Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a replacement. I really think that there’s a human in the loop going forward in that AI might be a useful tool, but we all know its limits in terms of hallucinations, in terms of potential inaccuracies. Even if you apply it to rote tasks, it’s important to check the work. And you know better than anyone as a writer that the current models do not match your ability to write, let alone gain context in a conversation to ask the right questions or show the intelligence that you have as a journalist.

If you think about what it takes to create great design, there’s so much in that context window that’s emotional or thinking temporally about a brand experience or a user flow. I just don’t see how, in the near term, AI is able to have that as part of its context, which means that humans are providing that.