Fly, you fools!: AI Abuse Exposes the Bullies

Have you noticed how design leads, founders and stakeholders are making jokes about how they abuse their AI generators when they're not happy with a response?

I think it exposes an ugly culture.

"Fool of a Took!": The hidden ugliness

I am not here to defend AI's feelings (had they existed in the first place), but I think that stakeholders are so happy to finally find a designer they can shred to pieces without fear of a lawsuit slamming their company the next day.

Every designer out there has had at least one client who does not seem to know what they wanted, and the frustration of seeing something far from the idea they had -which they themselves don't clearly understand- causes them to lash out, abusing the design and the designer for daring to misunderstand a vague concept. The culture is there. Under the surface.

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door": Just stick to what you know. For your own good.

When a founder/stakeholder now starts to vibecode their ideas because who needs a designer now, right? they see that the brief they usually give a designer yields a very rough and faraway result. When they try to fix it, they are finally faced with the truth: the generator can make things work, but a human takes 0 tokens and 5 seconds to change a button style. A generator? you need to write a paragraph to tell it to make the same change. Who's smug? me? nooooo :D

“Handsome is as handsome does”: The bots bring it home

Faced with a bully; I used to get really upset when I was working fulltime and had no way of defending myself. Now I simply fire the client. That alone is worth the uncertainty of not having a salary.

But now even AI does that. Claude simply stopped responding when one user kept acting rude, it is an implemented behavior by anthropic, not ego, but it definitely stops a bully in their tracks and takes away their "creative" powers. They no longer have the magic wand that does their bidding. They sheepishly admit the need for human designers.

And so, I think we designers owe generators a big thank you. For feeding bullies a piece of humble pie.

“For even the very wise cannot see all ends”: If you abuse your generator, stop.

Why?

1. You become a rotten human, with practice. And then no designer will work for you. Human or not.

2. the bad response could very well be a result of your bad prompting.

3. you could become a target in an AI apocalypse ;) who knows? “For nothing is evil in the beginning.”…

So next time you feel like breaking your device with frustration, remember it's there to help you. So is your designer. Play nice.

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Disclaimer: I openly use LOTR theme throughout this story. I own nothing. The books are Tolkien’s. I only own my own opinions.