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Designers vs. AI

Exploring the role of designers and the power of deep understanding in the age of AI and GPT-4

Johan Salo
UX Collective
11 min readApr 4, 2023
A neon-styled brain illustration, created in Midjourney, glowing vividly against a dark background, evoking a sense of an intelligent explosion.
MidJourney-generated neon-lit brain, CC 2023

Common sense is about understanding and reasoning about everyday life based on one’s experiences and oneself. A fundamental aspect of common sense is a deep understanding of how things and people are interconnected in time and space and how ideas and theories are related. What sets humans apart from AI models is the level of deep understanding, human instincts, and subjective understanding that comes from our sociocultural background, upbringing, friends, and family.

GPT-4 and similar language models (a complete list) will never have memories of a time and place other than those generated through conversations and prompts. For example, it will never know what it smelled like when the snow melted on Västerhöjden, Hofors, in the spring of 1981, or how it felt to ride a tricycle. It will also never know what it feels like to play guitar with one’s body and create a song out of nowhere. However, it might perform some of these tasks artificially without personal experience. The difference is that it is not personally made, empathetically, and without a deep understanding.

In this article, I will explain what is missing in GPT-4 and why it will not replace me in my design work. Yet.

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