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The AI Aesthetic

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: The AI Aesthetic

#121

Post by kombookcha »

danans wrote: post #117
gentoo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They both read as hyper-polished pastiches of existing, well-established aesthetics. The cyberpunk one in particular employs just about every genre trope I can think of. There's no sense of stylistic ingenuity or choice - e.g. deliberately breaking from convention or leaving things out.

> There's no sense of stylistic ingenuity or choice - e.g. deliberately breaking from convention or leaving things out. Is stylistic ingenuity, breaking from convention, or leaving things out on a website for a Ramen restaurant chain a feature or a bug? I'd choose to go based on the quality of the food not how unusual the website UI is. The website is not the product. I personally find navigating and ordering food on…

The website is not the product, but it does suggest something about the way your restaurant operates and how it is trying to present itself. You don't know the quality of the food before you go.

This summer I've noticed a lot of menus with AI generated images of food and I have not trusted a single one of them. If you are gonna pitch me with this thing that blatantly is not even tangentially related to your actual product, that does not give me a lot of confidence in your business. If they'd used a stock image of a carbonara I would be none the wiser, but the entirely fake stuff is a massive turnoff.

Some of the best restaurants I know have old timey bare bones websites because they've been around for decades, and it's an oddly good predictor of a place that has a lot of loyal customers.

If I saw a website that looked like the ones above, I would be immediately skeptical. Handmade but rudimentary says down-to-business no nonsense, shiny and nicely made by a pro says high effort. This stuff? It says slop shop.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#122

Post by mock-possum »

Retr0id wrote: post #59
websight wrote: post #45

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 design, no. The content? “Cyberpunk ramen, street side. Bold flavors. Fast pickup.” Oh my god yes.

The thing that really gets me about this stuff is - is all about the content, the actual content is what really matters, you need to have content that actually works, that people find appealing, otherwise you have dogshit. A staccato bullet point of marketing speak is dog shit. It’s nothing, it’s less than nothing, customers are repulsed by it, and rightly so. bad presentation you can sometimes get away with, but bad content? Almost never. And this is bad (LLM generated) content, at a glance.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#123

Post by harisamin »

Let's be real

* remember the 90s internet aesthetic? geocities anyone? GIFs everywhere?

* how about the Flat Design aesthetic?

* How about the Twitter Bootstrap aesthetic?

... This too will pass ...

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#124

Post by yorwba »

XCSme wrote: post #120
jjcm wrote: 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,…

Wasn't one of the main original points of LLMs to be creative? To create stories, creative writing?

It wasn't the point, but early LLMs would make mistakes so often that writing fiction full of hilarious nonsense was one of the only applications. Now that they make mistakes less often, you need some other source of high-entropy randomness to reinject creativity into the story.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#125

Post by CapyToolkit »

jjcm wrote: 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,…

To me, neither of them feels like AI generated. The tarot example feels like its inspiration came from collectible card games, while the ramen example reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#127

Post by cadamsdotcom »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #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 somethi…

Thanks for not shipping your first draft!

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#128

Post by KronisLV »

jjcm wrote: 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,…

> LLMs are trained to write consistent code

You are absolutely right, that's the load bearing assumption and it earns its keep.

Personally, I didn't mind when a lot of sites looked like the default Bootstrap theme (because that's what they used), because generally it made sense. I think that LLMs, both in regards to prose and the code and UIs they produce, could have lead to an age of decent - where things would be just fine and sane, the writing decent and not frustrating, the code easy to read and debug, UI whitespace and layouts would be good, fonts would be readable, usability would be great.

Instead we got AI slop writing that reads like someone turned the pop-sci/LinkedIn tone dial up to 11 and UIs that all feel like some sort of SaaS landing page.

Oh well, it could have been worse.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#129

Post by msy »

I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#130

Post by weiliddat »

majormajor wrote: post #96
somenameforme wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you said made me think that it's similar (not entirely the same, but adjacent) to those make-a-website for $XX or buy-a-template era of websites.

If we think about that as the intended competition (and not websites corps spent millions on design/polish/copy), I'd argue that AI (model + coding agent + skills + whatever) is doing a better job overall. Most agencies don't spend enough effort in understanding what you want, or hire juniors and bill them as seniors. It's almost always late, overbilled, somewhat what you said you wanted but not really, and technically terrible.

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