The loudest voices in the AI conversation are always at the extremes. It'll transform everything. It'll ruin everything. But the most interesting design work happening with AI right now starts from a much less comfortable place — genuine uncertainty about what the tool is actually doing to your process.
What happened
Two stories landed this week that, on the surface, have nothing in common.
In Halifax, an exhibition at the SMU Gallery features artists who are actively using AI systems while simultaneously interrogating them — subverting their outputs, questioning their assumptions, folding the technology back on its own logic. It's not a rejection of AI. It's a critical engagement with it.
Meanwhile, Etsy has introduced new rules cracking down on AI-generated imagery being used to misrepresent products. The marketplace built on the promise of handmade authenticity had to explicitly tell sellers: stop faking your product photos with AI.
One response is nuanced. The other is binary. Both are revealing.
Two responses, one blind spot
Etsy's crackdown makes sense. When your entire brand promise is "this was made by a human," AI-generated product imagery is an existential threat. So you ban it.
But banning is a blunt instrument. It addresses a symptom — fake product photos flooding the platform — without solving the design problem underneath. Etsy's trust model was built on aesthetics and vibes: the handmade look, the personal seller profile, the craft-market feel. None of those things were ever verification. They were signals. And AI got good enough to fake the signals.
The rule was inevitable. But the fact that it was necessary tells us something uncomfortable — a platform centred on authenticity never actually designed robust systems for authenticity. It designed for the appearance of it.
The artists took a different path
The Halifax exhibition does something more interesting. These artists aren't rejecting AI or embracing it uncritically. They're treating it as a material — something to work with, push against, and question.
That distinction matters.
In design, we understand materials. We know that watercolour behaves differently from acrylic. We know that designing for print is different from designing for screen — not just because of the medium but because each one shapes your decisions in ways you have to actively manage. You don't just use a material. You wrestle with it.
AI deserves the same treatment. Not blind trust. Not blanket rejection. A willingness to notice where it's guiding you, where it's flattening your thinking, where it's defaulting to patterns you didn't choose.
Why this matters for working designers
I've noticed something in how AI tools get discussed in design teams. There are the enthusiasts who've integrated AI into every stage of their workflow and rarely question the output. There are the sceptics who refuse to touch it. And then there's a smaller, quieter group who use AI regularly but treat it with the kind of productive suspicion you'd apply to any unfamiliar material.