AI is a tool, not a role
It works in the hands of someone who already knows the craft. It does not replace the craft.
Most people outside design already thought UX was decoration that anyone could have an opinion on. Now many of them assume anyone with an AI tool can produce it. Both ideas are wrong, and the second one is more dangerous.
AI is genuinely useful. I use it in my own work. It drafts, and it clears the boring parts out of the way. But a tool amplifies whoever is holding it. Hand a powerful tool to someone who does not understand the problem, and you do not get good work faster. You get work that is confidently wrong, faster.
Design is not the pixels. It is the decision underneath them: who is this for, and what happens when it breaks. A model can generate a screen that looks finished. It cannot tell you that the finished screen quietly excludes the person on a cheap phone, because it does not carry the responsibility of that person getting help or giving up.
Here is what that looks like in my own work. On the public services I design now, I start with the error state instead of the happy path, because on a weak signal that screen is where a citizen decides whether to trust the service or walk away. A model will happily polish that screen once I ask for it. It will not tell me the screen needed to be designed first.
So the risk is not that AI replaces designers. The risk is that teams treat design as something a model auto-generates, then ship things that look fine and only find out later that they fail real people. That failure is cheap to cause and expensive to notice, and it is most dangerous at national scale.
The craft still decides the outcome. AI just makes the craft, or the lack of it, show up sooner.