07/27/2026
*If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me whether AI had already replaced me, I’d probably have enough money to retire and actually let AI replace me, or at least try.*
Robots have been roaming creative teams for almost three years now, and despite the remarkable improvement in their design capabilities, they’re still not quite there. No tool has yet managed to truly understand and apply composition and typography in a genuinely inspiring way. They know how to imitate, but they still don’t fully understand the rules and principles of art and design, let alone how to break them and be truly creative and original.
No, I’m not saying that every designer is original. As the quote often attributed to Pablo Picasso goes: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
Everyone draws inspiration and steals ideas. But when a human being, a talented one, yes, does it, they use judgment, develop the idea and adapt it to the brief, the client and the medium.
Then there are the spelling mistakes, quality issues and image generation that still falls short. To get the result to a good place, you need to review it manually and fix it in Photoshop, or keep going back and forth with one of the chatbots, which, of course, will fix one thing while breaking something else along the way.
At the end of the day, product managers and marketers at large companies simply don’t have time for endless conversations with a chatbot, only to end up with an output that isn’t suitable for professional production, print or digital use.
So, what is AI good for? As of this writing, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, an excellent production assistant and an obedient team member.
Need multiple sizes of an ad I designed, or an entire banner campaign? Something that used to take me two or three hours can now be completed in the background in ten minutes.
Image searches? We used to spend hours browsing stock libraries to find something close to what we needed, and even then, it still had to be edited. Today, I can generate the exact person, character or visual I have in mind.
Changing backgrounds, upscaling images and making edits, tasks that once took a long time can now be completed in minutes.
That frees up my time to increase revenue, market the business, write articles and generate video art, which, by the way, is where the real revolution in art and advertising is happening right now.
*(In the image: Pablo Picasso generating Cubism.)*
