The first time you realize your job description has quietly shapeshifted from “creative genius” to “editor-in-chief of whatever the algorithm spits out,” you might, as Microsoft’s Jon Friedman notes, feel a certain dramatic tension. And make no mistake, “dramatic” is the mood in Redmond these days. Friedman, whose remit covers both design and research at Microsoft, occupies ground zero in this new AI-powered arms race—where the tools of creation and the limits of imagination are not only merging, but mutating at an alarming rate.
Friedman’s crusade began several years ago, when he set out to answer a question that has haunted Microsoft users since Clippy’s heyday: Can the company’s software and hardware ever look like they were made by the same group of people? For a while, it felt like the only thing uniting Windows was the piecemeal chaos of a “designed by committee” aesthetic.
But according to Friedman, that chaotic energy has coalesced into something much more compelling—and, perhaps unexpectedly, AI is fanning the flames. In a world where Adobe and Figma are frantically duct-taping AI features into their creative toolkits, design—once the domain of fastidious pixel-pushers—is now about as editorial as your favorite Sunday magazine supplement.
Here’s the twist: these days, the design job isn’t about making every last icon by hand, but learning “how to edit” what the machines churn out. Friedman, sounding equal parts designer and newsroom vet, frankly admits his own workload now looks much more like managing an unruly flock of robot interns. “Even my job over the past 6–8 months has become an editor-in-chief job of the product, not just the design leader.” Imagine Don Draper if all the Mad Men were cleverly disguised NVIDIA servers.
For IT professionals and software designers who spent years mastering the artisanal craft of “making things from scratch,” this brave new world is unsettling. If your career has more in common with pottery than with Photoshop macros, you may be forgiven for looking at AI-powered design and muttering, “Et tu, Clippy?”
The solution? Generative AI tools with names like Hailuo and Kling—no, not a new Star Trek villain, but engines for animating static images. Stills of Surface devices were rendered in different scenarios, then given life by these AI wizards. The resulting 55-second ad has lived on YouTube for two months, its digital trickery hiding in plain sight. Not one comment suspected the ad was AI-generated. Take that, uncanny valley!
So what’s the lesson here for tech marketers, creative directors, and the growing ranks of “AI content wranglers?” The cat is well and truly out of the bag—and when generative AI combines time and cost savings with stealthy output quality, management will universally see it as a feature, not a bug.
But beware, for every efficiency gain in creative services, there’s a corresponding uptick in existential dread among the people whose jobs are suddenly “supplemented.” Today it’s stock photo compositing, tomorrow it could be your favorite witty forum columnist (gulp).
At first, AI-generated art practically glowed with an embarrassing newness. You could spot it from a mile away—like a velociraptor wearing a necktie to a paleo conference. But, as Friedman observes, the telltale signs are quickly vanishing. AI is learning, for better and worse, to mimic the flaws and quirks of human touch. For producers, that means more plausible outputs. For critics, it’s one more step towards creative dystopia.
Here’s where it gets juicy, though: as AI tools mature, the act of creating becomes less about “doing the thing” and more about orchestrating and editing, curating possibilities, and hammering bland algorithmic outputs into something that (ideally) still bears the fingerprints of a living, breathing designer. It’s creativity as remix, not as raw invention—a development sure to have purists howling into their Pantone swatches.
Friedman himself seems to relish the new capabilities. Need to illustrate a children’s book about anxiety? DALL-E to the rescue. Want to build a website, but don’t fancy wrangling CSS at midnight? A niche AI tool will lend a hand. For the creative generalist—the Swiss Army knife of the 21st-century tech scene—AI is both muscle and muse, enabling “big idea” thinkers to leap over technical limitations and focus on the vision.
Yet for every designer thrilled by these powers, there’s a nervous freelancer tracking “AI artist” rates on Fiverr with a deepening sense of dread. Having all creative disciplines “meld together” may sound utopian to some, but to others it’s like watching your specialist degree dissolve in a river of one-click generative widgets.
For the IT professional—especially those on the infosec, implementation, or customization side—the key insight is that your adaptability will be as important as your technical skills. If the creative muscle is now editing and orchestrating, not just executing, then your value might be in your taste, your insight, and your ability to coax the algorithm towards brilliance rather than blandness.
