Our world, as we knew it, was shattered in 2022.
A magical robot entered the chat. One that writes, designs, answers emails, builds strategies, and probably could’ve made a decent cup of tea if you asked nicely enough.
Naturally, panic followed. Designers suddenly became “optional”, writers were “on their way out”, and entire industries were being declared obsolete by people who had just discovered the prompt box five minutes earlier.
And then there were the smarty pants. You know the ones.
“I’ll just fire my designer François. AI can do it.”
Confident, efficient, and slightly ahead of themselves.
Because what comes next is always the same story. You open your shiny new tool and type your first prompt with the confidence of someone who has just discovered fire.
“Create a logo. Make it modern. Minimal. Unique. Award-winning. But also cheap. And quick.”
It delivers.
You pause, stare, and tilt your head slightly. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely not good either. So you try again.
“Make it better. Make it pop. Make it more premium. Fix the melting eye.”
Each time, the situation somehow gets worse. It fixes the eye and melts the nose. It improves the background but suddenly everything is written in Cantonese. You try again. And again. And again. At some point, it feels like you are speaking Maltese to someone on the other end of the line who is confidently replying in a completely different language, insisting they understood everything perfectly.
And somewhere between “sleek but bold but playful but serious but different but familiar”, you realise something very important.
You miss your designer, François.
Here’s why.
1. AI doesn’t understand your meltdown.
AI doesn’t understand your meltdown.
There comes a point in every project where logic quietly leaves the room and emotion takes over. You’re staring at something thinking “this just isn’t it”, and you can’t explain why. You just know. That instinct, that frustration, that gut feeling is something AI simply doesn’t share.
You can type paragraph after paragraph trying to explain what’s wrong, carefully adjusting your prompts like you’re negotiating a very delicate situation, and it will calmly return another version that is technically correct and somehow worse than the previous one.
Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, it forgets what you even started the conversation for. François wouldn’t have. He would’ve looked at it once, sighed, and said, “Yes, this isn’t working,” and you would’ve both moved forward instantly.
2. It doesn’t know what “good” feels like.
It doesn’t know what “good” feels like. AI is excellent at producing options, and it does so very quickly. It will generate fifty logos before you’ve even had your first sip of coffee, but somewhere between option seventeen and forty-two, everything starts blending together.
They all look fine, clean, and acceptable, but also completely forgettable.
You know those ideas that make you stop mid-scroll and think “this is clever”? That’s not quantity, that’s experience.
AI will give you more, but it will never lean over and say, “This one. Stop embarrassing yourself and pick this one.”
3. It has no taste.
It has no taste. You can ask for “premium”, “bold”, “clean”, “elegant”, and it will give you something that technically ticks the boxes. But taste is not a checkbox.
Taste is knowing when something is too much, when something is trying too hard, and when something is quietly doing exactly what it should.
AI will not tell you, “Jane, that flaming red background you chose is going to melt people’s eyeballs and possibly cause minor distress.”
It will happily give you your fire-red design, polished, glowing, and ready to ruin someone’s morning. You will only realise something went wrong when someone puts on sunglasses just to ‘check out’ your post.
AI always has something to say. It just never tells you when you’re wrong.
4. It doesn’t read the room.
It doesn’t read the room.
Every brand has context, personality, and a very specific way it should behave. AI can mimic styles, but it does not understand people.
It doesn’t know the difference between an ad aimed at Mary, your loyal client who still writes things in a notebook and says “I saw it on the Facebook”, and another aimed at the crowd lining up outside your competitor’s shop because they ran a giveaway on Instagram and everyone lost their minds.
These small things matter. AI gives you something that works “for everyone”, which usually means it connects with absolutely no one.
5. It doesn’t care about your big idea.
It doesn’t care about your big idea.
To you, this project might be everything. Your business, your rebrand, your “I’ve been thinking about this for three years and even my dog has an opinion on it” idea.
There is emotion, stress, and probably a few sleepless nights behind it.
AI processes it like any other request. Fast, efficient, and completely detached. It does not care that this is your big moment. It does not feel pressure. It does not lose sleep on it.
It will not pat you on the shoulder when your big idea fails.
Sometimes you don’t just need something done quickly, you need someone to care enough to do it with your same passion.
6. It guesses. A lot.
It guesses, a lot. And it does it with confidence. If it doesn’t understand something, it will not ask. It will simply create an answer and deliver it like it has never been wrong in its life.
You ask something simple like, “How much does a milk carton cost in Malta?”
It gives you an answer.
You go to your local shop, ready to confront Doris about the 20c she has apparently been stealing from you daily.
You are emotionally prepared for conflict. Doris is not. You then realise AI was wrong, Doris was right, and now you have to walk an extra 500 metre to the next grocery store to buy your milk.
AI gets you close. Sometimes dangerously close. But knowing when something is almost right versus actually right is still very much a human skill.
7. It doesn’t replace thinking.
It doesn’t replace thinking. It replaces doing, and that is where people get confused.
Yes, it makes things faster. Yes, it removes effort. But the thinking, the strategy, the “why are we even doing this” part is still entirely on you. Bad news if you already fired François.
Because now, instead of slowly arriving at a bad idea, you are arriving there at high speed with confidence.
AI makes thinking more important, not less. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will just do the wrong thing faster.
8. It won’t save you from bad decisions.
It won’t save you from bad decisions. In fact, it will support them. Enthusiastically.
You can take a weak idea, dress it up beautifully, and suddenly it feels like you’ve done something brilliant.
You haven’t. It just looks better now. Underneath, nothing has changed. It still doesn’t solve the problem.
This is where humans step in, to question, to pause, and to gently say, “We need to rethink this before we embarrass ourselves publicly.” Instead, AI, will encourage you to make a fool out of yourself.
9. It’s not your creative partner.
It’s not your creative partner. It’s your assistant. A very fast, very capable, slightly chaotic assistant that sometimes feels like a very wild, imaginative five-year-old.
It has many ideas. Most of them are questionable.
All of them are shared with full confidence. It helps you explore, move faster, and generate options, but it will not do your work.
So no, we didn’t panic.
We opened it.
We tested it.
We learnt its language.
Also, what it couldn’t do.
We broke it a few times.
We definitely asked it to fix the melting eye more than once.
And then we did what we’ve always done.
We used the tools. But we kept the thinking.
We still have our François, he just now has a very fast assistant helping him when he’s stuck.
AI isn’t replacing creatives.
It’s just making it very obvious who actually has ideas…and who was relying on the tools all along.