The Rise of AI-Generated Websites: Should Designers Be Worried?
Gone are the days when it took anywhere from weeks to months to create a fully working and eye-pleasing website. Mapping out the user flow, coding, and revising every headline typically took a team of professionals.
With AI, it’s just a matter of asking for it to “build a responsive website for a wellness company” and you can expect to get a working prototype in just a matter of minutes.
Both exciting and unsettling for some people, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a trendy topic on tech blogs—it’s creating actual, usable websites.
Therefore, there is a debate going on in the design community about whether AI-created websites will eventually replace human web designers.
No…not quite yet.
What Do We Mean By AI-Generated Websites?
AI-generated websites are created by algorithms designed to automate the design, layout, and content generation process.
The platform tools — like Wix ADI, Framer AI, and 10Web — utilise data and machine learning to determine what users want and generate the design in mere seconds.
All you do is tell the AI what type of business you operate, possibly upload a logo or colour palette, and then, voila—your site is generated and complete with stock photos, menu systems, and even a mock-up of a home page. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy—extreme simplicity.
Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? However, ease-of-use is rarely synonymous with craftsmanship.
Why Small Business Owners Are Using AI Website Builders
For small businesses or solo entrepreneurs, AI website builders are nothing short of phenomenal.
They eliminate all technical hurdles and reduce the cost significantly. No need to hire designers, developers, or content writers when you’re able to create a perfectly acceptable website in less than 10 minutes.
There are four main reasons why AI website builders are quickly becoming a hit:
- They’re fast. In just under 10 minutes, an AI tool can create a homepage.
- They’re affordable. It costs less to use an AI builder than to hire a human designer.
- They’re easy to use. These AI web builders offer features such as a drag-and-drop interface, automated layouts, and pre-written content that make website building easy as pie, even for those without a technological background.
- They’re scalable. AI can automatically update your content for you, test designs, and tweak each element for better performance.
That said, there’s a catch. A few of them, actually.
The Limitations of AI-Generated Design
AI design tools are somewhat deceptive. For the unsuspecting, the clean layouts, balanced typography, and stylish colour palettes will look impressive. But, if you dig deeper, you’ll find a host of problems that require a human touch to solve.
Here are some issues that usually crop up when using AI for website design:
- Similar Designs: Since a lot of AI tools draw from the same dataset, their generated designs often end up having similar layouts and visual hierarchies.
- Limited Thinking: AI can only optimise user flow based on mathematical formulas. It can’t account for subtle human behaviours or cultural nuances.
- Generic Content: An AI tool can whip up website content in mere seconds. However, these can sound robotic and not reflect the brand personality.
- Lack of Creativity: Combining and remixing already created designs and concepts is what AI is best at. Rarely will it come up with an innovative design.
When clients want something unique, a human touch still beats AI design.
Why Human Designers Are Still Crucial
Designers are not simply decorative artists; they are translators, turning ideas, goals, and user psychology into visual and interactive experiences. While AI may be able to duplicate style, it has difficulty duplicating meaning.
A website is more than just colours and buttons. It is a symbolic gesture of a brand towards its target audience – a digital handshake. Humans connect by sharing emotions, humour, stories, and visual rhythms. These are things that can’t be fully replicated with code.
Think about this:
Can an algorithm really get why healthcare providers use a colour palette with plenty of whites and accents of soft blue to help patients relax and build trust? How about when fashion labels deliberately break design principles to make a bold statement? Most likely not.
Human designers bring contextual awareness to design projects – an unwritten human logic that translates “pretty” into purposeful.
Collaborate, Not Compete
Smart designers are not against AI design tools; instead, they’re learning to work with these tools.
Think of AI as an assistant who can perform low-level tasks such as resizing graphics, creating templates, and cleaning up layouts while the designer focuses on the creative aspects of the project.
This is a partnership of the two disciplines, not one replacing the other.
Here are some ways that professionals are already using AI in their workflow:
- Utilising AI design tools to generate multiple layout ideas or mock-ups faster than if designers were to manually create them.
- Allowing AI to test multiple design variations (A/B testing) to determine what users prefer.
- Using AI-driven analytics to understand how visitors interact with the designs.
- Taking advantage of AI to rapidly populate content.
Instead of being fearful of job loss, designers who have adapted to working with AI are finding that AI has saved them time on mundane tasks, freeing them up to focus on conceptualisation, developing strategies, and utilising human creativity.
What Clients Really Want — And What AI Cannot Fake
What clients are hiring designers for isn’t just the visuals; it’s their ability to think. Clients want an advisor, an expert and a guide through often messy business decisions that go far beyond design software.
