A detox guide for designers navigating today’s AI discourse
We really have some shitty ways of talking about AI.
We’re about a year into the Great AI Divide, or whatever our history-keeping algorithms decide to call this moment, and even the most literate among us can’t help falling into the same old rhetorical pitfalls — ones that seem to alienate more people than they invite into the conversation.
We’re losing ourselves to our worst instincts. Not because we’re doomed, but because we’re treating this moment like a game of hot takes and hustle. But right now is actually a rare and real opportunity for a smarter, more generous conversation — one that helps our design community navigate uncertainty with clarity, creativity, and a sense of shared agency.
Instead, we’ve turned the discourse into a pissing contest.
Who can get the most engagement?
Who can rattle the most nerves?
Who can split the room and put the most distance between the supposedly old “archaic” ways and the newer, more exciting, vibey ones?
In this process we never think to ask if abdicating our creative judgment almost completely to the Large Language Model gods is a good idea. It’s like we’re a tribe of primitive Luddites offering up our drudgery in return for a magical oracle that only rewards the loudest acolytes.
We’re playing into our performative identities because we’re afraid of being left out in the cold.
Meanwhile, we’re forgetting the most important thing:
There are healthier ways to talk about all this.
Not to conjure a rose-colored world from the early 2000’s, but it was almost the exact same landscape of uncertainty, excitement, and novelty way back then. But somehow our approach and our sense of community was totally different.
Maybe Limp Bizkit deserves more credit… hmm… (remembers the backwards red hat)… nah.
But I do remember because I was there. A lot of us were. And the evidence of the discourse taking a dangerous corner today is all around us.
Healthy conversations don’t make you feel gross.
They don’t leave you rattled, reactive, or self-doubting.
They don’t flatten all of the nuance into an abstract point or pit us against each other in a weird flex-off.
They invite participation. They build. They move forward like a good improv scene — like a “yes, and…” that encourages more voices, more learning, and more possibility.
Every good designer knows that solving any complex problem means you have to identify it first.
So that’s what this is. A simple ID exercise.
A catalog of our worst impulses — not to shame, but to offer better, healthier alternatives.
I’m certain that most of what we’re doing is unconscious and unintended by good-hearted people. But that’s just the point, isn’t it?
By surfacing the patterns in how we talk about AI — often with fear, status anxiety, and noise — I’m hoping we can grow past this weird liminal phase.
Not heaven. Not hell. Just a low-level echo chamber where every LinkedIn post feels simultaneously urgent, predictable, and… exhausting.
So, what I’m proposing is a bit of a detox from our usual way of talking.
And I’m suggesting some healthy alternatives instead.
FOMO ❌
“Everyone’s ahead of me. I need to catch up or I’ll be obsolete.”
This is the dark hum of the current discourse. You see it between the lines of almost every AI post. The implication is simple. If you’re not prompt-engineering throughout your entire design process, you’re already behind.
Simple fear of missing out.
It’s not just anxiety — it’s a quiet arms race of self-erasure, where speed takes up all the oxygen in the room and thoughtful reflection somehow feels like a liability.
A Healthier Way: Curiosity-Driven Learning 🌱
The truth is, the cheese is always moving.
That’s the nature of knowledge work. Change isn’t a moment — it’s our constant state of being.
As Peter Drucker famously warned:
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
At the rate we’re going, every year, every month, even every week is more complex than the last. The pace won’t slow down — but the way we show up to each day can.
So what if we saw this moment not as an exercise in sprint conditioning, but as an invitation to learn?
Leading with curiosity reframes the AI shift from “What am I missing?” to “What can I explore that aligns with my values, my practice, and the people I serve?”
It puts the designer back in the loop — not as a bottleneck, but as a rational and strategic human-centered synthesizer.
Not optimizing just for speed, but for shared understanding.
Gaslighting ❌
“Design is dead. AI has already replaced you. Stop trying.”
The velocity of change we’re experiencing has created a kind of virtual chasm in our shared reality. It’s no wonder the discourse has taken on a theatrical tone — half prediction, half panic.
Enter gaslighting.
That’s when the dread warriors, armed with half-baked provocations and usually a touch of mansplaining, sow doubt under the guise of thought leadership. Their goal isn’t clarity or education — it’s status.
If you’ve started to question your own sanity, that’s an important clue and here’s what to tell yourself. You’re probably still grounded. The gaslighters just want you to think otherwise.
This isn’t just annoying. It’s manipulative. It’s pervasive. And it’s all too common in our professional and political atmospheres.
But here’s the thing. We don’t have to accept their reality as our fate.
Even if only a fraction of what they say is true, the rest is still noise — and we have the right to filter for our own peace of mind.
A Healthier Way: Critical Perspective 🌱
I go by a simple rule of thumb.
Your experience is not my experience.
Instead of questioning if every move we make relative to our peers or competitors is correct or not, why don’t we just recognize each other as unique individuals, all in our respective places in work and in life?
Chances are the gaslighters live in a bubble filled with their own innate Blue Velvet gas. Let them suck it all in while you stay sane.
Clickbait ❌
“AI will replace UX.” or “No-code is the end of design.”
We’ve all seen the headlines. We’ve all clicked the links.
This daily apocalypse is a new kind of engagement economy. Let’s call it Hysteria-as-a-Service. Crafted by people who are either too clever by half or too thoughtless by whole.
These proclamations don’t predict the future — they provoke the present.
They divide us into two groups. The doomed and the destined. The washed and the winners.
It’s narrative bait for our most primitive instincts.
