Designers consume an enormous amount of visual information. We collect references, save images, study identities, notice typefaces, remember compositions and absorb visual languages without always knowing we're doing it.

Eventually, some of that comes back out.

Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist gave me a useful way of thinking about this. Perhaps originality was never really about creating something from nothing. Perhaps it was about what we do with the things we absorb.

Over time, I became comfortable with that feeling.

Until AI brought it back.

A familiar process, with an unfamiliar feeling

Recently, I was working on variations of a logo for a client.

The original concept was mine. The client didn't approve of the execution, but they really liked the underlying idea. So instead of abandoning the direction, I started exploring it further.

This time, AI was part of the process.

I went through variation after variation.

Some were immediately wrong.

Some had interesting details but didn't hold together.

Some were close.

A few made me stop and look again.

I shortlisted what worked for me, rejected what didn't, refined the promising directions and kept iterating.

In other words, I was doing something I've done countless times as a designer and creative director.

Looking at possibilities.

Making judgements.

Editing.

Refining.

Knowing when something feels right.

And yet, somewhere in the middle of the process, I had that old feeling again.

Was I stealing?

The uncomfortable part isn't the tool

The question wasn't really about whether AI could make a logo.

It was about authorship.

For a long time, the relationship between making and authorship felt fairly straightforward.

You sketch something, you make it.

You draw the mark, you designed it.

You build the composition, you own the creative decision.

But creative direction has never actually worked that way.

A creative director doesn't necessarily produce every element of a project personally. Their role is often to establish a direction, explore possibilities, recognise potential, reject what doesn't work and push an idea until it becomes resolved.

Photography has art directors.

Film has directors.

Architecture has architects working with entire teams.

Design has always involved collaboration between people, tools and processes.

AI simply makes that separation more visible.

The machine can produce possibilities much faster than I can.

But it doesn't know which possibility is appropriate for the brand.

It doesn't know what the client actually needs.

It doesn't know why one curve feels too heavy.

It doesn't know why a particular proportion makes the identity suddenly feel more confident.

It can give me options.

I still have to decide what those options mean.

So, who made it?

I don't think there is a neat answer yet.

And I'm not particularly interested in pretending there is.

There is a tendency to frame AI and design as a simple argument:

AI made it.

Or:

The designer made it.

But the actual process is usually messier.

If a designer generates a hundred possibilities and chooses one, then redraws parts of it, changes the proportions, removes elements, combines it with another direction and eventually turns it into something that works for a specific brand — where exactly did the authorship disappear?

At the same time, I don't think simply pressing a button and accepting the first output deserves to be called creative direction either.

The distinction, for me, is judgement.

The ability to recognise something.

The ability to reject something.

The ability to know why one direction works and another doesn't.

And then having the discipline to keep working until it becomes yours.

Perhaps the role is changing

This may be the bigger shift we're experiencing as designers.

AI isn't necessarily making designers irrelevant.

But it is changing which parts of the design process require the most human attention.

When generating possibilities becomes easier, selection becomes more important.

When execution becomes faster, judgement becomes more valuable.

When there are hundreds of directions available, knowing which one to pursue becomes the real work.

That doesn't make the tool inherently good or bad.

It simply means our definition of the designer's role may need to expand.

At Kashyap Design Labs, we think a lot about this distinction.

We don't see design as simply producing an artefact.

The value is in the thinking behind it — understanding the problem, finding the right direction, questioning the obvious answer, making decisions and knowing when an idea has actually become resolved.

AI can participate in that process.

It doesn't remove the responsibility of making the decisions.

I'm still recalibrating

The funny thing is that I'm not sure I've completely solved the original feeling.

Maybe that's okay.

Perhaps every major change in creative tools forces designers to reconsider something they thought they understood.

The camera changed painting.

Digital tools changed graphic design.

The internet changed how references, culture and ideas travelled.

Now AI is changing the distance between thinking, making and selecting.

And somewhere inside that change, I think we're all going to have to ask ourselves the same uncomfortable question again:

When I say "I made this", what exactly do I mean?

I don't have a definitive answer.

But I suspect the answer has less to do with who produced the pixels, and more to do with who made the decisions that gave those pixels meaning.

And maybe that's where authorship has always lived.