06/13/2026
last week Adobe invited me to their 99U conference in new york city. i was really excited to go but tbh i was a bit skeptical that they were just gonna push ai onto us. that’s not exactly what happened…
going in, it was really nice seeing familiar faces and meeting new people. i loved being in a room full of creatives who are really passionate about what they do. here are some of my favorite moments:
i loved Meg! Lewis’s talk about being a weird adult. you don’t have to follow any type of traditional path. you are the only person that defines your own success
adobe creative collective members stefan sagmeister & tim taser went back and forth with each other about how they use ai. tim is all about using ai in his work in a commercial sense, while stefan was more about using ai in the workflow rather than the final work.
ovetta sampson had my favorite moments, and i took so many notes from her convo. she really understands the limitations of ai. she also made it clear that you should be specific about what kind of ai you’re talking about (like spell check and talk to text is still ai). she really focused on staying in the embodied world and to not rely on the machines.
i hate gen ai, and i think relying on gen ai to make your work is lazy. i’ve used ai to make my workflow faster (like batch renaming hundreds of files, fixing broken project files, cleaning up small parts of photos), but everything i make is still me. i’m not opposed to people who use ai in their workflow; it’s a tool (i wonder, were people having this same conversation when illustrator & photoshop came out?). i do think as everyone uses ai more, we’ll swing back around to wanting the art that only humans can make.
at the end of the day, it’s your skills, taste, talent, and weirdness as a human that ai cannot replicate.
so tell me, what are your thoughts about ai and how it relates to the future of the art & design industry?
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