Shame on them for leading us with these clicks.
Click again, and shame on us — and Shamu for that matter… (sorry, that was a shame spiral).
I get it. We’re visceral beings. We sat through eight seasons of Game of Thrones because the pilot blew up everything we thought we knew about the rules of television— and the rest of the show kept us locked in with intermittent sex, violence, and surprise beheadings.
The internet does the same thing, only without the sets or the CGI dragons. It thrives on the tease. But unlike Westeros, there’s rarely any payoff.
Every article promising “The Death of Design Is Coming Sooner Than You Think” or “Why I’m Leaving UX (and You Should Too)” echoes in a sea of sameness. The volume is high, but the depth is shallow.
A Healthier Way: Nuanced Storytelling 🌱
The alternative is simple, but not easy. We have to value substance over spectacle.
Instead of indulging our base instincts, we can slow down and ask better questions.
We can tell stories that don’t just predict collapse or salvation, but wrestle with ambiguity.
Now is the perfect time for long-form storytelling.
We should try to capture this messy, transitional moment in all its contradictions — even if the current “reality” only lasts a week before the next AI milestone drops.
Nuance may not go viral, or get a lot of retweets.
But it does build trust, community, and the kind of resilient knowledge we’re all going to need when the noise finally dies down.
Hot Takes ❌
React-first commentary without reflection or grounding.
Everybody’s a critic. Whether AI is speeding it up or not, we’re living in a knee-jerk culture.
We see a thing, often without full context, form an opinion, and rush to publish it — as if our gut reaction were a gem worth urgent distribution.
Sometimes it’s not even our own opinion. It’s a borrowed mood. A true vibe dressed up as truth.
A Healthier Way: Thoughtful Dialogue 🌱
Let’s slow it down just a bit.
Why don’t we let our thinking marinate? Let’s ask ourselves what we’re really responding to. Is it the content? The stakes? The tone?
Thoughtful dialogue starts with listening — not just hearing, but listening with the intent to understand. It invites response rather than reaction.
We should ask questions instead of issuing a verdict. Lots of information should shape our thinking. Let the nuance emerge over time.
Every good design critique builds — it doesn’t tear down for effect. Our discourse should do the same.
Flexing ❌
“Look at what I made with AI. You should be doing this too.”
Somewhere along the way, a bunch of us stopped saying “Let’s figure this out” and shifted to “Look what I can do.”
Flexing is status play disguised as inspiration. It rarely invites engagement — just admiration, envy, or worse, paralysis.
A Healthier Way: Shared Discovery 🌱
Let’s bring back experimentation as conversation.
Instead of showcasing outputs like trophies, what if we shared our learning journeys?
What worked, what failed, what surprised us — and what we still don’t understand.
Discovery is contagious when it’s authentic. The more we make room for vulnerability in the process, the more others will feel safe to try, learn, and share alongside us.
AI is too big for any of us to master alone. But we can explore it together.
Elitism ❌
Dismissing others or mocking different perspectives.
I’ve always hated bullies. Maybe it’s because I’m a Libra, but uneven power dynamics have always gotten under my skin.
What I see forming in design circles is actually pretty disturbing — and it’s not getting better.
Ironically, AI has the potential to give more people superhuman creative abilities. But what we’re seeing instead is gatekeeping at its worst.
We make terrible assumptions based on job titles, tool choices, or however a consumer-driven company decides to define itself in relationship to design. And we treat those assumptions like doctrine.
We’ve confused corporate taxonomies with cultural truth. That’s dangerous.
We either survive as a community or succumb to our divisions. Excellence doesn’t require uniformity. We can hold a standard and honor the spectrum of designers showing up in radically different ways.
A Healthier Way: Community Stewardship 🌱
Community is all of us — anyone involved in the struggle of solving problems through design.
Stewardship, on the other hand, means recognizing that we’re all at different places in our journey. And that’s not a flaw, it’s an expected feature.
Instead of gatekeeping, we should create onramps and shared pathways. Instead of one-upping each other, we can mentor, amplify, and generously share our successes and our failures.
If AI is truly going to democratize creativity, then we need to be a community worthy of that promise.
Make room. Make space. And if you’re further along, send out some invitations.
What happens next is on us.
I still believe the best of us will prevail — but only if we lead with curiosity instead of clout, conversation instead of conversion, and generosity instead of fear.
We don’t need to rush toward AI like it’s a test we’re all going to fail.
We just need to make room for the truth. This moment is uncertain for everyone.
And if we start talking about it with a lot more humility, a little more humor, and a through-line of humanity… we just might find our footing.
Further Reading
- The State of AI Service Design in 2024 — A critical look at where AI and service design intersect — and where they’re headed.
- The UX of AI: Designing Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence — A foundational UX Collective piece on aligning AI with human needs.
- Google UX Researcher Says Best AI Strategy Is Understanding People — Even at Google, human insight leads the way — according to their own design researchers.
- Breaking Into AI UX: 2023 Reading List and Reflections — A curated entry point for designers looking to engage critically with AI.
- Limitless Design in the Age of AI — Explores how creative constraints — and their absence — shape AI design experiences.
- It’s Not FOMO, It’s Capitalism — A sharp critique on how economic structures feed performative urgency and anxiety.
- Attention Economy (Wikipedia) — An overview of the concept first described by Herbert Simon — now embedded in modern platforms
- The Sciences of the Artificial (Wikipedia) — Herbert Simon’s seminal work on design, complexity, and artificial systems.
The broken rhetoric of AI was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
