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Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

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Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#31

Post by Espressosaurus »

saulpw wrote: post #29
jampa wrote: post #13

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…

> the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. Design by committee is known to produce terrible designs. The best an LLM can do is to completely copy a common decent design.

Yeah, my experience is that when they do work they'll get the job done but the design is going to be unmaintainable garbage unless I force my own design on it.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#32

Post by codyb »

jampa wrote: post #13

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…

Internal corporate tooling can be greatly improved by promoting scheduled "water cooler chat on steroids" calls between engineers/designers/product/tpms/managers and the actual users.

What's nice is that these sessions bleed into everything. You don't need to look through users' eyes that many times to find great improvement in UX sensibilities.

Since scheduling is the biggest pain point here, I just built a scheduler and a signup form at work. Everyone who gets a session walks away with positive feedback, the company as a whole becomes more interconnected, and now I'm working to get more and more folk on board.

My goal is to unleash a whole flotilla of white collar workers who understand the value of talking to the users such that they too push for lightweight, no action item, scheduled sessions which becomes standard practice as part of our careers and we all end up with better software as a whole.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#33

Post by troupo »

jampa wrote: post #13

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

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#36

Post by monknomo »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #16
okokwhatever wrote: post #8

Thats because the new design is the conversation. The new framework is the language and the narrative style. This is the biggest win under my opinion.

Well, it is still much more efficient (consumed energy, outcome, and mental sanity-wise) to fill a form with a textbox and a datepicker to book a flight, than trying to negotiate it with a chatbot. Everyone assumes that the perfect communication medium is human (or human like) conversation. If that was the case, couple and marriage therapists wouldn't exist.

don't worry, someone will make an llm therapist agent to help you negotiate with your llms

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#37

Post by simonw »

I've heard some anecdotal evidence that designers are starting to use AI tools to help them build working interactive prototypes of their designs, but I don't have enough day-to-day contact with professional design teams to have a good feel for how widespread that is and what impact it's having on the process.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#38

Post by tylerrobinson »

simonw wrote: post #37

I've heard some anecdotal evidence that designers are starting to use AI tools to help them build working interactive prototypes of their designs, but I don't have enough day-to-day contact with professional design teams to have a good feel for how widespread that is and what impact it's having on the process.

This is my personal design AI use case. Scaffold out the prototype for me so I can click around and see if it feels right.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#39

Post by daxfohl »

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 future of engineering job prospects. While there's still room to worry, "yeah but design is fundamentally human, while engineering is mostly technical and can be automated", I'm sure, just as design has realized, that when we get to a point where AI should be taking over, we'll realize that there's a lot of non-technical things that engineers do, that AI cannot replace.

Basically, if replacing a workforce is the goal, AI image generators and code generators look like replacement technologies from afar, but when you look closer you realize they're "the right solution to the wrong problem", to be a true replacement tech, and in fact don't really move the needle. And maybe AI, by definition of being artificial and intelligence (as opposed to real common sense) as a whole, is fundamentally an approach that "solves the wrong problem" as a replacement tech, even as AGI or even ASI gets created.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#40

Post by lateforwork »

> 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.

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