OpenAI Codex chief says AI still struggles with creative design

OpenAI's head of Codex, Andrew Ambrosino, says AI still can't get creative design right and that the challenge is not only technical. "I think design's a little bit harder to grade than software," Ambrosino said on a recent episode of "Lenny's Podcast." "In that, creating a loop where you can train the model on what's good design and what's bad design is just a little bit more tedious and onerous than, you know, does the code compile?" The gap has to do with taste and the judgment required to know when something actually works.

Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, noted that AI models are trained on the "distribution of data" and typically create designs that people recognize as "average," he said on a recent episode of "Hard Fork." So far, AI often speeds up parts of the process but rarely produces a polished finished product on its own.

For now, that means creative jobs appear safer, though practitioners will need new skills like prompting or vibecoding.

openai, codex, andrew ambrosino, creative design, design judgment, lenny's podcast, dylan field, figma, prompting, vibecoding