The headline is the argument: AI cannot design. Not yet. Sidebar's piece makes this case without hedging, targeting the designers who have already integrated tools like Midjourney, Firefly, and Figma AI into their daily workflows and are quietly watching output quality degrade.
The core claim is structural, not aesthetic. AI removes friction from production but has no stakes in the result. The human editor, the person who knows when a layout feels wrong before they can say why, is the last load-bearing wall in the process. Remove that person and you get statistically average output optimized for approval, not quality.
What makes this worth reading in full is not the conclusion, which you already have. It is the specific breakdown of where AI fails: spatial reasoning, typographic hierarchy, context-aware restraint. If you are billing clients for design work and using these tools, this piece is a liability assessment, not a think piece.
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