AI Isn't Your New Photoshop

“AI is just another tool”.

Many design educators keep making the same mistake: they're treating AI like it's just another piece of software to add to the curriculum. This completely misses what's actually happening.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: AI isn't a tool. It's a mirror being held up to design education, and we don't like what we're seeing.

For decades, design schools have operated on a comforting fiction: that we're teaching creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. But let's be honest, we've mostly been teaching software proficiency with a side of design history. We've been grading execution, not ideas. We've been rewarding students who can make things look polished, not necessarily students who think differently.

AI just called our bluff.

When a student can generate a dozen competent logo variations in the time it used to take to set up a grid system, what exactly have we been teaching all these years? If AI can instantly produce what would have been a B+ project (nay, A+), were we ever really teaching design, or were we just teaching the manual labour of design?

This is why the panicked response from many educators feels so hollow. "Students are cheating with AI!"But if your assignment can be completed by typing a prompt into ChatGPT, your assessment is wrong. Perhaps we've been giving students busywork and calling it pedagogy.

The real provocation here isn't about AI replacing designers. It's about AI exposing how much of design education has been theater. We've built elaborate structures around craft and technique, partly because they were measurable, gradable, teachable. But craft was never the point. It was just the only thing we knew how to assess.

Today, we're forced to confront what design education should actually be about. Spoiler alert: it's messy, subjective, and really difficult to grade.

AI doesn't care about your design process assignment. It doesn't need to sketch thumbnails or build mood boards. It goes straight from prompt to output. That's rather revealing. Because if the process was so valuable, why does skipping it often produce acceptable results? Perhaps our sacred processes were always partly about hazing, making students prove they could suffer through the boring bits before earning the right to be called designers.

Here's what really scares educators: AI suggests that taste, judgement, and direction might be more important than execution skills.

The crisis isn't that AI is too powerful. It's that it's revealing how much of design education was built on questionable foundations. We told ourselves we were teaching people to think, but we were mostly teaching them to execute. We said we valued creativity, but we rewarded competent mimicry. We claimed design was about solving problems, but we assigned projects with predetermined solutions.

AI isn't just another tool because tools don't force existential reckonings. Tools don't make you question whether your entire pedagogical approach was rather missing the point. Tools don't reveal that perhaps you've been teaching students to be really quite good at things that don't actually matter.

Design educators have two choices. They can keep pretending AI is just another software package and watch their curriculum become increasingly irrelevant. Or they can use this moment to finally build the design education they always claimed they were providing, one that's actually about thinking, not just making.

It requires teaching things we're not entirely sure we know how to teach.

But at least it would be honest. Which would make a refreshing change.