Asymmetric encounters with AI: Professional designers’ perceptions and integration of AI tools

Emerging generative AI (GenAI) tools, which are known to encompass cultural biases, are anticipated to significantly impact creative work, especially as they become incorporated into professional software suites such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, Figma, and Miro. Professionals and pundits predict positive and negative outcomes, ranging from substantial productivity gains to the risk of reduced employment opportunities for creative practitioners, concerns around intellectual property, and fears that a lack of diversity in training data will result in diminished variety of creative outputs. This uncertainty makes it vital to examine how generative AI is used and perceived at the cutting edge of adoption across professional contexts in both the Global North and South. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 professional User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI) and graphic designers from across cultural contexts, with most from Global South backgrounds. Participants were at varying stages of GenAI adoption; some were exploring and others were integrating GenAI tools into their professional workflows. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analysed participants’ experiences to understand how socio-economic and cultural situatedness shaped their engagement with GenAI tools. Our findings revealed a complex, asymmetric landscape of AI adoption within professional design workflows. We contribute insights into asymmetries within extended creative cognition, uncovering a paradox of access wherein AI provides essential scaffolding for participants’ work while simultaneously imposing a standardisation tax that constrains situated cultural expression. We propose design directions for GenAI tools that may promote cultural inclusivity and ethically responsible Human-AI collaboration.