61–70 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Admit it. You're the guy they have post-training on SVG pelican generation for human preference...
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.
Perhaps it is finally true this time, but the AI hype machine has been making this very same claim for years now.
You'll have to understand if we insist on tangible results before buying that Kool-Aid in bulk.
I wonder how much of the stuff that actually takes up the time of the people we call "designers" to do their jobs is something our current crop of LLMs is good for. If it's 90% then LLMs could make you a 10x designer. If it's 10%, LLMs could make you a 1.11x designer (minus the time it takes to fiddle around with the LLM, of course).
> After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster This does not match my experience. I have been using Claude for speeding up design. Describe your page and ask it to use Tailwind and it will come up with some interesting designs. You still need a designer because some designs it comes up with are over the top, and need to be moderated.
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…
From time to time I look at the explore page of various AI design tools, and they are as corporate-depressing as I didn't expect them to be [1]. It's not even a bell curve. It feels like they are overindexed on bland corporate aesthetic. Getting them to output anything but a Linear clone is an exercise in frustration. [1] https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1953750443248562431
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.
One thing I've wondered and not been sure of, is that you can see productivity boost in parts of the process, but overall the end to end process doesn't seem to be getting done faster.
I'm not sure of this, but it's what I've observed at work.
You might be designing a lot of prototypes faster, but are you landing on something good quicker? Are you getting the final product out faster?
Design moves at the speed of culture; not technology. It took 3 years of people messing with mobile phones before it occurred to someone to implement "pull down to refresh" and much longer for it to be common practice that people just expect from UX. I think people are still learning what they want from an AI experience. I do think you have to be pretty targeted with your predictions, though. Consumer product design…
Better to just show progress instead.
Back then people were similarly incredulous of the entire idea of the internet and apps.
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…
AI Dungeon using gpt2 was the best AI has been to this day
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.
To me, the key quote is the simple "If you had told me in late 2022 I’d be saying these things 3 years later, I would’ve been pretty surprised." As someone with little exposure to the design industry, seeing how quickly AI could generate images, I'd been under the assumption that the AI takeover was already well underway there, so was surprised to learn that it's not. If anything, that gives some comfort around the f…
I guess they’re vaguely cool looking images? If the author had used them to talk about how “concept art” in games/movies was going to get upended by AI there would be a point there, but as it stands I find it very puzzling that someone who claims to teach design would use them as key examples of why design - a human process of coming up with specific solutions to fuzzy problems with arbitrary constraints - was headed in any particularly direction.