The most interesting piece of AI product design I've seen this month wasn't made for designers. It was made for five-year-olds.
What happened
At IFA, a company called Luka Kids showed off an AI drawing projector aimed at children. The concept is disarmingly simple: a child describes what they want to draw — a dragon, a horse, a spaceship — and the device generates an outline, projecting it onto paper. Then the AI stops. The child picks up a crayon and finishes the picture themselves.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has been catching heat for promotional material that paints a starkly different picture of AI's creative future — one where the technology handles creative work end to end. The creative community's response has been, let's say, frosty.
Two products. Two completely different answers to the same design question.
The decision nobody's making carefully enough
Here's what I think most AI product teams are missing: the most important design decision in any AI feature isn't what the AI does. It's how much it does before handing control back to the human.
Call it the completeness dial. Right now, almost every AI product has it cranked to maximum.
Generate the whole image. Write the whole email. Build the whole prototype. The AI does everything; you approve or reject. Your role shrinks to quality control.
The Luka projector takes the opposite approach. The AI contributes maybe 20% of the creative work — just enough structure to get past the terror of a blank page — and then deliberately steps back. The child does the colouring, the shading, the actual creative choices. The result is something the kid genuinely made, with genuine pride, using AI as scaffolding rather than a replacement.
That restraint isn't a technical limitation. It's a design choice. And it's a better one than most AI products are making right now.
Why this changes how we design AI features
We spend a lot of energy debating whether AI belongs in a product. We don't spend nearly enough thinking about where the AI should stop.
Consider the tools you use daily. When an AI generates a complete first draft — a layout, a piece of copy, a colour palette — what actually happens next? In my experience, you either accept it wholesale or spend more energy wrestling with it than you would've spent creating from scratch. The AI's completeness becomes an anchor. Its output fills the space where your thinking should've been.
But when a tool gives you just a starting structure — an outline, a rough composition, a set of constraints — it accelerates without replacing. The blank page disappears, but the creative decisions remain yours.
This is the difference between AI that makes you faster and AI that makes you unnecessary.
It's worth noting that the EU's new toy safety regulation now pushes manufacturers to assess the mental health impact of connected products on children. That regulatory context makes the Luka projector's hands-on approach especially smart — it keeps the child active and creating rather than passively consuming AI output. But honestly, the principle isn't just about kids. Passive consumption of AI-generated work isn't great for anyone's creative muscles.