I never quite fell for the scam of “designer who can’t photoshop”.

You can’t do product design without visual design - and many designers don’t. They’re picking from UI libraries like Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer could do, and many do. That’s why the job mostly died.

Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on should have good fundamentals. They’ve gone through the discipline and developed taste, they don’t choose it from a library.

The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting personal authority without proving or living anything. And that shows IMO.

My probably unpopular opinion is that using AI can be very creative and you can get into flow states, and the quality of outputs vary by skill of the user.