Thought Leaders
Using AI While Still Using Your Brain: Website Building as a Test Case

Recent dialogues around AI and its usage in applications across various use cases, industries, and functions have typically fallen into one of two broad perspectives, one pessimistic and one optimistic. The pessimistic view, in extreme terms, is that AI will be the end of whatever industry or creative field itâs impacting â or maybe even the end of the world. The extreme of the optimistic view is that AI is like a magic wand or a cheerful, dutiful, and brilliant assistant here to handle the cares of your day â and do your thinking for you. And there are, of course, countless variations of those viewpoints along a scale of dour realism all the way to outsized hyperbole.
Even now, as I write this article, an AI word processor integration cheerfully suggests to finish my thought for me â often suggesting things Iâm not thinking at all. Depending on your level of comfort with the written word, this could feel like a huge boon or more like an annoyance. And the same seems to go for most applications; we tend to appreciate AI more in those areas where we are weakest.
But is reinforcing those weaknesses with AI-powered assistance or, indeed, papering over large gaps in our abilities or knowledge, actually a benefit? Well, hereâs one perspective: recent studies have shown a negative correlation between the use of AI tools and critical thinking among students. This seems intuitive; after all, if you always have the mechanic change your oil and never learn how to do it, you wonât wake up one day suddenly knowing how.
If, then, the constant use of AI to do hard things for us â to lessen the challenge of learning and soften the blows of experience â can in fact make us less capable, then the question becomes, âHow do we use these tools without compromising our faculties and stunting our growth?â
As a case study, of sorts, letâs consider one of the most popular uses of AI on the internet today: building a website.
Why Building a Website is Hard
Creating a website is really a perfect example of the sort of task we mere mortals have good reason to wish to delegate to our wonderful machines. It is laborious. It requires a certain level of self-education. It is not a consistent process across various website builders, many of which can be finicky and often have steep learning curves.
Whatâs more, the types of people looking to build websites are often exceptionally busy. Take a small business owner for example. Building a website is probably not at the top of that personâs daily list, as compared to making ends meet, keeping track of countless vendors, managing inventory, paying employees and so on.
Websites are also multi-specialty. There is a technical component to building them, but also a design component, a writing component, a search engine optimization component and more. These are things the average person may find difficult to learn all at once, to say the least. The benefits of learning these things may seem to be outweighed by the difficulty inherent in applying oneself to do so.
How AI Makes It Easier
The ways in which AI simplifies the labor of the website-building process are hard to fully enumerate. A properly-designed AI-powered website builder can straight up generate a customized, fully designed website with the answering of a few quick questions. Colors, fonts and layout can be fine-tuned rapidly and immediately after.
Top AI website builders also usually have simple drag-and-drop grid layouts so users can arrange content in a clear, visual editor. The best ones have built-in image libraries, further simplifying the visual design component of the process.
Even more complex tasks like layering are clear and simple within modern, AI-powered website builders, enabling users to stack elements and create dynamic visual effects for greater impact and readability. To top it all off, AI can even provide a domain name suggestion for your website with an AI-powered domain name search.
With just these few examples, you can clearly see how AI simplifies what can be a challenging process. But, again, do you really want AI to do everything? Isnât there a certain level of learning that is lost when you donât engage with the tools at hand beyond that first automatic generation of a web page? And, worse yet, wonât the quality of your website ultimately suffer if the AI-generated output is not subsequently refined by the human hand? The answer to both those questions is clearly âyes.â
An Optimal Balance�
The immediate output of an AI website builder â and really most AI content generation tools â may look, at first glance, to be ready for publication, but putting it out into the world without refinement is typically a mistake. What makes oneâs website or other project unique is the thought thatâs put into it; the human thought. The convenience of AI tools such as AI website builders is undeniable, but just as students leaning on AI chatbots to write their essays are failing to learn anything, so too do those looking to establish a strong web presence miss the mark when they do not engage beyond the initial site generation step.
An AI website builder can be a wonderful tool, but particularly as a supplementary resource and enhancement for the process of website creation. There are so many other factors that go into finding a company to partner with for your website beyond just âdoes their AI website builder generate a web page quickly?â You need high-quality support, you need other tools and add-ons for your site, you need a growth track of sorts that you can follow to raise your web presence game as needed. Really, you need a one-stop shop.
And when it comes to the process of actually building the website, itâs important to engage with the tools and learn how to use them yourself in addition to taking advantage of the agility AI empowers. (Or, if you are completely lacking time, to have a true professional do it for you.)
There must be an optimal balance when it comes to the use of AI. If we become completely reliant on it, whether for the use of building websites or planning our days, the mental muscles we use for these tasks will atrophy. And yet, time is short and responsibilities are many, so why shouldnât we use AI tools to streamline a challenging process when appropriate?
It's easy enough to strike this delicate balance when it comes to building a website using an AI website builder; we must apply the human touch to every part of the website after every step in the AI-powered building process. Now we just have to figure out how to balance everything else.