The Internet Is Chaos. That's Exactly Why AI Is Winning

There's a version of this conversation where I tell you AI is going to take your job. You've seen that one. It's everywhere. Hot take after hot take, each one citing another hot take, none of them particularly interested in being right. They just want to be first.

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Here's what nobody in that conversation is saying: the internet has a credibility problem. And AI is winning partly because of it.

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Think about what it's like to search for something right now. You get SEO slop, opinion dressed as data, listicles that haven't been updated since 2021, and comment sections full of people who are very confident about things they made up.

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This became increasingly evident as I became a parent, able to find two very different answers confidently stated all on page one of the search engine results page. We built an information ecosystem that optimized for volume and engagement over accuracy. And then we're surprised that people are turning to a single, conversational interface that just answers the question.

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AI isn't always right.

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In fact, it's wrong a lot. Anyone who uses it regularly knows this. A creator on TikTok has a whole bit surfacing these AI flops. But it's often directionally right, open to your course corrections, and it's always fast and calm. That's a rare combination in 2026.

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I've been a designer for 16 years. In that time, the tools have changed dramatically. And every single time, someone announced the end of the profession.

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When Adobe moved to the Creative Cloud subscription model, designers lost their minds. When Sketch showed up and started pulling people away from Photoshop for UI work, it felt like a rupture. When Figma made design collaborative and browser-based, the conversation was all about what that meant for the craft. When Canva put drag-and-drop design in the hands of non-designers, people were convinced it was over.

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It wasn't over. The tools changed what was possible. The profession changed with them. But the thing that actually makes design work — knowing why something works — that didn't move.

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This is where the AI doomsday posts lose me.

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Yes, AI can generate copy. Yes, it can produce images. Yes, it can do a first pass at things that used to take real time. But here's what it cannot do: distinguish good design from bad design. It cannot tell you whether your brand looks confident or desperate. It cannot see that your type hierarchy is undermining your messaging, or that your color palette is creating associations you didn't intend. It cannot feel the difference between a brand that has earned credibility and one that is failing to establish trust.

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Taste is learned. Craft is learned. Both require years of looking at a lot of work, making a lot of mistakes, and developing the internal calibration to know when something is working and when it is trying to hard. AI doesn't have that. It has pattern recognition at scale. That's useful. It's not the same thing.

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The brands that are going to embarrass themselves with AI aren't the ones using it thoughtfully.

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They're the ones handing it the keys and walking away — because they can't tell the difference between output that's technically correct and output that's actually good.

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I use AI regularly. For research, for first drafts, for talking through a problem when I need to think out loud. It doesn't diminish the work. It changes what the work looks like. More synthesis, more curation, more judgment. Less time on the parts that were always kind of tedious anyway.

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The people who are going to be fine aren't the ones avoiding AI. And they're not the ones outsourcing everything to it either. They're the ones who have spent enough time developing taste that they can tell when the output is wrong — and fix it.

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The internet is loud and full of people pretending to know things. AI gives people a quiet room with a fast answer. Of course it's winning.

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But a fast answer and a right answer aren't the same thing. That gap is where designers live. It's where we've always lived.

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Sharpen your craft. Use the tools available to you. Everything else will follow.

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