Self-curation and friction

If you’re a young designer and you’re using AI you’ll never be able to develop taste or a style.

You will not develop any taste or style if you keep using AI. Especially if you’re a young designer or young creative.

Every design influencer is currently telling you to use AI or else your career is doomed.

Buy this, subscribe there, ignore technique and theory, you need AI now to be competitive.

False.

You don’t need another subscription based service to be a good designer. All you need is taste to be above the skillset of 90% of designers.

Unfortunately taste is not available as a monthly subscription service, so you’ll have to build one by yourself.

A junior designer freshly out of Uni or somebody shifting into the profession has not developed taste, they have a minuscule visual library with no discerning curation. 

That library most likely consists of Spongebob, Mr Beast thumbnails, some Wes Anderson films cause you heard he’s the best, an expensive logo book you skimmed through that one time and the seasonal brain rot memes on social media.

To develop taste you need to train and expand your visual/conceptual library every day. It is a marathon of self curation, practice and curiosity. Keep in mind that self curation requires patience, and practice requires friction. You need to be very aware of the things you want to consume and how you want to bring them into your projects so that your taste, your skill and your style have space to flourish.

AI removes you from this experience. It makes you believe you’ve done the practice that helped you reach that outcome.

AI models have algorithmically calibrated taste filters that will always appease the lowest common denominator. It has been built to never stray too far away from what is mathematically expected.

And when you grow as a creative through what is mathematically expected, you’ll be in the same lane as the other 99% of creatives who can’t critically dissect their ideas and ways of working.

Now, having good or bad taste is irrelevant. As long as you have taste you demonstrate you have an opinion. Having “opinions” will give you sharper ways to engage with ideas and explore more interesting directions than any AI gen service ever could.

By allowing AI to dim your taste before you’ve barely developed any opinions about your craft you’re making yourself entirely dependent on it and it will make it very hard for you to transition into different software and different areas of design.

Yes, your work won’t be immediately “good” (if you could say that about an AI deliverable) but you will be building a solid foundation.

Aim for challenging reads, practicing new techniques and later applying those into your preferred way of working, look at nature, play a videogame, watch a movie from the 60s, watch all the reels from that weird designer who has some opinions.

Friction through your creative explorations is what creates the spark to genuine growth and innovative ideas, and AI will only butter you up and make you think you’re a genius for producing an algorithmically agreeable idea.