AI won't replace designers because it lacks taste and subjective opinion. Instead, as AI gets better at generating highly opinionated (though not perfect) designs, it will serve as a powerful exploration tool. This plants more flags in the option space, allowing human designers to react, curate, and push the most promising directions further, amplifying their strategic role.

Contrary to fears that AI will fill the internet with generic content, it's empowering more people to build interesting and creative projects. Users are discovering more new websites now than in the past five years, suggesting a resurgence of the web's early, experimental spirit.

AI's primary impact on design isn't just making it accessible. For experts, it's a tool to rapidly explore a vast space of creative possibilities. This allows them to sample far more options and apply their taste and intentionality to a much broader canvas than was previously possible.

By deliberately incorporating physical buttons and switches, Ferrari’s first EV, designed by Apple's Jony Ive, challenges the industry's iPhone-inspired aesthetic. This suggests a broader pivot in user experience away from digital-only interfaces as screen fatigue grows.

In a crowded digital space, products and marketing with a unique, even polarizing, visual style are more likely to capture attention and be memorable than those following standard design trends. Daring to be different visually can be a powerful competitive advantage.

The host successfully prompted Google's Gemini 3.0 to redesign his personal website in the style of Microsoft XP. This demonstrates that AI can move beyond generic templates by leveraging unconventional, nostalgic design languages, creating a memorable user experience that stands out.

For creative work like design, AI's true value isn't just accelerating tasks. It's enabling designers to explore a much wider option space, test more possibilities, and apply more craft to the final choice. Since design is non-deterministic, AI serves creative exploration more than simple speed.

With AI tools like Gemini 3.0 democratizing execution, the ability to generate unique, scroll-stopping ideas and provide strong design references becomes the key differentiator. Good taste and a clear vision now matter more than the technical ability to implement a design from scratch.

The true creative potential for AI in design isn't generating safe, average outputs based on training data. Instead, AI should act as a tool to help designers interpolate between different styles and push them into novel, underexplored aesthetic territories, fostering originality rather than conformity.