like everything else.

And that's exactly why intention still matters. A real designer can use these tools differently — feeding in their own body of work, their own visual language, to maintain consistency and speed up their process without losing their identity in it. That's a tool being used with authorship behind it. That's not the same thing as prompting something into existence and calling it branding.

That convergence is what brought me back to that promotional graphic. I have to wonder now — was it AI-generated? Did the business owner simply type a prompt, see something with decent colours and a polished style, and think yeah, that works?

And honestly, I get it. On the surface, the quality is there. The colours hit. There's a style attached to it. But something's off. It looks artificial. It doesn't complement its surroundings. And most tellingly, it has no visible thread connecting it back to the business itself — no sense that anyone thought about what this place actually is before deciding how it should look.

That's the gap AI can't close yet. Aesthetic competence without contextual understanding.

And then there's taste… Which is its own conversation. Every time a new image model drops, people are raving. And I'm genuinely not moved by it. Not because I don't understand what I'm looking at, but because I understand exactly what I'm looking at.

Here's the thing though — it's not universally bad. It's situational. AI-generated imagery works well in certain ecosystems: meme culture on X, Pinterest aesthetics, curating a personal online narrative, editing photos to shape how you present yourself. For audiences that have already normalized it, it functions fine.

But in other contexts it does real damage. The designer who gets hired by a friend to brand their small business? That's a human relationship built on trust, local knowledge, and genuine understanding of what that business needs to communicate. AI can produce something that looks like branding. It cannot produce something that means anything to that specific place, those specific people.

And yet — if I'm being honest — this behaviour isn't new. In tattooing, I've seen it firsthand. I've done it myself. You take someone's flash, adjust it slightly, put your name on it and move on. That's been happening in creative industries forever. Reference, imitation, inspiration — the line between them has always been blurry. We've all borrowed from something before we found our own voice. I learned in college that nothing is original and by now everything is a variation of a variation at this point. All the ideas are already out there, you probably don’t even know it.

AI didn't invent that. It just scaled it beyond anything we were prepared for. I'm not punishing AI users or passing judgment. I'm not saying it's right either. I'm pointing at the intention — and at the symptoms of a carelessness that AI has made impossible to ignore.