My AI obsession. It feels like a cheat code. That's the problem.

The speed is real

AI made me faster. No debate. First drafts come easier. Ideation moves quicker. The gap between "I have an idea" and "here's a version" went from hours to minutes. I use it for everything from brainstorming headlines to roughing out content strategies to pressure-testing my own thinking. It's genuinely useful. It has also, without my permission, rearranged the way I work.

I used to start projects by staring at a blank page for an uncomfortable amount of time. That discomfort was productive. It forced me to sit with the problem until something real surfaced. Now I open a chat window and get options in seconds. The blank page is gone. And I'm starting to realize the blank page was doing more for me than I gave it credit for.

I listen to guys like Liam Ottley and Eric Sui talk about AI and I'm nodding the whole time. Build faster. Automate the repetitive stuff. Use the tools before the tools replace you. I believe all of it. I'm doing all of it. But I also wonder if the speed is covering for something I haven't fully processed yet.

Is it making us dumber?

Not dumber in the obvious way. I'm not forgetting how to design. But I'm outsourcing parts of my thinking that I used to do manually, and some of those parts were where my best ideas came from. The slow part. The messy middle. The weird tangent that led somewhere unexpected because I had to work through it with my own brain.

AI doesn't do weird tangents. It does patterns. It gives you the most statistically likely version of a good answer. And most of the time that's useful. But "most likely" and "most original" are not the same thing. And I'm starting to notice that the more I let AI handle the early thinking, the more my work sounds like everyone else who's using the same tools. That's not a quality problem. It's a voice problem. My voice used to come from the struggle. Now the struggle is optional. So where does the voice come from?

Am I only scratching the surface?

Here's what keeps me up at night. I'm fully convinced I'm on the right path. AI isn't going anywhere and the designers who embrace it will outpace the ones who don't. That part is settled for me.

What's not settled is whether I'm using it deeply enough to actually transform my work, or just deeply enough to speed it up. There's a difference. Speed is scratching the surface. Transformation is rethinking the entire process. I haven't gotten there yet. I'm faster, but I'm not fundamentally different. And if I'm being honest, I don't know how to maintain my unique human perspective while going deeper into a tool that's trained on everyone else's. That's the real question. Not "should I use AI." Not "will it replace me." The question is: how do I go all in without losing the thing that makes my work mine? I don't have the answer. But I'd rather be the designer asking the question than the one pretending the cheat code doesn't come with a cost.