Not long ago several websites used Inter font and purple gradient. It turned a portion of the web identical and characterless, and eventually fell out of fashion.
Round 2 of that is happening now, aided by AI with the perfectly designed beautiful sites and documents, not the AI slop. If you are familiar with a tool's default output and design preferences, you might already be spotting the signatures of the tool in the wild. The fonts, color palette, design elements, and layouts are the telltale sign and serve as the watermark that we can identify with relative ease.
For a long time we chased beauty and perfection. Now that we have it, it feels sterile and leaves us with a bad taste much like the purple gradient websites did. With the speed and penetration of AI, this is happening fast and at scale. The beauty of bot generated content is good for bots but not enough for human consumption.
Arguably, the issue lies with both the operator and the AI. For the operator, it's the lack of design knowledge, willingness or patience to customize the defaults or demand a different output. For the AI, it's the lack of variety and more intelligent defaults - which is needed precisely because not every one is a design expert.
As they say, the true beauty lies in our differences and flaws. It makes us interesting. In the age of AI, “to err is human” takes on a whole new meaning. It's time to embrace and expose our imperfections - to connect, to be authentic and even to prove that we are human.
AI could soon catch up and insert deliberate imperfections into its carefully crafted output to impersonate humans, but until then-
Imperfections are the Captchas for creators.
First published in LinkedIn: