I Don’t Want AI to Take Away the Struggle

What decades of design taught me about the emotions we risk losing when creation becomes effortless

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember.

As a kid, I was quiet. I was thoughtful and analytical, and I spent a lot of time inside my own head. I watched people. I noticed small details. I thought about why things looked the way they did and why they made me feel certain things.

Drawing became one of the ways I processed all of that.

Sometimes I drew what I saw. Sometimes I doodled without really knowing where it was going. Sometimes I created things that had nothing to do with the world around me because I wanted to disappear into another one for a while. I wanted to escape.

Art became a quiet place for me.

There was wonder in drawing something and watching it slowly appear on a piece of paper. There was also frustration. I would erase things over and over in tears. I would hate something I made and then come back to it later and realize I liked it. I would get completely absorbed in tiny details nobody else would probably ever notice.

Then computers entered my life.

In the early 2000s, like a lot of people discovering what the web could be, I started building websites. I designed them in Photoshop. I made the graphics myself. I proudly showed off my first designed Myspace. I thought I was soooooo badass. I spent days thinking about the backgrounds, the typography, the layout, and all the little details. Then I figured out how to turn those designs into actual websites. I wanted to get it all right. It turned into an obsession.

Then that obsession became a career.

Drawing moved into graphic design. Graphic design moved into websites. Websites moved into UX and product design. Product design eventually moved into design systems, engineering, prototyping, and now AI.

The tools have changed constantly throughout my life.

What hasn’t changed is what it feels like to make something.

There is a tremendous amount of emotion involved in design work.

Sometimes you are excited because you know you have something good.

Sometimes you are anxious because you have spent days thinking about a problem and you are about to put your work in front of a room full of people who may completely disagree with you.

Sometimes you are afraid that you missed something, so you bug family and friends over and over showing your design “Is this good?”, “No, but is it really?”

Sometimes you are frustrated because the thing in your head refuses to become the thing on the screen.

Sometimes somebody understands exactly what you were trying to do, and there is a real sense of happiness in that.

I have experienced all of those things throughout my career.

That struggle is part of why I feel connected to the things I make.

And that is something I think about a lot as I work more deeply with AI.

I use AI constantly. I build with it. I experiment with it. I believe it is going to fundamentally change how designers work.

But I also think there is something we need to be careful not to lose.

When AI can generate the interface, write the copy, create the image, suggest the layout, and produce dozens of variations almost immediately, it becomes very easy to skip the uncomfortable parts of creating.

The staring at the blank page.

The bad first attempt.

The erasing.

The uncertainty.

The frustration.

The excitement when something finally starts working.

The anxiety of showing another person something that came out of your own head.

Those feelings sound inefficient, but they are also deeply connected to why many of us became designers.

When I draw something with a pencil, I am not just producing an image. I am sitting with something long enough to understand it. My hand cannot move faster than I can think. I have to let time pass between my thoughts to notice the feelings, the emotions and the stillness.

AI can expand our process, True; but I also don’t want to outsource every uncomfortable moment of creation.

Sometimes I still want the pencil.

I want the blank piece of paper.

I want to draw something badly and figure out why it looks wrong.

I want to feel the frustration, curiosity, anxiety, wonder, and satisfaction that come from making something myself.

I want the struggle.

After more than two decades of moving from paper to Photoshop to product design to code and now AI, I think that matters more to me than it used to.

As designers, we should embrace what these new tools allow us to do.

But every once in a while, I think we should put them down.

Pick up a pencil, art brush, anything and make something.

And remember what it feels like to be the real person behind crafting the work.

Embracing the struggle and the emotions is part of the process and what makes us grow. We should not automate that.

I Don’t Want AI to Take Away the Struggle was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.