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The AI Aesthetic

blog.jim-nielsen.com

151–160 of 188 posts

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#151
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.

Two words, two more. Good thing. Good thing. Buy it. Buy it. Feel good. seems AI to me. Humans were doing marketing slop this way before AI but it doesn't really matter if the slop is AI or human.

[dead]

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#152
post #124
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kinda, more accurately the current goal for labs is to produce economic value to justify high valuations / capex, thus having to RL on correct answers rather than interesting ones.

If you could access the current models as base models I guess you'd still get very interesting hilarious stuff.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did wonder which one to put that under. It might be it own category of “made by AI company”, but I also think both Anthropic and OpenAI have been vocal about how their codex and Claude code is 100% AI generated But how is AI outputing sparkle emoji or orange accents colors interacting with AI? Unless you also classify AI output as a form of interacting with AI

The sparkle emoji has become an indicator for "this is an AI feature, click here to do AI things". I have even used it. The beige UI with orange accents probably refers to the design guidelines of Anthropic, Mistral, Microsoft AI and a bunch of other companies. They all try to use soft, non-threatening colours, and for some reason those two are a popular choice.

Huh, ok. I disagree. Sparkle emoji and beige cream or orange accents every where is definitely AI output, not some “AI features here”. I don’t even see sparkle emoji on any AI websites or “features”. It’s only in sloppy output and most people will tell you to remove it because it screams slop too much.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#154
There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces as well as whack-a-mole UI controls (you know, the ones where you click the toggle and the entire UI repaints and you have to move your mouse somewhere else in the UI to click the toggle again? The non-determinism of AI’s grain has seeped into its UI/X).

Ahahaha, like this? https://monosnap.ai/file/TzFL6H6fRMfsv1G8v0mbKH2hI1kL8e

This is an HN userstyle css that I had Claude help me with. No serifs though.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#155
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 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.

The cards and its design, the font, the placing of text, it's all pretty common AI-esque.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#156

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.

You got examples of such vocabulary?

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#158
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

Hamburger menu is not a good UX abstraction, that's why the mass usage stage of it was pretty short lived and most people are leaving it for more obvious patterns, like tab bars
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