Ep 54: Authenticity in the Age of AI - Real Talk with Laurie Laizure from Interior Design Community
Authenticity in the Age of AI: Real Talk with Laurie Laizure
A fireside chat between two industry veterans on the current state of AI in design, how to spot AI-generated content from a mile away, protecting your IP, and why designers have more power in this moment than they realize.
- The design industry is split between early AI adopters and firms that are waiting to see if it matters. Both positions have real trade-offs — and both Jenna and Laurie have seen designers on each end of the spectrum make decisions they regret.
- AI-generated content is detectable — and the tell-tale signs are specific. Em dashes, weird emojis, comparative statements, mismatched fonts and sizes, and a certain cheerful genericness that no actual human would ever write. Laurie DMs friends when she spots it.
- Designers are positioned to become trusted product guides — a role that is more sustainable than "influencer" and more achievable than licensing deals. The consumer market is starving for someone who actually knows what quality looks like.
- Your IP is at risk if you hand it to the wrong platforms. Jenna works with developers behind the scenes and will tell them directly when a tool is being built to eventually displace the designers feeding it data.
- Quality in, quality out. AI is not a shortcut for thinking. The designers who win with AI are the ones who put genuine, specific, well-thought-out inputs in — and then actually proofread what comes out.
Laurie Laizure is the founder of Interior Design Community, one of the largest and most active professional communities for interior designers. For a decade, she has been bringing designers, brands, and industry leaders together through social media, events, and education — consistently advocating for fair compensation, ethical practices, and the professional standing of designers at every level. Jenna and Laurie have shared panels and spoken together at industry events for two years.
Where Designers Actually Are with AI Right Now
Laurie sees the full spectrum through Interior Design Community — from designers who have built custom GPTs for daily business operations and use AI across every part of their workflow, to established firms that have been successful for 20 years and are watching from the sidelines with genuine skepticism. Both ends exist. Both have logic behind them.
The "wait and see" group is not being naive. They have functioning businesses. They have clients. They have processes that work. The question they are legitimately asking is: what specific problem in my specific business does this solve? And Laurie's observation is that a lot of the AI conversation in the industry has not answered that question well — it has led with hype rather than specifics.
"There are people using AI to get time back — responsibly. And there are people using it in ways they shouldn't, passing off AI work as their own. The range is enormous."
— Laurie LaizureThe concern Laurie raises is the middle — designers who are not using AI at all but are also not watching it closely enough to understand what is coming. The firms that get blindsided will not be the ones that tried AI and decided it was not for them. They will be the ones that dismissed it entirely until the competitive gap had already opened up.
How to Spot AI-Generated Content — Laurie's List
Laurie has been on social media for a decade and has been studying AI content closely enough that she can identify it at a scroll. She will DM friends when she sees obvious tells in their posts. This is not about gatekeeping — it is about protecting people from publishing content that signals "I did not actually write this" to the clients who are already primed to look for it.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha grew up watching this. A nine-year-old can spot AI-generated content on Pinterest. If a child can see it, a client can see it. And once a client suspects your heartfelt post about a difficult project was generated in 30 seconds, they start questioning everything else.
- ✗Em dashes everywhere. Legitimate writers use em dashes, but AI uses them constantly — in every paragraph, multiple times. Three em dashes in four paragraphs is a tell. Normal conversational writing rarely looks like this.
- ✗Weird or excessive emojis. AI tends to add emojis where a real person would not, or strings them together in combinations that feel off. If you would never write that many, do not let AI write them for you.
- ✗Comparative statements. "She's not just a designer — she is the visionary of the future." AI loves this construction. Nobody actually talks like this. Strip all of them.
- ✗Overused buzzwords. "Luxury," "elegant," "transformative," "innovative," "seamlessly." These words appear in AI output at a rate that no human writer would sustain. Train your GPT explicitly to avoid them.
- ✗Mismatched fonts and sizes in emails. When you paste AI-corrected text into an email and do not reformat it, the size and font often shift — going from your standard 10pt Arial to 12pt Times New Roman mid-paragraph. Visibly embarrassing, and clients notice.
- ✗Generic enthusiasm. "I'm SO excited to share this AMAZING new project!" Nobody who actually designed something they are proud of writes about it like a press release. If it does not sound like you in real life, it is not going to resonate.
