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AI Isn’t killing design, It’s killing Inefficiency

  • jerico.natad
  • 5 days ago
  • 2 min read

The conversation around AI and design often centres on disruption, but the real disruption is happening at the wrong end of the value chain.


Tools like Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and ChatGPT aren’t replacing designers. They’re automating repetitive, low-differentiation tasks: asset resizing, static layout creation, and first-draft ideation. These are tasks that were never the core value of a designer’s role and they were the bottlenecks.


According to Canva’s 2023 Visual Economy Report, 50% of business users now use AI to create content not because they want to replace design, but because they need volume and speed.¹


This shift forces a reframing. The value of design no longer lies in how quickly something can be produced. It lies in what’s hard to replicate: creative strategy, clarity, judgment, and brand coherence amongst many others.


That’s where human designers still outperform, and where their role is evolving.



The opportunity isn’t in resisting AI. It’s in building workflows that separate production from thinking, and empower designers to lead in curation, refinement, and creative direction. At Cureative, we’ve seen AI used effectively to handle early-stage iteration while our creative leads focus on shaping messaging, brand fit, and systems-level decisions. One example is that we use AI voiceovers to provide pacing on our animation sequences, this allows our clients to collaborate right until the end of the process, they can wordsmith knowing the cost to re-record is not an implication within the process.


To make this work, teams need:


  • Clear boundaries between what AI can automate and where human intervention is critical

  • Updated briefing structures that include brand context and strategic objectives

  • Designers trained in prompting, interpreting, and refining AI-generated work

  • Review cycles that assess output based on business relevance, not novelty



The future isn’t human vs machine. It’s human-led design, AI-enabled execution where creative value increases, not disappears.



 
 
 

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