> That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.
I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.
The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).
Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.
To be fair I find the approach from claude design incredibly wasteful of tokens, and time-consuming since it needs to build a full website. Their website is also clearly vibe-coded and not homogeneous in style with the rest.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
Readme reads like a sales deck. Got to "six load-bearing ideas" and closed the tab. If your tool was actually good you'd just show what it does.
Also 14k stars in a week is doing a lot of work here. Nobody finds a repo that fast organically.
Once stars started becoming a marketable metric, it's pretty much inevitable that they would be purchasable. Same as any other bot review market I suppose
How does a human designer even compete? I just looked at all the demos and they look beautiful.
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
I feel the designs they present are actually quite bad. Like... they are an anti-ad for this product. Just random fonts, bold, italics, underlines. Bad contrast, skinny small fonts.
Your site is actually really nice except the red color burns into my retina, so that's the only thing I would change about it (change your --primary to something more like #7c2c3e)
Originality. The same as with art. Art and design are more than just a mean to satisfy a need. They are an opportunity to explore, to question. When Georges Seurat developed pointillism, he wasn't trying to compete with the people who could imitate Raphael. He created his own direction.
> The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Why? Is a chair that you made with your own hands not as valuable to you because somebody else got one from Ikea? Would you not show it to your friends for this reason?
On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
That's impressive, although I'd hesitate to call that "standing", it's more a crawl I'd say.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.
I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.
The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).
Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
I just basically define what I need in a UI in plain text
when the prototype is built.
I extract the repeating units, then add design to it.
Oh look, they are gaining stars at a rate of pretty much exactly 1400 per day: https://www.star-history.com/?repos=nexu-io%2Fopen-design&ty...
Yeah, nothing shady here at all.
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
Your site is actually really nice except the red color burns into my retina, so that's the only thing I would change about it (change your --primary to something more like #7c2c3e)
I love writing but even there I have to work doubly hard to make sure I'm doing something valuable.
My point is that the space within which human creators can distinguish themselves is diminishing rapidly.
There's so much joy to be found in regular human creating and sharing.
The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Regular, non-groundbreaking creative work seems ... less worthy of sharing?
Why? Is a chair that you made with your own hands not as valuable to you because somebody else got one from Ikea? Would you not show it to your friends for this reason?
If people could generate an infinite variety of chairs in a few seconds, than yes, my sharing would be discouraged.