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Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

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Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#21

Post by kenjackson »

In some sense it is happening. But as alluded to in the article its going to be from the bottom up. I use AI designs for my slides and videos. Are they as good as a professional designer? No. Not even close really. Is it better than me? Yes. Not even close really.

The thing is on a computer today is that most design is prepackaged and not customized to what I'm doing. AI gets me a big step closer to that so much so that it is preferable to most of the prepackaged work done by a professional designer. Again, if I had a professional designer next to me to do slides and videos then that would be better, but very few people have that.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#22

Post by levmiseri »

Lots of these discussions are simplifying design to 'making things look pretty'. That's just not true for even the more visual-based design disciplines like graphic design. And the 'regular' product design (ux/ui/ixd) happening in most tech companies has very little of this compared to the rest of the scope of what a designer really does.

Product design isn't a layer that you apply. It's not an output of some prompt. It's a difficult-to-define process of crafting the interface between the user and product's functionality.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#23

Post by fellowniusmonk »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #19
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.

I've still not seen any good workflows for design prototypes, are you talking designing code prototypes or design?

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#24

Post by jackdoe »

After 3 years of building products with AI and using it for at least ten hours per day, I started to think like Hayao Miyazaki.

> I am utterly disgusted. ... I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

or David Simon:

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...

SIMON: What?

SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...

SIMON: You imagine that?

SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.

SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.

SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.

SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1177569966

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#25

Post by scuff3d »

> My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation

Best summary I've heard so far

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#26

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

zdragnar wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just a guess, but maybe they were really estimating how much effort they made.

It's quite possible that it took less overall mental effort from the developers using AI, but it took more elapsed time.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#28

Post by CharlesW »

monooso wrote: post #14
mwigdahl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

It doesn't, and the study authors themselves are pretty clear about the limitations. The irony is that current foundation models are pretty good at helping to identify why this study doesn't offer useful general insights into the productivity benefits (or lack of) of AI-assisted development.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#29

Post by saulpw »

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…

> the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones.

Design by committee is known to produce terrible designs. The best an LLM can do is to completely copy a common decent design.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#30

Post by krapp »

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

Because art, commercially viable art, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspirarion. AI can generate the first inspirational image but cannot do the 99%, all the hard work, to turn that image into a viable product.

If you're talking about commercial art, I think most of it is already done by AI wherever feasible.

The interesting conversation is around art not as a product to be consumed but a medium of human expression with intent behind it.

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