We can see why people would be tempted to use AI to design a website. It’s fast, you think it does what you want it to do, and it’s cheap. And recent studies have found that 266 million companies are using or exploring AI. Should they be using or exploring AI for website design? Absolutely not. Read on to learn why.
The Creativity Gap
Don’t tell us generative AI is creative – it has been trained on specific datasets, patterns, and algorithms that make it copy creativity. It lacks original creativity. It can mimic, but it can’t innovate.
Who wants a website that mimics every other website out there? Hopefully, nobody.
Your website is the digital face of your brand. It should communicate your unique brand identity, values, message, and your overall vibe. Don’t let AI create a website with the same vibe as every other one. You want it to communicate your unique identity, message, and values. Genuine human connection and empathy rely on the nuances of communication and cues and more importantly, in business, personalisation.
Because People Do It Better
Humans do web design better. It’s as simple as that.
We’re not going to bash AI entirely – AI-driven design tools are improving and have their benefits, but humans simply do it better.
As we said above, humans understand humans better than a dataset-trained machine does. We can personalise, humanise, and generate unique content. All AI models will warn you of the risk of bias or false information – how can you let it do web design? And don’t get us started on the dangers of AI-generated website content for marketing campaigns.
Human intuition creates a truly unique, engaging browsing experience. A website will be functional and resonate emotionally with users, creating meaningful connections through design. AI can’t do that.
Don’t worry, web designers, AI isn’t coming for your jobs just yet!
Ethical and Practical Risks
AI is riddled with ethical and practical risks. Recently, Google got itself into a bit of a pickle with its AI Overview release and some less than ethical (and comical) AI Overview search query answers. Follow the link for a giggle.
Seemingly unrelated to website design, yes, but we’re proving that even Google, the final tech boss (don’t tell Apple we said that), can design an AI system that wasn’t ethical. You can imagine how wrong it can go for anyone else. And it’s not the only instance of AI being unethical – we could reel off an article-long list of examples of AI being unethical. AI-generated imagery is another PR nightmare altogether.
AI will use the datasets it has been trained on to build a website. Yes, it can speed up the process, but it can also mass produce the same website layouts, sometimes replicating text. For one, nobody likes a copycat website design – it screams unprofessional. But more than that, practically, it can be a legal headache.
Humans can better align with the unique qualities of a website, brand voice and image, and emotions. They might be attempting to get AI to the point of human intelligence and emotional reasoning, but they’re not there yet. And if you know anything about website design, the psychology of emotions can control the traffic flow through a website.
AI Can’t Align Strategy with Design
AI can listen to your long-term business goals, but we wouldn’t say it can create a website around it. There’s too much involved to ask it to design your website using a specific theme, tone of voice, and content and then ask it to reflect your marketing strategy and business growth goals. It can process all that data, but it doesn’t have the strategic insights needed to align strategy with design.
Another issue is AI doesn’t know what’s happening right now unless it’s trained. It might have training on data up to 2023 – ChatGPT is trained up to April 2023, for example – but AI doesn’t know what’s trending right now, what keywords to include in the content for SEO optimisation, etc.
A human web designer will listen to your design preferences, business goals and strategies and design a website that wraps all of them into one high-quality, unique design.
We wouldn’t be surprised if you’re using AI – every man and his dog are. But we would be surprised if you said you were using it to design a website. The technology simply isn’t there yet!
