You're 80% there? Prompt more!

“So has AI, like, affected your work?”

The question is asked gently, with a touch of worry and kindness in the tone. Are you holding up?

Not all clients want to work with a given service provider – with a designer, in my case. Some of them never see the value of what I provide, but must work with me because my work is the bridge to something they need. If they could pay zero dollars, or maybe find the cheapest, worst provider possible just to have it done immediately, they would.

Sometimes, other factors¹ force a client like this to work with me, and the value they gain from my work is kind of lost on them – they benefit because circumstances obligate them to receive that benefit. There’s no moment where they finally learn that an experienced designer has a positive outcome on their goals. If you ask them, I’m in the way and they’re doing everyone a favor by enduring the process.

These clients are sometimes a source of revenue, but mostly they’re opportunities I want to filter out and turn down². Now, breathless AI marketing does the work of luring them away for me, and they leave me alone.

The type I do have to watch for now is the client who has been Marketed to, and has been given permission by the Very Well-Balanced People of LinkedIn to treat every discipline they don’t understand as something that can be prompted to completion by typing the right words into a computer³.

They get started on something, and, wow! AI tools can certainly sprint to results that look like a completed process. But, after darting to that finished-looking app or website, it seems to them like they’re not getting quite the result they want. They fiddle around. They get a new result, near-instant, looks final, but again it’s not exactly there. They aren’t sure what to do now. They contact me.

We’re almost there, like 80% done, and we’d like you to step in and get the project to the finish line.

80% there? Sounds like you could prompt 20% more and be done! Right?

I usually pick a more diplomatic way of saying it, but now that’s the gist of my reply.

So I invite that client to experience the wall they think I can magick away if I step in at the last minute. I need them to notice the fragile foundations of the work, to see that however much they want to move further than the dead end, that more time and effort leads to no additional progress. When a project’s design was borne out of an AI-centric process, the distance from 80% to 100% done is near-infinite.

Sometimes, by going through this back-and-forth, we get a great working relationship. After they’ve brought the attempt to its inevitable end, they come back with an understanding of where the possibilities fizzle out. We can start talking about what work that goes beyond can do for them, and at that point they’re well-equipped to decide if my work has enough value to them.