I love AI. I use it all the time. I have claws, I have claude max 20x, I’m on a 40+ day GitHub commit streak, I’m currently using nanobanana to help me remodel my house. Hell, I’m one half of a consultancy focused entirely around AI.

But time and time again, I’m seeing evidence that AI has literally no critical eye for its own work.

One example: I’ve been hiring AI experts on behalf of clients. My favourite footgun exercise is to ask them to prepare a presentation for an interview stage, with the explicit expectation that they use AI to do so.

The best candidates use AI (of course) but stand firmly between its output and what they’ll present back to me. They know their material back to front. They probably wrote a bunch of it themselves, or shaped it hard. Then AI helped to mould, expand or tighten their words, before the human jumped in at the end to cast a critical eye.

Those presentations fit into around 1 slide a minute, with under 50 words on the slide. As in, the bare minimum that any solid pre-AI presentation would stick to in order to be even presentable in the allotted time, let alone actually compelling as a live presentation. They then present it confidently - never needing to read their own slides to know what they’re presenting next.

But the vast majority of responses have been 3-4 slides per minute of allotted time, containing an absolute soup of paragraphs, bullet points and drivel. What’s worse is how painfully obvious it is that not only has the presenter not taken the editorial eye over the words, it’s not clear that they’ve even read them.

People. This is basic.

You are accountable for your output. The AI does not look bad if your AI slop is on show. You do. Especially if the person the other end knows anything about how these models work.

This has been true of written words since GPT-3 when the Jasper AI slop cannon reared its muzzle and fired its first salvo at the walls of Linkedin think posts. Once you see the AI tropes, you can’t unsee them. AI responding to AI on my feeds all day every day, and I’m seemingly Haley Joel Osment.

It came for software engineering and anyone who’s build maintainable applications knows that without significant context engineering at multiple levels, AI is not a good software engineer.

The same for images. We can now spot AI images (or us terminally online can) a mile off — to create something with any value at all you must go beyond the first prompt and refine, refine, refine.

And now it’s interface design’s turn. Claude Design may have been built by what will possibly end up the biggest company the world has ever seen, but their model can’t design for shit.

I’m sorry. It can’t.

We’ll undoubtedly see successful companies in AI design (and to be clear, I want our reliance on drawing rectangles to go away) — but the one-shot design skill is currently a myth, to anyone who knows what they’re looking at.

The ‘designers are cooked’ narrative is currently typically accompanied by pound shop versions of Anthropic greige UI slop - before that it was blue/purple gradients. It will evolve again.

Like vibe coding an app, the LLM’s output might look good on first glance. But dig deeper, or try to build on that foundation and it becomes an exercise in nailing jelly to the wall. And trust me, us designers know.

This will undoubtedly improve

Good people are working on this - either for profit or for love of the game.

The design tooling space is on fire, from exciting projects to build real replacements for Figma et al to ‘design skills’ and DESIGN.md files attempting to steer models into more interesting and high quality outputs.

(My hunch is that this problem will be solved in the application layer, not the model layer, so some of these more ambitious products may win out.)

Design teams are also starting to listen. Long term I have little concern around the quality of design of established products suffering here — in fact undoubtedly we’ll see more interesting and polished interfaces as tools are developed and mastered.

What is also obvious is that good design plus AI can create extraordinary things. Suddenly designers can realise their visions for how something can feel, with no handoff or slow feedback loop with an engineer. Whole new design trends and patterns are emerging from a new group of people having access to new tools.

But guess what. Each still took time. Nothing actually good was created slapdash. The tools increase creativity and add capabilities as well as speeding designers up.

And that effort will always be valued, as this tweet by Hillary Gridley describes perfectly. We’ll continue to see enormous gains in productivity and capability through AI, but ‘There will always be a signalling arbitrage opportunity in keeping a human in the loop’.

That’s good news for those who can maintain their quality bar when all others are dropping theirs.

Make sure you check your AI outputs and that could be you.

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This space is moving fast: I reserve the right to change my opinion as models evolve.