Why ChatGPT isn’t putting me out of a job.

I had a client recently send me a logo they’d made using ChatGPT. On the surface, they were pretty happy with it, which is fair enough, but when they sent it through it was just a JPG. No vector file, no transparent background, nothing usable.

So before I could even start on their website, I had to recreate the entire logo from scratch just to get it into a proper format. Something that could actually be scaled, sent to a signwriter, and used across different applications without falling apart.

But the bigger issue wasn’t even the file type. It was the design itself.

It looked almost identical to another local business in the same industry. Same style, same concept, same overall feel. It wasn’t technically “bad”, but it was generic, obvious, and didn’t do anything to set the business apart.

That’s the part people don’t really think about with AI.

It’s not coming up with something new. It’s generating content based on what already exists, which means you’re almost always going to end up with something that feels familiar. And in business, especially for small businesses, familiar usually just means forgettable.

Good design isn’t just about making something look nice. It’s about understanding where a business sits in the market, what their competitors are doing, and how to create something that actually stands out. It’s also about thinking through how that design works in the real world, across signage, websites, social media, print, and everything else.

AI doesn’t think like that. It just gives you an output.

So no, I’m not worried about it putting me out of a job.

If anything, it just makes it more obvious why good design matters.

:

Here’s a logo design that I asked ChatGPT to create based on the client brief, which was using purple and combining a cookie and a coffee bean.

….snore. Am I right?

Now here’s my design. Same concept, but the execution is SO much better.