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The day I realized AI wasn’t coming for my UX job
(I knew it was coming to rip it apart and put it back together)
Two years ago, I sat frozen at my desk. ChatGPT wasn’t even a year old. The deadline for a major UX project I was working on (in my company I founded with my former PhD student) was approaching, and I had nothing. Not a wireframe. Not a prototype. Not even a coherent concept. Just dark old emptiness — inside and out. And a growing sense of panic.
“Have you tried using one of those AI tools?” I casually read on a Design Slack that I’m part of.
First, I scoffed. As a professor and part-time designer, who had spent years honing my craft, the suggestion felt a little bit like an insult. “I don’t need a robot to do my job,” I thought in that moment, defensively.
But that night, I couldn’t really sleep. The thought of not being able to find any inspiration haunted me. What if I was becoming obsolete? What if the skills I’d spent years developing were about to be replaced by code and algorithms? I mean I’d been playing with ChatGPT right on the day it came out. And generally, I was so impressed with generative models, but I just didn’t think they were quite there yet. And the tech headlines weren’t helping: “AI Threatens Millions of Jobs” and others like that, which ended up leading to…
