Why was the aesthetic standard to be pale when workers worked the fields and royals were inside, but tan when workers moved into factories and only the rich could afford to go on a beach vacation?
Aesthetic standards are formed by association. Its why sites that are "well designed" but obviously just use a squarespace or wix template feel so cheap. Why millenial flannel went from hip to standard to outdated. Why purple was the color of royalty before we could synthesize the pigment.
Having good design is about associations. Whatever design LLMs will default to, it will always feel cheap because we will learn over time that that design means cheap. Having good taste is about being ahead of the curve. An LLM cant be ahead of the curve because then that becomes the standard, and theres a new ahead.
You can use LLMs to make novel looking websites by carefully telling it to add certain details, use certain elementd, etc. At that point youve looped back to being a graphic designer.
LLMs seem fundamentally incapable of producing truly diverse outputs, truly creative and different responses to the same prompts in different runs. Because you and me use the same Claude, if you want a website and I want a website, we'll get (almost) the same website. This is not some BS about "the average of its training data", most of the LLM style (both in design and in text) comes from reinforcement learning. You could RL Claude to produce a very different style, but you couldn't RL it to produce a different style for me than it does for you.
I think this is also where a lot of the complaints about "Claude writing" come from.
It's worth mentioning that they do RL for aesthetics to some degree based on human expert feedback, but whatever the model tends to produce quickly becomes debased by its ubiquity. They could RL for output diversity, but it's less well studied and likely to cause minor regressions in coding performance, at least until the algorithms are dialed in.
Same. I honestly am very satisfied with the aesthetics of free Wordpress blogs. Like Terry Tao has. I also have one.
So it's what lies between saying "I want x website" -[.....] -> Code+Assets
The issue has to do with specification fidelity, in short a grill-me style aesthetic interrogation using illustrative tooling - ascii diagrams for specifying layout, copy and user-flow, image-gen mockups for higher fidelity mockups. References are also very important for nailing down the aesthetical qualities. I've noticed it's far better vs purely text description to simply gather up a mood-board telling the llm to find commonalities and come up with a design system and brand guide.
So I don't believe it's an unsolvable problem, it's simply a lack of effort on the implementors part. Also there's probably some survivor's bias here (you won't notice an intentionally designed vibe-coded site)
For example here's one reference exploration site i recently made with grok: https://explorer.withfudge.com/
This leads to 'fixing' the amount of text areas it needs to fill, so it works to a constraint of having to fill a collection of text areas instead of outputting the message that would otherwise best suit.
My way to combat this is to start by refining the words/messages to be put on the canvas before letting the agent try designing something.
As they say, to a hammer, everything is a nail.
Initially it feels like the result will be too empty, but once the greebling is removed it most often looks better
The overall arrangement and useless shit LLMs put in the copy is often annoying though.
It's like it was made by the world's most anal-retentive Wordpress theme builder. They went over it a thousand times until it was perfectly optimized, no distinguishing marks, no stray tiny misalignments, no single-use stylings.
If there is a silver lining in all this, this might get us to appreciate the flaws in all humans, heck even yearn for them.
Sprinting to a finished-looking result at step 1 gives you the illusion that these decisions were considered, but even the casual observer quickly concludes that the page has 3000 words yet nothing to say.
There must be a name to this phenomenon and I surely can't be the only one?
Clear and to the point. Not even a cookie popup (which ni user respectable site needs, so super low bar to clear).
If you meant the text then I agree.
... one thing I'm noticing about negative reactions towards AI generated data is that older folks seem more lenient, appreciative, or even enthusiastic about them for some reason. Kids hate it. Young artists, vehemently so. Which is opposite of how technologies usually work, and that's a bit weird.
The same people who are likely seeing tens of the same sort of pages and immediately closing them because "who cares".
I mean I guess I'm looking at this too. But at this point the most interesting projects in the world to me are ones with bad CSS.
The thought is a new wave of people who only know LLM-generated sites, so those design patterns are what they demand/emulate/etc. across the spectrum of user interfaces.
The only previous trend I can draw a parallel to was when Comic Sans and Microsoft Clip Art dominated every flyer and poster.