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The AI Aesthetic

blog.jim-nielsen.com

21–30 of 188 posts

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#21
There's definitely a lot of AI-generated websites, especially for dev tools & SaaS, that love to have dark backgrounds, cool colors (purple especially is making a resurgence it seems), and tons of fancy UI widgets.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#22
post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

> The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.

The funny thing is that looking like everyone else was once considered the definition of good UI design, because it helps users understand a new interface. Then mobile apps came and suddenly UI design was about “expressing your brand” or whatever.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#23
post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

Honestly these examples absolutely DO look like generic AI slop, no offense.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#25
post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

I like your product and I’m gonna try it because I’m growing to hate the “Claude generated website aesthetic” but $0.13 is way too cheap.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#26
There are like 43 tiny icon libraries and frameworks for web design. AI didn't start this trend at all. This article is just "put AI in the title and it will get attention" and apparently it works.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#28

Another AI-ism is the use of the word "grain" in technical contexts. I'm confident the OP is human-written, but everything in my AI-supported codebase is about grains, seams, tracer bullets, and load-bearing components now. I'd barely heard some of these words before, and now they're everywhere. It's like everyone suddenly has a friend who speaks in the same idiosyncratic way, and we're all picking up their vocal sti…

This has been a growing problem with humans for a while. Go back ten years and use "guardrails" or "top of mind" in a conversation and you'll get baffled looks. For whatever reason the fad based enthusiasm for semi jargon is a widespread affliction.

In the english speaking world the political sides are even becoming unsubtly linguistically distinct. You can tell which way someone votes by their choice of vocabulary.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#29
post #9

The defining "AI" aesthetic is the TUI, for better or worse. The real question is what the post-AI aesthetic will be, and at a guess it will bifurcate into obsessive recreations of earlier happier pre-AI times, and some sort of opposite extreme of videos of Chinese cities covered in LEDs.

Perhaps amongst coders, but I doubt most users are interacting with TUIs - my retired mother uses ChatGPT most days, but I suspect it'll be a while before she downloads Claude Code.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#30
post #23
post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

Honestly these examples absolutely DO look like generic AI slop, no offense.

I think that if the images were replaced by human made (you can take photos of real things if you don’t want to draw or hire an actual artist) perhaps the design could be more passable
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