Designers are also creative consultants: trying to balance the desires of their clients with usability, accessibility, and branding consistency. The discussions between a client and designer — the back and forth, the empathy, the negotiation — are what result in great design outcomes.
AI cannot be present in a meeting and question a client’s assumptions or even sense that they are going in the wrong direction. AI cannot brainstorm over coffee or understand a client’s apprehension when they say, “I like it… but I feel like something is missing.”
In summary, AI can create websites. Designers create meaning.
Good Enough vs. Great — The Quality Issue
Quality is another issue that needs to be taken into account. While many of the websites created by AI look acceptable, most of these websites are optimised for short-term success. They might load very slowly. They might lack the proper structure required for SEO. They might not even meet the standards of accessibility.
On the other hand, human designers understand the behind-the-scenes issues that distinguish “good enough” from “great”. Human designers understand how colours influence the conversion rate of a site, how micro-interactions impact engagement, and how navigation affects the amount of time users spend on a site.
An AI system can provide information based on trends on how something should be done, but does not understand why it is being done that way. This difference is a crucial consideration, especially now that everyone is vying for online attention.
The Changing Role of a Designer
The reality is that design positions are not disappearing — they are evolving.
In the future, designers will become creative directors over AI systems. Instead of manually coding or positioning objects in a layout, they will guide AI by using prompts, fine-tune the results, and add the personal touch that AI misses.
This is similar to what happened when desktop publishing programs first emerged. Everyone believed that graphic designers would be obsolete. However, instead of eliminating the need for graphic designers, these software just made graphic designers faster, more in demand, and more versatile.
As with desktop publishing, we see this happening again — but with smarter tools.
The Ethical Side of AI Design
One critical area of AI design that shouldn’t be overlooked is responsibility.
For starters, since AI is basically just designing the website based on scraped content from thousands of webpages, who actually owns the design? What if two companies end up generating strikingly similar web designs because the AI models they used are the same?
Accessibility is another key area that needs to be considered. Theoretically, AI has the ability to create sites that are up to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). But ultimately, a human will still need to review its usability in real life to avoid excluding the elderly and disabled people from accessing your site.
Human designers provide this ethical oversight. Designers care about the user as a person, not just a number or data point. As AI design tools continue to evolve, the human layer of accountability will be more important than ever.
The Strengths of AI Design
Let’s be honest. There are several places where AI excels over humans. One of these is prototyping. Designers can input prompts into AI design tools and receive initial wireframes, colour schemes, or even an entire page design to jump-start a project.
AI also helps speed up testing by identifying where users will initially focus and analysing hundreds/thousands of engagement data points at once – tasks that would have previously required hours/days for a team to accomplish.
Therefore, while AI will become a larger player in the day-to-day activities of designers, it will still be a secondary/assistant type of role, not a leading actor.
So, yes, AI will become a larger player in the day-to-day activities of designers, only as a supporting actor and not the leading actor.
Will Designers Lose Their Jobs to AI?
If a designer’s role is mainly to drag widgets into templates and hand off completed files, then yes, they may find themselves at risk of losing their jobs. This piece of the industry is being rapidly replaced by automation.
However, if a designer has focused on developing creative thinking, effective communication, and solving complex human-based problems, then they’re value skyrockets. AI cannot feel emotions. It cannot dream. Most importantly, AI cannot understand the emotional layers of a design that make it truly resonate with its audience.
Therefore, instead of focusing on how designers will lose their jobs to AI, perhaps designers should ask themselves a new question:
How can I leverage AI to enable me to do better, faster, and more meaningful work?
This is the true value proposition of integrating AI into the designers’ workflow.
Potential Future Possibilities
A few years from now, hybrid design teams may consist of a mix of humans and AI working together in tandem and in real time. The human members of the team will provide the strategic and emotional elements of a project, and the AI will provide the structural and technical aspects of a project in an instant.
Designers can say something like “create a home page that is soothing and authoritative with the colour palette of an ocean” and watch the AI create five different versions of this concept within seconds. The designer then makes adjustments, refines the design, and voila, the abstract design concept is transformed into a visual reality.
The combination of human creativity and machine efficiency could potentially revolutionise digital creativity altogether. But only if both parties are allowed to do what they’re best at.
My Thoughts
AI-created websites have arrived and will get progressively better on a monthly basis. These tools will make creating a website easier for people without design experience and accelerate workflows for experienced designers.
However, these AI-generated websites will never replace the artistic element, empathy, and storytelling instincts that a human designer brings to a project.
Should designers be concerned about AI taking over design? The answer is no. Instead, they should be attentive, curious, and ready to adapt.
Why? Because the future of design is not just going to be defined as man vs machine — it is going to be man AND machine. Those who are willing to work with AI and understand how to work together creatively will lead the next creative wave.