Design Authorship in the AI Age

A simple barometer of quality education is whether students graduate believing they’re prepared and capable of doing good work in their chosen field. As human-AI collaboration becomes integrated into the design industry — and design education — that sense of preparedness grows more complicated.

For educators like Byungsoo Kim, the rise of AI presents concerns about how to prepare the next generation of designers. An assistant professor of industrial design at NC State University’s College of Design, Kim is exploring students’ perceived sense of authorship — the comfort level in claiming designs as their own — when they incorporate AI tools into their creative process. 

In workshops he leads, Kim has been collecting quantitative and qualitative data to measure student engagement when using AI. His findings could indicate whether the technology helps or hinders students’ belief in their creativity and design concepts, not only for graduation but also once they enter creative industries as professionals. 

“For students and young designers, motivation is really important,” Kim said. “When they lose their sense of engagement in learning, it’s actually critical.”

A “Tipping Point” in Design Authorship

Kim first conducted this study in a sketching course at Kansas State University. He has since adopted the same format at NC State, where he currently leads a similar workshop that teaches students to use a popular industrial design tool, Vizcom AI.

For one workshop, industrial design students were tasked to create a salt-and-pepper grinder set. In another, architecture students had to design shared spaces inside a dormitory. 

With both groups, Kim began by teaching students to communicate their ideas visually with hand-drawn sketches on paper to establish design intent without digital assistance. Then students uploaded their original sketches to Vizcom AI, which rendered them into photorealistic digital images. As part of the exercise, Kim asked students to generate 11 different images by incrementally increasing AI’s influence from 10% to 100%.

Afterward, students completed surveys assessing their comfort with the tool and their sense of ownership of the AI-generated designs.

While Kim continues collecting data for a forthcoming paper, patterns have emerged from the numerous workshops he has led. So far, he has found that most students claim ownership of their designs, but surveys reveal a critical threshold: when AI influence exceeds roughly 50% — representing a “tipping point” — students feel the designs no longer belong to them.

Below that threshold, students maintain their sense of authorship as long as at least half of their original sketch remains visible. Beyond it, their sense of ownership over the work begins to erode.

Opportunity and Caution

Kim’s driving question is straightforward: How will educators like him prepare students for professional design in the age of AI?

In informal post-workshop conversations, he asks students about their comfort with AI tools. Their responses reveal a range of attitudes.

“Some students are really conservative in their use of AI,” Kim said. “They prefer to create the designs themselves and feel a sense of craftsmanship. They want to reach a certain point with their creativity, then use AI to refine it.”

Others embrace the technology enthusiastically. “Some are very excited about AI because they want to learn to be more effective as designers,” Kim said.

This divide defines Kim’s pedagogical challenge — helping students navigate their wariness of AI while also preparing them for an industry that increasingly expects fluency with it.

For hesitant students, Kim reframes AI as an assistant rather than a replacement. “I encourage them to use the tools as a kind of assistant or tutor, because what AI tools are good at in my field is handling a 2D sketch,” he said.

Vizcom AI’s settings, for instance, can be adjusted to preserve students’ original sketches while helping them visualize ways to strengthen their designs and concepts.

 “I encourage them to use AI tools as a kind of assistant or tutor.”

Student concerns extend beyond authorship to job security and satisfaction — anxieties that mirror broader industry upheaval. In fact, Kim’s research was inspired by an article he read about concept artists in film and animation who began changing their job titles after AI integration transformed their responsibilities.

“[These concept artists] really liked their jobs,” Kim said. “But after AI is integrated, it’s more like they are just coordinating generated AI images and then retouching them. It’s more efficient. But their job satisfaction level decreased because that’s not what they wanted to do.”

Happiness: The Human Cost of AI?

Debates on AI tend to focus on whether using intellectual property to train machine learning violates copyright laws. In November 2025, for example, the famed Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli demanded that OpenAI cease using its films to train AI — a response to an image generator that went viral as users created cartoons of themselves in the style of My Neighbor Totoro.

Kim’s research approaches the AI debate from a different angle: how does the technology impact artists, designers and their creative processes? The question is an ethical one, with broader implications on the well-being — or the potential human cost — of AI.

If using AI decreases creative satisfaction or accomplishment, why use it? Put another way: why rely on technology for work that people actually want to do? 

“Ideally, from a utilitarian point of view, you want to do actions that increase human happiness — not just individual, but for all parties concerned as a result of the action,” said William A. Bauer, an associate teaching professor of philosophy at NC State.

Utilitarianism, which seeks to promote the well-being of the greatest number of people while causing the least harm, is one of the philosophical frameworks that Bauer and an interdisciplinary team of faculty — including Kim — use to examine AI’s social impacts through NC State’s Centering AI in Society and Ethics (CASE) Initiative.

Although Kim’s research is focused on design students, it connects to more universal questions: should we delegate to AI the work that we find fulfilling? And what would happen if our abilities to do meaningful work grow weak and, like underutilized muscles, atrophy? 

This dulling or loss of abilities from underuse is called cognitive deskilling. As AI reshapes service and industrial sectors, there is mounting concern that the expertise people have honed through training and years of practice will weaken. 

“The more you use these AI tools, you are developing your own skills less,” said Bauer. “You are developing the skills of collaborating with [AI], and it can benefit you and push you in different ways. But you’re also weakening that ability to initiate autonomously your own creativity and cognitive power.” 

In Kim’s field, deskilling could mean that designers lose the ability to sketch, paint or maintain a keen eye for color, light and shadow. But the loss may run deeper than technique. When the creative professionals Kim read about changed their titles from “concept artist” to “concept coordinator,” they seemed to react as if they were losing something significant — not just a job description, but perhaps also a sense of competency, craft and identity.

“If some particular use of an AI promotes cognitive deskilling, that could be pretty easily connected to decreasing human well-being or happiness,” Bauer said.

Creative Futures

Kim presented his initial findings at NC State’s 2025 University Research Symposium, “Research With AI: Navigating A New Age,” last April. He has since expanded the study to include workshops at Carnegie Mellon University.

The research holds the potential to help instructors integrate AI tools into curricula. 

“Maybe [this research] can also serve students by finding an ethical way of using AI, too,” said Kim. “That’s my hope.”

Given how rapidly new AI tools are being adopted, research has yet to catch up to provide guidance for new professionals entering the job market. Kim’s novel study is an important step toward broader conversations about how we will navigate the game-changing technology as a culture and society. 

In the meantime, Kim faces the challenges of AI head-on as a scientist measuring its impacts on design education — and as a creative problem-solver who understands AI’s inherent limitations.

An industrial designer himself, Kim emphasizes in his classes the importance of differentiating oneself to create something truly distinctive. Trained on millions of images, AI struggles with this and produces outputs that lack the qualities of good design. 

“AI kind of grabs everything and then produces an average design,” Kim said. “If you want to be original, if you want to be exceptional, then you have to actually own your originality.”

His advice to students reflects this concern: broaden your design horizons and explore in ways that AI can’t.

“Maybe during summertime, go travel, or go try something new. Maybe intentionally disconnected from the digital world,” Kim said. “Go have a unique experience that can actually bring back something new, something different from others.”

“Personal experiences make you different.”