Is the era of people building websites coming to an end?

It was fun just to watch people turn their photos into Ghibli-style images or create spontaneous videos, and it was fun to try it out myself, too.

However, after a while, as AI performance improved explosively, the timeline started to overflow with posts like,“Look how much I got done with AI in such a short time!” and before long, people began to seriously view it as a threat to their jobs.

Around March 2026, as AI performance began to improve at an accelerating pace, I realized that even someone like me—who isn’t great at programming—would have to get my hands on it, or nothing would get started. So, feeling a bit anxious, I began experimenting with various AI tools and issued a company-wide call to action to adopt AI across the organization. (Of course, AI tools were already widely used, primarily among engineers.)



In October, I decided on a whim to revamp our company website. I used Figma to outline my vision, then fed it to ChatGPT and Claude to create a rough draft of the site’s structure. I also used them as sounding boards to refine the structure, and they offered perspectives different from my own and they were a huge help in getting the site completed.

While the insights provided by the AI were certainly helpful, At the risk of being misunderstood, I’m convinced that if I’d taken the time, I would have ended up in much the same place.

If asked why, it’s because what I want to say and what I want people to feel comes from within me; even if I’m convinced by what an AI tells me, that doesn’t mean I’ll automatically think everything is “great” just because the AI says it’s “great.”

Now that AI-driven production is possible, it has become easier to create work of a certain standard—including layout, coding, illustration, and more—faster than humans can.

Of course, people with exceptionally high skills have started to produce output at an even higher level, but somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m doing it myself. And there’s a phenomenon where people feel depressed because they get the sense that humans can’t compete with the output generated by AI.



I can certainly understand why people would think that, given how much AI is changing the world—in fact, I had fallen into that state myself.

“Why did I start making things in the first place?”

I remember that nearly 30 years ago, just as the web was beginning to take off as a new form of expression and a new means of communicating information, I thought to myself, “Wow, how do they create a site with such a cool design that combines video and audio?” and that’s when I started learning.
I now realize that what moved me wasn’t the technology itself, but the fact that the output reflected the creator’s “intent.”

Even now, I’m not exactly working just to tinker with Figma or AI tools. (Though when I was just starting out, I used to have fun just playing around with Photoshop.)
ultimately, what people want to do is express and communicate; the means can never become the end.

About 4,500 years ago in Egypt, people built pyramids weighing a total of 6 million metric tons, and sought to convey their message through stone statues, murals, and hieroglyphs. About 2,000 years ago in Rome, they built the Colosseum, and in medieval Europe, they spent hundreds of years constructing cathedrals. Even today, people continue to express themselves through every possible medium, including architecture, cuisine, video, still images, writing, and sound.

Although, over the course of so many years, the tools of expression have evolved—from carving chisels to brushes, from brushes to Illustrator, and from Illustrator to AI—ultimately, what I want to do is express and communicate; the means never become the end in themselves.

One of the stories that has moved me recently is that film director Christopher Nolan, for The Odyssey,
used an IMAX camera—which, including its soundproofing equipment, weighed about 136 kg—and shot the entire film using approximately 640 km of film.
In the digital age, the age of AI, is it foolish for him to go out of his way to shoot new footage using film…

The director had a clear vision in his mind and a specific level of detail he was aiming for, and he made that choice precisely because he determined that the IMAX format was the best way to bring it to life. Who could possibly mock the fact that even an imaginary giant standing about 18 meters tall was brought to life by combining a massive puppet with the actors’ performances and visual effects?
No one can. After all, the quality of the output is simply overwhelming—it really touches people's hearts and is breaking IMAX box office records.

Even if a maker says, “Isn’t it amazing that I made this in such an analog way in this day and age?”

Ultimately, it’s not about “AI this and that”—without the vision and judgment of the people behind it, no output that carries responsibility can be made.No one wants to accept something just because an AI told them to.

Of course, I believe AI brings efficiency and prosperity in this day and age. At our company, we build our own internal tools and have fully integrated AI into our production processes.

Just as people’s range of movement in life expanded dramatically when they gained access to cars, trains, and airplanes, the advent of the AI era has made it a little easier—no, actually, much easier—to reach places we couldn’t reach on our own.
That is precisely why I strongly believe it is important for us to never stop thinking for ourselves, to master the use of AI, and to keep putting our own will into what we make.

Right now, while we’re still dazzled by the dizzying pace of AI tools’ development, all sorts of needless worries often cross my mind.But I want you to remember. Or perhaps imagine.
Whether it was when the Internet first emerged about 30 years ago, when paper gave way to email as a means of communication, or when smartphones first started appearing, there were always people somewhere who felt anxious about it, and many users were flustered and treated it as something they didn’t want to acknowledge.

The same goes for website development.

Now that AI poses a threat and zero-click rates are approaching 70 percent, we need to use our imagination even more. When deciding which school or tutoring center to send your child to, don’t you find yourself wondering, “What are they actually saying?”—rather than just relying on AI-generated summaries?

It's the same when considering which company to work for, and it's the same when buying a car—which is a really big purchase. If you think about it, we look at websites when we need to, and we use AI summaries and websites for different purposes.

I, too, rarely visit brand or company websites on a regular basis. But there’s always a time when I do end up looking at them. It’s just that the role of the websites that many people used to visit has changed, and we need to be aware of that.

Precisely because we are in the age of AI, we must recognize—and convey—how important it is to have a place where companies and brands can show their own will in their own voice and style.

On the scale of human history, there have undoubtedly been countless environmental changes, and I believe that the emergence of AI will ultimately be a “good thing” for those of us who make things—as long as we continue to imagine, think, and refuse to give up on making our own judgments.