"Design was cancelled, not replaced" — why designers are losing their jobs to the illusion of AI, not AI itself

Yurko Gutsulyak has been watching his industry unravel. A Toronto designer and member of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, he recently met five newly graduated designers who had been unable to find work for a year. Some couldn't even get an interview. "LinkedIn increasingly resembles a digital bread line for mid-level and senior creatives," he writes.

But here's the thing he wants people to understand: it's not AI that's replacing designers. It's the illusion that AI has already replaced them.

"The truth nobody is sharing is that AI has done less damage through replacement than through the illusion of replacement," he argues in an essay for RGD. "Mostly, AI accomplishes work that never really needed to be done in the first place."

If AI were truly replacing designers, he reasons, we should see a flourishing world full of great design implementations — better advertising, more beautiful products, more meaningful innovations. We should see a design boom, or at least a return to pre-AI levels.

Instead, we see the opposite. "What we really see is a huge creative decline, with an invasion of primitive clichés, amateur execution and a visual culture bordering on absurdity," he writes. "Agencies with legendary names produce design that looks like a college grad show. Luxury brands have started to look like regional startups. Yet they proudly advertise themselves as 'AI-powered' while running workshops on AI implementation."

The culprits, in his view, aren't the AI tools themselves. They're the AI evangelists — enthusiasts with bright faces and happy smiles who spread the message that "AI will replace all designers soon" and "Your profession will disappear."

These messages plant dangerous seeds. Businesses are sold the illusion that design can be generated instead of developed. As a result, companies reduce their investment in design, hoping to get the work done for free or for a dollar. But eventually, the work is not done.

"Design was cancelled and not replaced," Gutsulyak says.

The economics are simple: when something becomes abundant, accessible, and nearly free, its perceived value declines. Creative output is now easier to produce than at any point in history. But abundance doesn't automatically create meaning. We're moving from an era where a few people created ideas that influenced millions to an era where millions create ideas that influence almost no one.

"Design is meant to create experiences through emotion," he writes. "AI-generated design delivers AI-generated emotions."

He doesn't have a magic solution. But he believes the first step is being honest about the problem — distinguishing between work that can be generated and work that must be developed. When expertise is treated as optional, judgment is replaced by guesswork.

For designers struggling through this moment, his message is both bleak and strangely hopeful. The threat isn't that machines have gotten so good they've made humans redundant. It's that humans have convinced each other that machines are better than they actually are — and until that illusion breaks, the design profession will keep contracting.