The most useful piece of pushback I have had on AI this year came from a brand l
By ted-gibson · September 10, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The most useful piece of pushback I have had on AI this year came from a brand lead who rejected a full set of AI generated listing images, and her objection was not the one I expected.
She did not say they looked bad. They did not look bad, honestly, they looked reasonably slick. Her objection was that nobody had decided anything. There was no call made about what each slide in the gallery was supposed to say or what order the argument ran in, the styling did not match the website the brand had spent years building, and a couple of the claims in the copy were wrong in ways nobody would catch unless they knew the product properly.
The tool had done the execution and it had also quietly done the thinking, and the thinking is the bit that was worth paying for.
I use these tools constantly and this is not an argument against them. Where I have landed is that AI is the wireframing step. It is genuinely good at getting you from nothing to a rough version of six slides in ten minutes, which used to take a week and a designer, and that is a real saving. What it cannot do is know that your second image has to answer the objection that shows up in half your reviews, because it has not read your reviews and it does not know your customer.
The brief still has to come from somebody who knows the brand.
Where have you drawn the line in your own business, is AI doing the execution or has it quietly started doing the thinking?