It’s a seductive vision: seamless cross-pollination between “tech” and “creativity,” powered by a network of tireless digital collaborators. For project managers drowning in Jira tickets labeled “waiting on UI designer,” it’s the overdue utopia. But like every digital emancipation, the reality comes with risks—latent bias in the tools, the subtle flattening of human ingenuity, and the real risk that someday you’ll just be the reviewer of ten thousand micro-decisions you never really made.
For the workplace, the line between “man and machine” gets fuzzier every week. Today’s AI is the tool, but tomorrow’s could be the manager. At Microsoft—and, soon, everywhere—what matters isn’t just what you can do, but how adeptly you direct, critique, and combine ideas (both yours and the algorithm’s).
Friedman is optimistic, describing how AI has “supercharged my makership.” He’s discovering newfound creative velocity, producing work at a scale and speed that would give even the most hyper-caffeinated intern pause.
But lurking behind the optimism is the inescapable pang of anxiety and guilt: If it’s suddenly easier for you to produce beautiful, compelling work, isn’t that just a little less magical? If AI can reliably punch up your weakest skills, does your unique artistry still matter in the same way? IT and creative professionals alike will spend the next decade wrestling with this paradox—grateful for the boost, wary of becoming redundant, and never quite sure if the algorithmic tide is lifting all boats or quietly sinking some.
Yet as Friedman notes, while resistance is inevitable, so is adaptation. First, people worry what the new tools mean for their identity and livelihood; next, they discover new ways to wield those tools to achieve ever more ambitious dreams.
For every dystopian headline about job-destroying algorithms, there is a parallel story about weird new jobs—“prompt engineer,” “AI curator,” “slop-spotter”—proliferating in the margins. It’s just that no one dreams of growing up to be the “Chief Officer of Ethical Model Output Review.”
Want an edge in your IT career? Start rethinking your workflow with AI as a co-conspirator, not a rival. Build systems where creativity and analysis dance together seamlessly. Pay close (paranoid) attention to bias and quality. And recognize that while the line between “AI tool” and “AI colleague” is getting blurrier, the best roles will always belong to those humans who remain the best critics, editors, and orchestrators.
For IT professionals, business owners, designers, and even the woeful project managers caught in the crossfire, the message is clear: adapt, edit, orchestrate. Learn to love the role of curator-in-chief. Enjoy the extra hour at the end of the day, but always be ready to re-tool your skills before your AI “colleague” demands a performance review.
Tomorrow’s IT and creative professionals will need to blend old-fashioned curiosity, ruthless editing skill, and a willingness to wrestle with the philosophical implications of co-creation. If nothing else, you’ll need an answer ready for the question, “So, did you make this, or did your AI?”
Welcome to the era of editorial vision at scale. Don’t forget to check the comments—if your AI didn’t write them first.
Source: The Verge Microsoft’s design chief on human creation in the AI era
From Design Unification to Algorithmic Alchemy
Friedman’s crusade began several years ago, when he set out to answer a question that has haunted Microsoft users since Clippy’s heyday: Can the company’s software and hardware ever look like they were made by the same group of people? For a while, it felt like the only thing uniting Windows was the piecemeal chaos of a “designed by committee” aesthetic.But according to Friedman, that chaotic energy has coalesced into something much more compelling—and, perhaps unexpectedly, AI is fanning the flames. In a world where Adobe and Figma are frantically duct-taping AI features into their creative toolkits, design—once the domain of fastidious pixel-pushers—is now about as editorial as your favorite Sunday magazine supplement.
Here’s the twist: these days, the design job isn’t about making every last icon by hand, but learning “how to edit” what the machines churn out. Friedman, sounding equal parts designer and newsroom vet, frankly admits his own workload now looks much more like managing an unruly flock of robot interns. “Even my job over the past 6–8 months has become an editor-in-chief job of the product, not just the design leader.” Imagine Don Draper if all the Mad Men were cleverly disguised NVIDIA servers.
For IT professionals and software designers who spent years mastering the artisanal craft of “making things from scratch,” this brave new world is unsettling. If your career has more in common with pottery than with Photoshop macros, you may be forgiven for looking at AI-powered design and muttering, “Et tu, Clippy?”
