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The AI Aesthetic

blog.jim-nielsen.com

91–100 of 188 posts

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#91
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these look "bad" exactly, but they do look like AI, and I don't think that's just because I know they are.

I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.

I'd clock this as an AI website with no question whatsoever. Everything comes in punchy threes. I don't need to know what "早い・旨い・熱い" means in order to smell it for what it is.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#92
post #84

Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones, which means they endure, are copied, and eventually become the implied standard UX… some examples of this are; the hamburger menu, tiny icons and auto-scroll for streaming text

Doesn't necessarily have to be good. Can also propagate and become "standardised" if it's the easiest, most convenient, most well documented way. Eg. Twitter Bootstrap.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#94
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these look "bad" exactly, but they do look like AI, and I don't think that's just because I know they are.

I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.

The one thing that strikes me as LLMesque is the occasional use of random and seemingly inappropriate symbols. For instance the lightning bolt and then the arrow/square by the order ahead label by the start an order button. It's also placed in a slightly odd location. The symbols at the top are also kind of weird. I think it's the LLM trying to allude to the cyberpunk theme, but it does a poor job of it in a way that even a low skill human probably wouldn't - because you just wouldn't think to put a part of a rectangle up there beside a checkerboard pyramid thing.

And that contrasts to an extreme degree against the rest of the scene which flows extremely well, maintains perfectly color coordination, and so on. I think it's kind of like how self driving cars can drive phenomenally well but then have occasional failure modes like randomly driving head first into a concrete divider. It's not like that's bad driving in the sense of missing a nuance, but something that's just completely conspicuously outside the rest of its demonstrated abilities.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#95
post #84

Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones, which means they endure, are copied, and eventually become the implied standard UX… some examples of this are; the hamburger menu, tiny icons and auto-scroll for streaming text

> Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones

And then get get every precision input being represented by a slider versus text box.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#96
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.

The one thing that strikes me as LLMesque is the occasional use of random and seemingly inappropriate symbols. For instance the lightning bolt and then the arrow/square by the order ahead label by the start an order button. It's also placed in a slightly odd location. The symbols at the top are also kind of weird. I think it's the LLM trying to allude to the cyberpunk theme, but it does a poor job of it in a way that…

Yeah polish + consistency but also with busy-ness is a hallmark from what I've seen. It can be tamed, but takes effort.

That said, the provided examples definitely are a clear step up from the "default" you'd get. Like how some bootstrap-templated sites did it much better than others, while the best made it nearly invisible.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#97
> Some patterns are very specific to the interactions inherent to the nature of AI as a technology. For example: streaming text. This is a pattern made for and refined by chat interfaces, so it may not have tons of utility for reuse across other software interaction paradigms.

I'm used to the software industry being isolated (vice versa) from the games industry, but I'm a bit surprised by this point because "streaming text" is a pattern inherent to video games running on low powered computers (i.e. 8/16 bit game consoles) and games continue to implement this as a stylistic (or aesthetic) choice today.

Then, thinking about it for more than a second:

Text streaming into view is also inherent to [slow] "network" connections, including the early internet and terminal interfaces (paper and CRT), the default way that computer text appeared for decades. These are less common, though still present today, but a keen-eyed observer [and I genuinely place Nielsen in this category] will surely have noticed the film & TV industry is still running with the trope/meme of text-appears-slowly as the best way to show computer action.

A more relevant example for a huge number of people is found on Tik Tok videos, where it's the default way for text to appear on screen[0]. Platforms desperately chasing Tik Tok have adopted the same effect -- it's a significant part of the aesthetic -- even Youtube's autogenerated captions[1][2][3] on "normal" videos.

[0] I mean "default" aesthetically, purely looking at the output. Not a "default" option like a software thing.

[1] which now come on by default if you have actual captions enabled -- it used to be like a separate language choice, like how if you select Italian subtitles it won't give you Spanish -- Valve^wYougle please fix.

[2] And these are arguably not really captions, by the way. Ignoring how wrong they are, and other issues, I'm just talking about in relation to the subject of this comment: captions and subtitles don't appear one word at a time. Show me a reasonably long phrase and let me read it. The / one / word / at / a / [music] / time / thing / is / a hippo / not / it / and / I / don't / receive / true / meaning. ('hypnotic', by the way)

[3] Yes, this is presumably AI. No, I don't think that undermines my point. It's still a choice (the people in charge did the choosing, not the confabulator), and it's a choice that goes against the extremely well established best practices for captioning as an accessibility service, as I whinged above[2].

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#98
the sparkle emoji used to mean magic or excitement or a really clean counter, and now it means a robot is thinking. we gave the most whimsical punctuation in unicode to a probability calculator

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#99
Interestingly, I've found that AI has actually made me more interested in design because I'm now able to actually do some things, whereas before I couldn't get my creative visions built.

As an example, I recently built my company's website and I'm really happy with the result. I wanted it to have some hints of Rollercoaster Tycoon, and with a lot of experimentation, direction, tinkering, and examples I got to something that I really liked. Two years ago my company website would have been some generic Bootstrap thing until I hired a designer.

There's a lot to improve and certainly some aspects of it feel like AI still but it's generally gotten a lot of positive feedback and above all I really like it. Considering writing a blog post about my creative process here because I'm a dev with no design background at all.

Sharing a screenshot as to not promote: https://imgur.com/a/xqKi6X6 (in the website everything in the park moves btw)

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#100
post #85

> AI = sparkles and rainbow colors — it’s funny when you think about it Never seen anyone use rainbow emoji to convey AI

Not the emoji, but the text, borders, or other elements for AI features are often in rainbow colours.
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