Every time a new AI model drops, the same headlines start doing the rounds: design is dead, designers are cooked, this changes everything. It’s almost predictable at this point.
But if you’ve spent any real time on the internet lately, you’ve probably noticed something else—a wave of websites that all look like they were made by the same person. And in many cases, they were. Or at least, by the same model.
There’s this very specific “AI aesthetic” that keeps showing up. Purple and blue gradients, dark mode by default, glowing elements everywhere, a kind of over-polished, vaguely futuristic look that feels more like a sci-fi demo than an actual product. It’s interesting, but also strangely uniform.
And the thing is, no serious designer is actually designing like that in the real world.
So where did this style even come from?
What I’m more interested in, though, is not the aesthetic—it’s the tools themselves. The newer generation of AI tools aimed directly at design work. Things like layout generators, interface builders, and design assistants that promise to take you from idea to UI in seconds.
On paper, they sound great. And to be fair, they do have potential.
But right now? They’re still very much in beta, and it shows.
If you’re a designer and you’ve used any of these tools, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The outputs are inconsistent, the decisions feel generic, and there’s a clear lack of taste. Not just in visuals, but in structure, hierarchy, and intent. They produce something that looks like design, but doesn’t quite behave like it.
The real risk isn’t that designers will be replaced. It’s that people who don’t know what good looks like will start accepting these outputs as “good enough.”
That’s where the real problem starts.
This is where the whole idea of “AI slop” really lives.
It’s not just about bad outputs—it’s about the inability to tell that they’re bad in the first place. When you don’t have a strong sense of design, branding, or user experience, it’s easy to mistake something polished for something effective. The result is a growing number of products that feel hollow. They function, but they don’t connect.
You see it in both design and code. Products that technically work, but lack identity. No clear brand, no real voice, no cohesion between what the product does and how it presents itself.
And that’s a problem, because design is not decoration. It’s differentiation.
In today’s startup world, design is one of the clearest signals that you know what you’re doing. Not just in terms of building an app, but in building a business.
Because businesses aren’t just products. They’re brands. They’re experiences. They’re how people feel when they interact with what you’ve built, and whether they trust you enough to come back.
That kind of thinking doesn’t come from templates or generated layouts. It comes from intention.
And right now, that’s still very much a human advantage.
Will AI catch up?
Probably—at least to a point.
But here’s the uncomfortable take: AI isn’t creative in the way we are. It recombines, it predicts, it mirrors patterns it has already seen. It can get very good at producing what already exists, maybe even refining it, but coming up with something truly new, something that feels culturally relevant and human—that’s a different challenge entirely.
Because design doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s shaped by lived experience, by context, by subtle cues in how people behave and what they care about. There are gaps between the data—messy, human gaps—that AI doesn’t fully understand.
That’s where originality comes from.
So why the “yet” in the title?
Because AI moves fast.
We’ve all seen how quickly things can evolve. One minute it’s the infamous Will Smith eating spaghetti video that looks like a fever dream, and the next it’s a version that’s almost indistinguishable from reality. The pace of improvement is real, and it would be naive to ignore that.
The same will happen with design tools. They will get better. They will become more useful. Over time, they’ll likely become strong companions in the design process, much like coding tools have over the past few years.
But that doesn’t mean they replace the role. It means they reshape it.
If you’re building a startup, ignoring design right now is a mistake.
Not a small one—a fundamental one.
Design is leverage. It’s one of the few areas where small teams can punch above their weight. It’s how you turn a functional product into something people actually want to use, talk about, and trust. It’s how your marketing and your product start to feel like they belong to the same company.
Investing in design isn’t just about making things look good. It’s about understanding your customer, shaping their experience, and building a brand that holds up over time.
AI can help you get there faster.
But it won’t decide what “good” looks like for you.
At least not yet.