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Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

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Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#11

Post by JCM9 »

I think it raises the bar on what’s needed to be a designer, but I don’t think it replaces the need for a designer.

I’d draw parallels to web design. Yes some frameworks made it incredibly easy for anyone to whip up a decent looking professional site. But then 95% of websites were the same boring single page scroll nonsense with some fancy CSS. It checks a box but isn’t notable. If you hire a designer to do something truly original then you can stand out.

It will be the same with AI where “good enough to check the box” becomes easy, but going beyond that still requires skill and experience.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#12

Post by Mabusto »

Design is one of those things that succeeds or fails in subtlety and both are difficult to quantify and back propagate through any sort of process, let alone training a model. The same way we figured out that the microwave can make approximations to good food quickly, so too shall we see that AI can do the same with tasks that rely heavily on a connection to people's aesthetics.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#13

Post by jampa »

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones.

The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages require nuance to understand the client and their branding (which clients often struggle to articulate themselves), and that's not something current models can capture.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#14

Post by monooso »

mwigdahl wrote: post #7
immibis wrote: post #2

Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. Not surprised to hear it's similar in other fields. AI in general, just like drugs, makes people feel good but without any actual substance behind the feeling. (If feeling without substance is all you need, then it's okay to use AI. AI Dungeon, for example, was pretty cool. Or slide backgrounds that would have otherwise bee…

That's a gross overgeneralization of the content of the actual study paired with a bizarre analogy. You do you, but I disagree completely.

Could you expand on your criticism?

OP stated that:

> Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse.

You responded that this is a "gross overgeneralization of the content of the actual study", but the study appears to back up the original statement. To quote the summary:

> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

(I realise newer models have been released since the study, but you didn't claim that the findings have been superceded.)

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#15

Post by kingkongjaffa »

The number one thing that AI is lacking is taste, precisely the reason we need designers in the first place. An engineer (most engineers are not designers) alone, or an LLM is not thinking about good design principles and doing the things needed to develop good taste.

It's the reason why LLMs are horrible at writing, and the reason why good design is really hard to get out of an LLM. Figma Make and Claude Code are really just using the out of the box CSS from shadcn that's why everything looks the same.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#16

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

okokwhatever wrote: post #8

Thats because the new design is the conversation. The new framework is the language and the narrative style. This is the biggest win under my opinion.

Well, it is still much more efficient (consumed energy, outcome, and mental sanity-wise) to fill a form with a textbox and a datepicker to book a flight, than trying to negotiate it with a chatbot.

Everyone assumes that the perfect communication medium is human (or human like) conversation. If that was the case, couple and marriage therapists wouldn't exist.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#17

Post by lysace »

jampa wrote: post #13

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages re…

Tangent: Google keeps doing the same with GCP/Firebase/etc. Every year they launch a bunch of really well-crafted services that make it easy to build the most average kind of product in whatever area is trendy that year. Every year I am left intrigued but needing more to actually make use of them. The next year it's something else.

I guess this is primarily a business pattern. Or anti-pattern?

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#18

Post by joenot443 »

jampa wrote: post #13

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages re…

I think this hits the nail on the head.

I've had great success using Claude to produce a new landing page which is much more stylish than something I would produce myself. It's also nowhere near the standard expected from a professional designer, but for a FOSS app, that's just fine with me :)

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#19

Post by kingkongjaffa »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #15

The number one thing that AI is lacking is taste, precisely the reason we need designers in the first place. An engineer (most engineers are not designers) alone, or an LLM is not thinking about good design principles and doing the things needed to develop good taste. It's the reason why LLMs are horrible at writing, and the reason why good design is really hard to get out of an LLM. Figma Make and Claude Code are re…

on the other hand:

> After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster

I am designing prototypes faster today with LLMs this is just flat out wrong. And it's not really 2.5 years it's more like the last 6 months, GPT5, sonnet 4.0 and 4.5 have made this stuff viable to seriously use.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#20

Post by zdragnar »

CharlesW wrote: post #9
immibis wrote: post #2

Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. Not surprised to hear it's similar in other fields. AI in general, just like drugs, makes people feel good but without any actual substance behind the feeling. (If feeling without substance is all you need, then it's okay to use AI. AI Dungeon, for example, was pretty cool. Or slide backgrounds that would have otherwise bee…

This story is not about developers, but setting that aside: The reason it's not damning is that the results can't be generalized. It's mostly self-reported "minutes per issue" anecdata by 16 experienced OSS maintainers working on their own, mature repos, most of whom were new to Cursor and did not a chance to develop or adopt frameworks for AI-assisted development.

I think this is missing an important point: the developers in question thought they were being faster, when they were in fact the opposite.

I'd love to see a larger study on more experienced users. The mismatch between their perception and reality is really curious.

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