In web design is AI a tool or a designer?

Are they cool?

Majority of modern website builders offer full-website generator functionality, which is amazing. You can type a prompt and get a complete website in a minute. Need customization? Not a problem, modify a particular section of the website, or even a small widget with another prompt. Website builders also back you up with graphical assets and copies. Images, photos, illustrations, placeholders and even production copies can be generated in the same app. Don’t forget about localization and translations — it’s all included! It all sounds cool, but let’s talk about downsides.

Downsides

The biggest issue with website builders is maintenance and customization. With hot deadlines and staff shortage (it’s no-code tool, you don’t need to assign a dev to such project) it can soon become a real mess. Lack of comprehensive UI design system (AI generators of most website builders don’t generate it) makes things even worse. Finally, one of the major disadvantages is inability to migrate a website from one platform to another. You can achieve such migration, but it’s not straightforward, and you will loose some bells and whistles in the process.

AI content generators introduce additional problems. Very likely a generated website will miss some unique twist, a human touch if you wish. AI models are trained on existing datasets, they produce content from the parts of a dataset. Even if the model will combine pieces from here and there, it will still look like something you’ve already seen before. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to use a generated website as is, you still need to customize it. It’s not rare that the final result of a website barely resembles initially generated version. Human interruption is also inevitable when it comes to deep SEO or performance related modifications — fancy animations and complex layouts are often tricky.

Is AI worth it then?

Yes, content generators in website builders are definitely worth it, but as a narrow purpose tool, not as a whole replacement for a designer. Some editing apps provide solutions to numerous small routine tasks, which many graphic designers have to deal with frequently.

For example designer can generate or process (e.g. remove a background) an image asset right within an editing app in seconds, something he would otherwise spend at least a few minutes on. One cool feature some editing apps offer is replicating a content. Imagine you designed a list with a couple of items, but for a better presentation you need a dozen of them — AI can replicate other items, based on the design of existing ones.

This list can go on, and I bet over time it will expand heavily. Content generators do pretty well as tools that help with specific problems, but there is no strong evidence that they will replace humans entirely in the foreseeable future. Creativity is not about content generation.