The wrong audience

From my friend and former colleague Autumn:

AI can’t replace Content Designers. Not now, and maybe not ever.

But.

That’s not what actually matters. What matters is whether your hiring manager, C-suite, or other stakeholder thinks it can.

I see this type of frustration growing among my UX peers. We’re being asked to do more and more at a higher quality than ever while constantly being having to justify the very existence of our jobs. And, as Autumn points out the people who wield power over us are the furthest removed from our day-to-day work and most susceptible to hype cycles, reminiscent of deep-sea mining.

And the most salient point is that AI only does the easy part of UX, such as picking out obvious components or writing simple copy:

What AI will never do is question whether my question is the right one to be asking. In this example, the AI didn’t suggest that, possibly, an error message isn’t necessary at all.

If I’m designing an appointment selector, it makes sense to only show the user what’s available. Why would I allow them to click on something that is only going to throw an error?

Of course there’s nuance to this. Maybe I want my customers to know that I usually have a 4PM slot. Fine: it can be grayed out with an explanation on hover, or it can be explained in a subtitle before the selections appear. But that’s the point: it depends on how the entire feature flows.

In other words, An LLM’s not going to tell you no.