Laurie's approach: she and Jenna both write or voice-clip their own social captions rather than having AI write them from scratch. Laurie will intentionally leave in a misspelling sometimes, because posts with typos perform better — people cannot help themselves commenting to point it out, and engagement is engagement. More importantly, it signals human. A misspelling is proof of a human hand in a way that perfect grammar no longer is.
Designers as Product Guides: The Income Opportunity Most Are Missing
Laurie makes a strong case for something she has been thinking about for a long time: the average consumer has almost no reliable path to quality furniture and home products. Their options are Ashley Furniture, Wayfair, Restoration Hardware, or IKEA — and in each case, a significant portion of what they are paying goes to marketing, warehousing, and distribution rather than materials and craft. An IKEA sofa at $1,000 might represent $50–$100 in actual materials and labor. That is the reality the consumer is not seeing.
Designers know this. They know what eight-way hand-tied construction means, what kill-dried frames feel like, which brands actually manufacture in the US and which ones do not. That expertise is genuinely valuable to the broader consumer market — not just to the luxury client who can afford a full design project.
"I would love for product to be how designers supplement their income. It's much more attainable than a licensing deal or a book. How many people in your city need a sofa right now?"
— Laurie LaizureLaurie also raised the poll Interior Design Community ran across their 100,000+ member community: 52% of responding designers reported income under $100,000 — in an industry where many practitioners live in major metropolitan areas where that is not a comfortable living. AI tools and product guidance channels are not glamorous, but they are practical ways to add a meaningful income stream without adding hours.
Your IP Is at Risk — and Jenna Is Watching
This is one of the more pointed parts of the conversation. Jenna works behind the scenes with developers and companies building AI tools for the design industry — advising, evaluating, and in some cases telling them directly that what they are building will harm the designers who are helping fund its development. She does not publicize this work widely, but Laurie brings it up because she thinks designers should know it exists.
The pattern Jenna has seen: a company approaches designers asking them to contribute floor plans, vendor lists, drawings, design processes, and workflow data to "build a better tool for designers." What gets built is a consumer-facing product that, trained on designer IP, eventually competes with the designers who contributed to it. The designers are asked to provide training data for a system that will eventually help clients bypass them.
Before contributing your work — drawings, process documentation, vendor relationships, design data — to any AI platform or tool, ask directly: what are you building this toward? Who is the intended end user in two years, not just today? If you get a vague answer, that is the answer.
Laurie frames it in terms of a pattern designers have experienced before: giving images and IP to brands and platforms that then profit from it without appropriate credit or compensation. AI is the same dynamic with higher stakes, because the tool being built on that data is potentially far more disruptive than a single social media post using your photography.
"If I feel like it's taking away from designers, I flat out tell them that. Sometimes I don't get a call back — and that's fine. That goes on a list: do not put your IP into this brand."
— Jenna GaidusekUsing AI Without Losing Yourself: What Actually Works
Both Jenna and Laurie are heavy AI users — and both write their own captions. That is not a contradiction. The point is not that AI cannot help with social media content. The point is that "help" means something specific and requires judgment on your end.
Laurie's process: voice-clip her content — speaking it the way she would actually say it — then run it through AI to clean up grammar and structure while keeping the voice intact. She leaves in occasional typos deliberately, because it signals human authorship in a way that matters. She then reads the output against what she would actually say and revises anything that does not sound right. It takes longer than copy-pasting. It produces content that does not make people discount what she is saying the moment they recognize the pattern.
The quality in, quality out principle runs throughout this conversation. AI cannot compensate for a vague, undifferentiated input. If you ask it to write "a caption about my new project," you will get a generic caption about a new project. If you give it specific details — what made this project challenging, what surprised the client, what you learned — you get something that might actually be worth reading. But you have to do the thinking first. AI is the writing assistant, not the thinker.
"Designers are trendsetters. We do not follow trends — we make them. If AI doesn't know it yet, it is because we haven't made it yet. Don't go to AI for inspiration. Go for historical reference and then let your creative mind take it somewhere AI cannot."
— Jenna Gaidusek
Listen to the episode here:
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.
