It didn’t start with the machine. It didn’t start with the prompt. It started when we agreed that design was a service. Not a question.

AI is sowing unrest. Right before our eyes, it slips into the shoes of artists, designers, copywriters. Into our shoes. Questions multiply like rabbits: "Is this the end of the designer's profession?" "Will machines replace us?" "Does the world still need humans?"

In an age where technology is seeping into the realm of creativity, designers stand as the last bastion of human expression. Generative AI not only provides tools but also poses unsettling questions: can a machine possess the soul of an artist? This is a moment when we must confront the essence of our creative identity, reflect on what makes us human, and where we are heading. Is this the end of an era or the beginning of an unknown, yet fascinating journey?

But contrary to the logic of popular headlines, I want to start from somewhere else. From a place where all of this did not begin. Because, for me, AI didn’t cause the crisis. It simply exposed it – with shameless, algorithmic precision. Like litmus paper. Like a light switched on in a room that had been messy for years. But if the mess wasn’t visible, why talk about it?

The emergence of generative AI tools has triggered a sense of threat and a professional crisis among designers. And that feeling is only growing stronger. However, it’s worth noting that the roots of this identity crisis go deeper than technology itself. Paradoxically, AI became a catalyst exposing problems that had long existed in design. Yes, long before. Designers had already begun stepping back from the roles of independent initiators and critics, surrendering instead to roles as executors serving commercial goals. In other words, the crisis wasn’t "caused" by AI – it merely found design already in crisis, in my view due to the loss of professional autonomy.

The commotion sparked by image and text generators is more panic than thought. On one side: admiration for the power of technology. On the other: neurotic questions about the purpose of our profession. It wasn't the AI revolution that brought us here. It was the logical consequence of gradually abandoning what I would call cultural ambition. The transformation from "a person of ideas" to "a person who gets tasks done." And now, when the machine begins taking over those tasks – we realize we have no Plan B. So what exactly are we?

If we look deeper into this identity crisis, we inevitably reach the core: the system. Specifically, the ruthless dominance of market logic and the corporate ideology of management that has infiltrated the field of design. Over recent decades, design has become increasingly entangled with the market – until it became one of its tools. Not a partner. Just another function of growth. As a result, the culture of design has been reduced. Narrowed. Smoothed out. Critical and emancipatory impulses – once at least somewhat present – have been pushed to the margins. Or better: squeezed out of the brief. Because there is rarely room in a brief for discomfort, reflection, or tension. Yet design that doesn’t irritate, chafe, or crack open reality is mere decoration. And managerial logic has become the verifier of all things. Everything, even the creative industries, must now function efficiently, measurably, without unnecessary emotion. In that spirit, design ceased to be an autonomous cultural practice and became a pure business tool. The enthusiasm around AI? Just another installment of the same logic: more, faster, cheaper.

The loss of the designer’s former role didn’t result from AI's arrival, but from an earlier submission to the mechanisms of late capitalism. The designer ceased to be a voice and became a cog in production. It’s about a reality in which technological expansion devours the humanist impulse. Creativity has been hijacked by the regime of productivity. We now create artifacts that resemble parasites more than carriers of culture. And AI isn’t to blame. What’s to blame is that we handed over the controls – surrendered ourselves to market logic. So if the designer wants to survive, they must rediscover a sense of purpose.

We must rethink the foundations. Because design no longer happens merely between a human and an object. It happens in a living, interwoven network. That’s where the conscious designer operates, shaping relationships between people, things, and systems. And if they abdicate that role, they leave the space open to algorithms programmed to maximize profit. Not values. In this setup, design is no longer about "making something pretty" or "intuitive," but about shaping the systems of our coexistence. Human–machine–society. Co-creation under tension.

From another perspective, AI also challenges the myth of the designer as a solitary demiurge. In Barthes’ spirit of "the death of the author," we might now speak of the "death of the designer" as a singular genius. Design becomes a collective endeavor: people, data, machines, context. And the designer? Perhaps they can find their place as a curator – the one who initiates, moderates, edits. And, crucially, takes responsibility. Maybe it is in this very crisis, on the edge of the old paradigm, that opportunity is born. Not to return to old roles, but to transcend them. To see AI as a stimulus for redefining one’s own subjectivity. The designer not as a lone hero, but as a conscious actor within a network. One of many. But still responsible. And perhaps more needed than ever.

The designer’s crisis isn’t just about aesthetics per se – it’s a crisis of human placement within the structure of late capitalism. Design, once seen as applied art, is now a full-fledged engine of growth in the data-driven economy. Business gets that. And so the designer has been pulled into the orbit of capital – and with it: the trap of productivity. It’s a natural phase of the same logic: do it faster, do it cheaper. For capital: it’s an opportunity. For designers: a loss of control.

I have no doubt that a small number of us will carve out new strategic roles, tackling complex, un-automatable problems. Others will be downgraded to tool operators. Still others will simply fall out of the system. In this context, managerialism has come to dominate much of design – flattening it, standardizing it, filing it into boxes. Because the designer’s crisis today is, quite simply, a crisis of labor in a world that increasingly doesn’t need humans. And as design has become commercialized, it has lost its cultural force. The designer today often functions as an automated arm of a marketing department. But even then – even unconsciously – their work is not neutral. Design always does something to the world.

A simple example: the interfaces of social media platforms – designed not for the user's benefit, but for the maximization of their attention. The result? Polarization, attention deficit, erosion of dialogue. Form becomes content. Every designed thing enters the social tissue, alters it – and then comes back, ricocheting, to reshape us.
The problem is that, as creators, we too often focus only as far as the brief reaches. Our reflection has capitulated. Yet a designer could be someone who asks questions, instead of just generating answers. Design is becoming a global template, cut off from the context of our shared being. So can design once again be a practice of negotiating meaning? The designer’s crisis is, at its core, the crisis of abandoning the critical function. But if we regain the courage to ask "why?" and not just "how?" – then maybe the light at the end of the tunnel hasn’t gone out after all.

An identity crisis for designers in the face of AI? Of course. But this isn’t a story about technology. Not really. It’s a story about us. AI simply found us where we’d already been for some time – in a semi-conscious state of forfeited agency. Not authority, because that hasn’t been needed by anyone for a while – but our internal sense of agency. When a new, more efficient way of operating appeared, we panicked. But that fear isn’t about the future. It’s about the present, in which we no longer know who we are.

And yet, I don’t want to drown in pessimism. I prefer to believe that this very moment – this strange historical hesitation – is AI offering us a chance. A chance to revalue the profession. To act against the grain. To return to reflection, to disruptive creative ferment. And maybe it is here, in this grotesque stage design – somewhere between prompt and product – that design can begin to awaken. To rise from the cozy armchair of service provider, look around at the rubble, and start asking questions. Maybe this isn’t a revolution. Maybe it’s just the first breath of one. Because if not, all that awaits us is rigor mortis.

Design can once again be a stance. Not a product, but an intervention. Not the beautification of reality, but its conceptualization. And certainly not just another item in a service catalog. I don’t believe there is any "end of the designer profession." Only a painful revealing of the illusion we’ve inhabited for years. If design wants to survive, it must once again narrate the world. Not just smooth it over. It must become a political gesture. A choice of ideas, not interests. Because if we don’t do that – AI will. According to the brief.

Is this the end of our game? I don’t know. But it is certainly the end of pretending. The world doesn’t need more "image designers." It needs constructors of meaning. Radical believers in sense. Interventionalists. Those who dare to be more than just another sleek tool in a sleek system. And maybe right now – amid the ruins of an old ethos – there is room to build identity anew. Time to be engineers of meaning, not operators of trends.