The AI Client

I’m somewhere between needing to hear if other folks are experiencing this, and needing to vent. For background, I’m an Art Director on an in-house team that supports a company with proprietary brands. Part of my job includes creating the brand books for these brands and executing the initial launch campaigns. I recently wrapped (or thought I did) on a new brand I was quite happy with, the project was usual for the brands we typically launch and I was asked to work on this project because it closely aligned with my style of work. I spent the better part of a few months working on this project, I spent more time than I typically would on it because I was really excited (probably the wrong choice.). Today I got notes from them, and there wasn’t a single part of the brand they wanted to move forward with. The logo, the positioning, the color palette, all of it was wrong to them. They attached something they “made very quickly in ChatGPT that’s way better” than what I provided. They made sure to note that they made it really quickly, and it exceeded my work. I feel totally defeated. Until recently I felt really lucky that AI wasn’t being pushed heavily at my job, suddenly, it’s everywhere. They want to replace shoots with it, they’re using it for copy generation, and now someone is asking me to make my work look like it. If this was a freelance project I would refund them and make it clear I wasn’t the right designer for them, but I can’t. And, making work that looks like what they sent me is soul crushing. I feel like I can’t escape it, I feel really disheartened. Has anyone been in a similar situation? How did you move forward?