The design world is flooded with new tools, especially in AI and interior design. Every week brings another product promising to speed up or even reinvent creativity. But after 16 years working across fashion and interiors, I keep returning to one question: can artificial intelligence truly understand design taste?
I have tested the tools. I have played with the prompts. And while I am no stranger to technology, I have found that most AI-generated design lacks the one thing that defines meaningful work: empathy.
Taste is not just about what looks right, it is about what feels right. It is sensing how people move through a space, how the light changes through the day, how emotion can be shaped by proportion or texture. So far, no algorithm can replicate that.
This article builds on something I first explored in my 2023 LinkedIn piece, Interior Design and AI: Why Interior Designers are Still Needed, written at the height of AI’s arrival in creative conversations. Two years on, I have seen more tools and more hype, but not one that understands a brief, a client or a space the way a human does.
AI Can Assist, But the Human Touch Is Irreplaceable
At House Designer, our clients do not come to us for generated options. They come for real collaboration, empathy and experience. AI tools cannot ask the right questions. They do not push back, and they do not notice the small emotional cues in a client’s tone. They cannot feel when a space needs breathing room or softness.
Taste is subtle. It shifts with light, rhythm, context and lifestyle. We have found that AI tools can mimic a style, but they cannot grasp intention.
We are interior designers, not prompt engineers. Design is not about automation, it is about perspective.
image credit: House Designer
The Role of AI in Interior Design: Assistant or Imitator?
AI can seem extraordinary at first glance. It promises faster ideation, instant mood boards and automated layouts, doing in seconds what once took hours. But these are not design decisions. They are starting points. At best a sketch, at worst a distraction.
That is the crux of it: these tools do not design, they recombine. They remix aesthetics that already exist. AI can give you a hundred options, but it cannot tell you which one feels right. It does not know your client, the energy of the space, or the way the light hits at 3pm in October. It does not know your gut feeling.
Taste lives in those details. In restraint. In knowing when to stop.
This is a question we explored in more depth over at House Designer, in Can AI design your home?, where the team looked at what these tools do well and where they fall short. My own view lines up with theirs: AI is a capable assistant, but the judgement behind good design is still human. When we did bring AI into our own work, we built it to support designers rather than replace them, grounded in real projects and real expertise. That, to me, is the honest way to use these tools: expertise led, AI enabled.
Design Is Empathy, Not Output
Good design is not made by churning out a hundred variations and picking the one that looks okay. It is shaped by lived experience, emotion, restraint and dialogue. That is what our clients pay for, and it is what they deserve.
No tool can yet replicate the human side of design. And at House Designer, that is exactly the side we never plan to give up.