AI is turning a lot of designers into factory workers

AI is making us all work like factory workers, and most of us are working at the speed of the machine, at the speed of AI, while the smartest of us are detecting the pace at which they work with AI. Let me explain what I mean by that. This is one of my loosely scripted videos. I just really want to talk about some things that's been on my mind just from being away from YouTube for such a long time. Everybody has different opinions about where this technology is headed. Everybody has different opinions and everybody thinks that they understand what the future holds. But the truth about it is that nobody really does. Even the people shaping the technology from the topmost players like OpenAI, Claude, a lot of them are building features every day, but we still don't know what is happening, where we are headed and what this technology is going to look like in the past 10 years, which is fine because people are just figuring things out. But going back to my opening statements and the title of this video, which is probably why you clicked, I've realized that people are using this technology like factory workers and the smartest people are actually dictating the pace at which they use the technology, which is the right thing to And let me break this down further. If you think about a factory, you would picture some kind of fast-moving conveyor belt that has some packages coming up on it. And then you have like 3 people picking up things from the conveyor belt and packaging them and processing them to the next level or to the next phase of the manufacturing process. And this is exactly what the picture in a factory looks like. What happens is that the conveyor belt is usually moving at a really, really, really fast speed, and people are just right there doing the packaging and doing all of those things. So those people have to move at the pace of the conveyor belt. Their work is very, very defined. They don't have to do too much thinking. All they just need to do is pick the package from the conveyor belt and put it to the next phase of the manufacturing process, and that is done. But you also have some people that you wouldn't see in the factory. They'd probably be in the offices. They are the ones that are controlling the pace of the machine. They can say that, oh, in the next 6 months, we want to have manufactured 30 million products. Therefore, we need to make this machine slightly faster so that it can churn out more products and so that our factory workers can do more work. And then that way, we're going to hit our target. So if you look at the organizational structure, The factory worker is the lowest person in the organization, and then the machine is more important than the factory worker, and then the person kind of like controlling the machine is more important than the machine. The reason I painted this analogy is because currently with the way things are moving and with the way a lot of people are engaging and using AI in their day-to-day work, they're actually using AI like a factory worker, because what you're basically just doing now is whatever problem you have, you find it so easy to default to these tools to help you solve that problem. In itself, I don't think it's a bad thing, but I think we all need to do the work of understanding where using these tools actually fits in our processes. I, as a designer, in the last 6 months, I've been trying to really figure out where it fits. I've been stress testing AI in my design process to understand where AI really fits in my process, where it makes me a better designer, and where it makes me a terrible designer. The reason I'm saying this, and the reason I'm literally speaking through all of this right now, is because If you're not able to determine where this thing actually fits in your process, then you're not going to be different from a factory worker. And what is wrong with being a factory worker? I'll tell you, everything is wrong with being a factory worker. One of the things that have been said about AI, one of the ways that people monger fear in AI is that they tell you that, you know, AI isn't going to replace you. The person that uses AI is going to be the person that will replace you. While I think that is true, I also think that It doesn't really, it doesn't really, it still doesn't make you a valuable person. The fact that somebody that uses AI shouldn't be able to replace you isn't all of the value that you can provide. The thing that happens when you are a factory worker or when you come across as a factory worker to your employer is that it means that you are a disposable tool and you're not an indispensable talent that you should actually be. And what this means is that AI isn't exactly replacing anyone's jobs. AI isn't replacing anyone, but AI is making it so easy for your employer to get another factory worker to replace you. That is, if you are not able to show the value that you bring. Beyond just writing prompts and relying on these tools, then you're just a factory worker, which means that your employer can easily go into the market and find another factory worker that they can give instructions to. And then that factory worker can replace you. That is what it means to be replaced by AI, to be honest. It just means being replaced by another person that can do the same thing that you do. But there are people that have this amount of insane talent, that the talent is so dense that they've become indispensable. And they've gone one or two steps above the level of a factory worker, because they are not working at the speed of the machine. Working at the speed of the machine means having to every day read the hundreds of things that hundreds of thousands of words that AI tools generate, generate, they tend to generate a lot of words. And when you're trying to work with them, you just read so much, and then you just ingest so much information, you supply so much information, because they are so quick in generating this, you are going to be moving from one tool to the other. And you're just ingesting context across everything, and you can't remember everything. And then your work that you do ends up being unprofessional, the quality is lacking, and then your work is just average. It doesn't even make you better than you would have been if you actually did it by yourself. And the reason for this is that because you think like you have these tools, and they make you fast, you start optimizing for speed over the quality of the work that you should actually do. And guess who optimizes for speed? A factory worker. That is it. Like, the quality of the work is determined by the machine. The conveyor belt that is doing all of the work in the factory actually determines the quality. They are the ones that are able to make sure that all of the packaging is nice to specification. But a factory worker is just responsible for how quick they are able to respond to the speed of the machine. So they are working at the speed of the machine. And what you want to do is do the inverse, right? You should be the one determining the pace that the machine moves. The only way that you can determine the pace at which you work with AI is to slow down and genuinely reevaluate your processes and understand where AI fits into it. Before you start automating everything, you should actually identify what it is that you're doing that is worth automating. When all of these tools came in, like you could feel like, of course you could feel like that kind of like excitement and aha moment that, oh, finally I can write all of this code. I have a video that literally I spoke about designers avoiding the inevitable, the fact that designers are going to need to start getting into development and start coding. I still believe that that is true because these tools help us to be able to do that. But at the same time, you need to be able to understand where it fits in your process, right? There's a difference between being able to use AI to code, to create internal tools or personal tools that can help improve the quality of your work, like a design tool that you can use to move faster. Than actually trying to replace your backend engineer because AI can now code for you, because these tools actually reward your deep expertise. So rather than trying to do somebody else's role, like rather than trying to become a software engineer because AI tools are available, or trying to become a product manager because AI tools are available, you can go so much deeper into being the best designer that you can be. You can obsess. On a problem, you can iterate 100 times. You can go slower so that you can go faster. You shouldn't be optimizing for the speed of the work that you deliver while the quality of the work suffers. Like, in fact, you should completely avoid YouTube videos or any kind of, um, content that optimizes for speed, that tells you that I was able to do XYZ in 2 hours, or I was able to do XYZ in one weekend, because those people are baiting you with content and showing you half-baked work. You should also ignore any kind of content that says that designers are cooked or something that says that designers are not really, really— something that says that designers are cooked or content that says that designers