Adobe AI VIP Community — Talk & Adobe MAX 2025

The tools we use leave marks on us. Not in the romantic, craft-worn sense — in the deeper sense that the constraints and affordances of our instruments quietly shape what we think is possible. A surgeon trained on one set of instruments develops instincts that persist long after the tools are upgraded. A designer who grew up in print thinks in grids that digital-native designers never inherited. We are, in some fundamental way, the sum of our tools' assumptions.

This is what makes the current AI moment genuinely different — and worth thinking about with more care than most conversations allow.

When Adobe invited me to join their AI VIP Community, a group of designers brought together to explore AI workflows and help shape how these tools develop, my first instinct wasn't excitement. It was the question I keep returning to: are we shaping these tools, or are they shaping us? The Frankenstein problem, restated for the age of generative everything.

What the summit surfaced

I presented on this tension: the risk that in our rush to integrate AI into creative practice, we mistake fluency for authorship. That we optimize for output velocity and inadvertently deprecate the slower, stranger parts of the process — the dead ends, the productive confusion, the moments of not-knowing that tend to be where the real work happens.

The room pushed back, in the best way. Designers from across disciplines were already living inside this tension, and they weren't passive about it. What emerged wasn't a consensus but something more useful: a set of shared intuitions about where to hold the line. Preserve the brief. Interrogate the prompt. Own the edit. The tool can accelerate execution; it cannot replace judgment.

MAX

Adobe MAX is, among other things, a proof of concept for creative community at scale. Walking those floors, sitting in sessions where working practitioners dissected their actual process — not the polished version, the real one — confirmed something I've believed for a while: the most important variable in how AI reshapes design is not the model. It's the people who refuse to let it define them.

What grounds this work is not skepticism of AI. It's a precise understanding of what design actually is. Design is not the production of artifacts. It is the act of deciding what matters, for whom, and why — and then making that legible to the world. That act is irreducibly human, not because machines can't generate forms, but because the question of what to make has never been a technical question.

The direction I keep returning to: it doesn't start with the technology. It starts with the community of people who are clear-eyed enough to use it on their own terms.

I'm grateful to the Adobe team for the invitation and for building a space where that conversation can happen honestly. And to the designers in that room — thank you for the pushback. It was the best part.