Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about AI right now. Either it’s going to replace every creative professional, or it’s completely useless. My experience sits somewhere in the middle and I think that’s where the truth usually lives.
I use AI as an assistant, not a replacement. It helps me work faster on things like market research, organising ideas, and structuring content. Tasks that used to take hours can now take minutes. That part is genuinely useful. In fact, the same way I approach intentional web design, I approach AI: every tool should have a purpose, and that purpose should serve the final result.
But here’s what AI doesn’t have: taste. Intuition. The ability to look at a layout and feel that something is slightly off even before you can explain why. These things come from years of visual training and human experience, and no tool can replicate that yet. The way typography and colour choices affect how people feel on a website, for example, is something that requires a trained eye, not just a prompt.
The six-fingered elephant in the room
If you’ve ever tried AI image generation, you already know. The uncanny hands, the strange eyes, the background that doesn’t quite make sense. AI can produce something that looks impressive at first glance, but falls apart under closer inspection. AI-generated interfaces often fail real usability tests for exactly this reason. The same is true for web design.
A story that stuck with me
A friend recently asked me to test a website he had built entirely with AI. No coding knowledge, no design background, just prompts. When I first looked at it, I was genuinely surprised. It looked clean and aesthetic. But the moment I started clicking around, everything fell apart. Buttons led nowhere, forms didn’t work, the navigation was broken.
I let my friend know. He came back excited, that the AI had already identified the issues and assured him everything was now fixed. Spoiler: nothing was fixed. The AI was enthusiastically wrong, and since my friend had no technical knowledge to intervene, the problems stayed. The website has been sitting there ever since, unused. A beautifully dressed window with nothing behind it.
The bottom line
AI is a powerful tool in the right hands. It can speed up research, help with structure, and spark ideas. But building a complex, functional, and truly unique website still requires human expertise, creative judgment, and the ability to actually fix things when they break.
