I first discussed this topic in a meetup at dayone together with Sarrah Vesselov. If you want, you can view a recording of the talks. Due to the amount of interest, I decided to write some more about it. In this post, I will discuss whether artificial intelligence (AI) will take over design systems. I will also consider if AI has a place in a human-led design system workflow at all.

Disclaimer: I am not an AI expert. If my research does not check out, please let me know.

When people talk about AI, I always picture a robot. Something like C3PO¹ from the Star Wars² movies. C3PO is a humanoid robot that can listen, speak, see, move and interact with the physical world. C3PO can reason about the world and make informed decisions.

Many people probably have a similar picture in their head when they hear AI but it’s wrong.

C3PO is actually an AGI³ (artificial general intelligence). There are many AGIs in movies⁴ but none exists in reality³. Additionally, there are only very few species that have general intelligence. Apart from humans, scientists believe that rodents and primates possess general intelligence⁵.

But if the robots in our minds are a form of AGI, what is AI, and what are the differences? Great question, let’s find out.