Ad Campaigns: Not as Human-Made as You Think
The real kicker, as Microsoft’s own recent advertising for the Surface business line demonstrates, is just how quietly AI has become the creative’s best-kept secret. Their team needed a slick, motion-filled promo but faced the familiar modern constraints: tight deadlines, shoestring budgets, and perhaps a desire to avoid yet another stock footage cliche.The solution? Generative AI tools with names like Hailuo and Kling—no, not a new Star Trek villain, but engines for animating static images. Stills of Surface devices were rendered in different scenarios, then given life by these AI wizards. The resulting 55-second ad has lived on YouTube for two months, its digital trickery hiding in plain sight. Not one comment suspected the ad was AI-generated. Take that, uncanny valley!
So what’s the lesson here for tech marketers, creative directors, and the growing ranks of “AI content wranglers?” The cat is well and truly out of the bag—and when generative AI combines time and cost savings with stealthy output quality, management will universally see it as a feature, not a bug.
But beware, for every efficiency gain in creative services, there’s a corresponding uptick in existential dread among the people whose jobs are suddenly “supplemented.” Today it’s stock photo compositing, tomorrow it could be your favorite witty forum columnist (gulp).
“Slop” and the Vanishing Line Between Human and Machine Craft
Of course, not everyone’s thrilled at the prospect of a future filled with algorithmically generated “slop”—that’s the handy, if uncharitable, shorthand for work that feels juuuust a little off, a little generic, a little “made by committee” in the worst sense. Injection-molded stock imagery and AI-written scripts threaten to turn a whole industry into a race to the uncanny bottom.At first, AI-generated art practically glowed with an embarrassing newness. You could spot it from a mile away—like a velociraptor wearing a necktie to a paleo conference. But, as Friedman observes, the telltale signs are quickly vanishing. AI is learning, for better and worse, to mimic the flaws and quirks of human touch. For producers, that means more plausible outputs. For critics, it’s one more step towards creative dystopia.
Here’s where it gets juicy, though: as AI tools mature, the act of creating becomes less about “doing the thing” and more about orchestrating and editing, curating possibilities, and hammering bland algorithmic outputs into something that (ideally) still bears the fingerprints of a living, breathing designer. It’s creativity as remix, not as raw invention—a development sure to have purists howling into their Pantone swatches.
AI: Sledgehammer for Deadlines, Chisel for Creativity
Microsoft’s design team didn’t turn to AI simply because they could—they did it because the usual constraints of time, budget, and human bandwidth demanded it. With AI, making changes isn’t just faster, it turns what used to be major production investments (camera crews, actors, multiple prototypes) into something closer to fiddling with sliders and clicking “regenerate.”Friedman himself seems to relish the new capabilities. Need to illustrate a children’s book about anxiety? DALL-E to the rescue. Want to build a website, but don’t fancy wrangling CSS at midnight? A niche AI tool will lend a hand. For the creative generalist—the Swiss Army knife of the 21st-century tech scene—AI is both muscle and muse, enabling “big idea” thinkers to leap over technical limitations and focus on the vision.
Yet for every designer thrilled by these powers, there’s a nervous freelancer tracking “AI artist” rates on Fiverr with a deepening sense of dread. Having all creative disciplines “meld together” may sound utopian to some, but to others it’s like watching your specialist degree dissolve in a river of one-click generative widgets.
For the IT professional—especially those on the infosec, implementation, or customization side—the key insight is that your adaptability will be as important as your technical skills. If the creative muscle is now editing and orchestrating, not just executing, then your value might be in your taste, your insight, and your ability to coax the algorithm towards brilliance rather than blandness.
Collapsing Boundaries: The Era of the “AI Colleague”
Friedman’s vision doesn’t stop at human creators wielding AI as a tool. He predicts an age where “engineers will have their own AI designer and designers will have their own AI engineer.” That is, the silos slowly dissolve, as each profession’s specialized sidekick provides just-in-time expertise. Imagine the teamwork: you, your AI, the engineer, their AI. No lunch invites necessary.It’s a seductive vision: seamless cross-pollination between “tech” and “creativity,” powered by a network of tireless digital collaborators. For project managers drowning in Jira tickets labeled “waiting on UI designer,” it’s the overdue utopia. But like every digital emancipation, the reality comes with risks—latent bias in the tools, the subtle flattening of human ingenuity, and the real risk that someday you’ll just be the reviewer of ten thousand micro-decisions you never really made.
