Graphic design used to require physical work. To compose letterheads, business cards, brochures, magazines, books, and posters, you hunched over a desk or a light table. You cut and pasted paper or assembled metal type on a printing press. You processed 35mm film by hand, developing pictures in a darkroom with chemicals.

Jason Tselentis is an educator, writer, and designer. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In 1984, Apple’s Macintosh arrived and changed everything. Layout software such as Aldus PageMaker and its successors enabled designers to make changes with a click. Graphic design transitioned from the workbench to the computer screen, in what we came to call the desktop publishing revolution. Design work moved from the laborious world of hands-on creativity to the freer but more abstract digital realm, where you can see the results of choices instantly—but each decision carries less weight, because you can undo it with a single command.

Today, we’re on the verge of another revolution, as artificial intelligence and machine learning turn the graphic design field on its head again. The vision is, to quote one project’s slogan, “websites that just make themselves.” Software will evaluate your text content, line of business, and imagery, and spit out finished pages without your having to lift a finger. These kinds of automated tools will arrive on the web first, but print design will change, too, as design-software makers inject machine learning into their layout tools and apps.

For all the noise about AI-driven graphic design, however, today’s reality lags stubbornly behind the grand vision. Many of the products now available will disappoint users expecting miraculous results from AI genies. That’s a letdown, for sure, but it also gives us some time to think about what kind of design work we want machines to do for us, and what roles we should be reserving for human beings.

The Grid promises to hand the design of your site over to an AI named Molly: “She’s quirky, but will never ghost you, never charge more, never miss a deadline, never cower to your demands for a bigger logo…Molly can apply a simple five-color palette to your site in more than 200,000 unique ways.”

One of the earliest entries into the artificial intelligence web design marketplace, The Grid has been promoting “AI websites that design themselves” since it launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2014. “Conceptually feels very next level, an obvious, natural progression just waiting to happen,” tweeted 37Signals/Basecamp founder Jason Fried when The Grid’s promotional video made the rounds of the web design community.

The Grid asked its “founding members” for $96 but then took years to deliver a product, and reviews have been decidedly mixed. If you watch the company’s video today, the next video that YouTube queues up for you will probably be “The Grid Sucks,” a rambling, hour-long complaint by early beta user DigitalDan. Molly might be an AI breakthrough, but at the moment, her role mostly involves generating color palettes and auto-cropping photos. Reddit is full of dissatisfied users who say that The Grid’s much-touted AI abilities produce look-alike websites that are difficult or impossible to customize. Other reviewers are similarly caustic (“shoddy and expensive,” says CMSWire).

The only way to reach the company is through a contact form, and its automated email replies—signed "Love, The Grid"—directed me to a demo video titled “The Five Minute Website on The Grid.” (The video itself clocks in at 56 minutes.) The software the demo walks through looks very similar to WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix—content-management systems that took most of the code out of web design a good while ago.

Wix, another popular website builder, also offers an AI solution: Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). Nitzan Achsaf, head of Wix ADI, says it can create a website all by itself by using the content you provide to suggest “billions of beautiful design options.” You click the option you prefer and the program does all the reformatting. The company’s materials make it look quick and easy—but like an enhanced version of Wix, rather than a breakthrough tool for auto-generating websites.