For the workplace, the line between “man and machine” gets fuzzier every week. Today’s AI is the tool, but tomorrow’s could be the manager. At Microsoft—and, soon, everywhere—what matters isn’t just what you can do, but how adeptly you direct, critique, and combine ideas (both yours and the algorithm’s).
The Personal Angle: Guilt, Gratitude, and Dread
If you’re a journalist—or anyone whose industry has been “digitally disrupted” before—all this talk rings a familiar, slightly dissonant bell. The writer recalls how his own father faced the upheaval of print going digital, forced to choose between re-skilling for Photoshop or embracing obsolescence. Today the dynamic is the same, only the tools have faster processors and a worrying ability to churn out plausible prose, pixel-perfect images, and even code snippets that work more often than not.Friedman is optimistic, describing how AI has “supercharged my makership.” He’s discovering newfound creative velocity, producing work at a scale and speed that would give even the most hyper-caffeinated intern pause.
But lurking behind the optimism is the inescapable pang of anxiety and guilt: If it’s suddenly easier for you to produce beautiful, compelling work, isn’t that just a little less magical? If AI can reliably punch up your weakest skills, does your unique artistry still matter in the same way? IT and creative professionals alike will spend the next decade wrestling with this paradox—grateful for the boost, wary of becoming redundant, and never quite sure if the algorithmic tide is lifting all boats or quietly sinking some.
The AI “Backlash” Is Real—And It’s Complicated
Predictably, not everyone is ready to sing the praises of “digital colleagues.” The creative world—from advertising to film and video games—has erupted in debate (and sometimes outright protest) against the encroachment of generative AI. Much of the anxiety is rooted in the fear that what were once highly valued technical skills have become, if not commodities, at least dangerously automatable.Yet as Friedman notes, while resistance is inevitable, so is adaptation. First, people worry what the new tools mean for their identity and livelihood; next, they discover new ways to wield those tools to achieve ever more ambitious dreams.
For every dystopian headline about job-destroying algorithms, there is a parallel story about weird new jobs—“prompt engineer,” “AI curator,” “slop-spotter”—proliferating in the margins. It’s just that no one dreams of growing up to be the “Chief Officer of Ethical Model Output Review.”
Real-World IT Implications: Stay Nimble, Think Bigger
The big takeaway for Windows professionals isn’t just that the nature of design is changing—it's that every discipline in tech is becoming more “editorial,” more hybrid, and more connected. The ability to command, steer, and edit AI output will be as prized as the knack for building something from scratch. Your creative edge is in your questions, your taste, and your judgment.Want an edge in your IT career? Start rethinking your workflow with AI as a co-conspirator, not a rival. Build systems where creativity and analysis dance together seamlessly. Pay close (paranoid) attention to bias and quality. And recognize that while the line between “AI tool” and “AI colleague” is getting blurrier, the best roles will always belong to those humans who remain the best critics, editors, and orchestrators.
AI’s Double-Edged Sword: Supercharger or Steamroller?
There’s little doubt that AI, in the hands of the inspired, becomes a supercharger for creativity, production, and—let’s be honest—last-minute client revisions. But it’s also a steamroller, flattening “good enough” content into the streetscape of modern digital life.For IT professionals, business owners, designers, and even the woeful project managers caught in the crossfire, the message is clear: adapt, edit, orchestrate. Learn to love the role of curator-in-chief. Enjoy the extra hour at the end of the day, but always be ready to re-tool your skills before your AI “colleague” demands a performance review.
What Comes Next? (And Why Still Bother to Care)
Whether you greet the AI design revolution with arms wide open or trembling clenched fists, one thing is certain: the era of human creation has been fundamentally altered, maybe forever. Microsoft’s not-so-secret plan isn’t just to make its software and hardware look like they came from the same galaxy, but to make the process of making anything more accessible, more rapid, and—dare we say it—more unpredictable.Tomorrow’s IT and creative professionals will need to blend old-fashioned curiosity, ruthless editing skill, and a willingness to wrestle with the philosophical implications of co-creation. If nothing else, you’ll need an answer ready for the question, “So, did you make this, or did your AI?”
Welcome to the era of editorial vision at scale. Don’t forget to check the comments—if your AI didn’t write them first.
Source: The Verge Microsoft’s design chief on human creation in the AI era
