Comment by adjejmxbdjdn
6 hours ago
Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence?
You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.
This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?
Both had a working prototype. The flaw everyone is making is that they are over focusing on the artifact and not that they have a shared tangible object that they can both editorialize and iterate on.
These systems should allow rapid iteration on discovery and thinking. One can now make a prototype a day that would have taken a week. That means that we should be able to converge on a much better design in the same amount of time it would have taken to make a v0 that turns how to have systemic flaws.
AI should scale our understanding of systems, not just shovel out half baked features and apps.
Road to hell is paved with a lot of 'shoulds' reality is a very different place filled with piles of trash and half baked ideas.
This is where I’m at. I’ve always been a computer tinkerer but a novice coder at best. I work in the film industry, so I don’t need to know how to code.
Where I’m at when building personal applications for my home / life is: does the code execute and perform the desired task?
If so, what do I care how shitty it is? I’m not publishing these projects (for the most part… I have one joke application up at songshift.reachnick.co) so efficient, clean, secure code are not really a priority for me.
You are ahead of the curve my friend
Yeah, that's basically me. (Hold the "expert", substitute with "has a degree, at least.")
findfantasyxviii.com
Maybe specialists have a higher bar than consumers, and as a design consumer he's right about the design, and the designer is right about the code, if "being right" means "understanding what the end customer will think about this".
Colleague (non-designer) generated UI with Claude. It was awful and broke basic design rules. So yes you may be right.
I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...
More robust link (to the heading by ID, rather than by text directive with pre/post text that will change): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_...
This!
People are never perfectly even in intelligence across all possible disciplines.
It's worth pointing out that Crichton coined that term during a period in his life where he was rapidly descending into conspiracy and iconoclastic thought, and this is of a piece with that.
Gell-Mann's observation was a sincere and thoughtful caution about the way we transmit information about complicated ideas. Crichton's "amnesia effect" is an excuse to ignore media you dislike.
> Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence?
Well when you put it that way ... monetizing the Dunning-Kruger effect does actually sound like a very good business idea.
I'm confused, this doesn't make sense. The target they're iterating on (UI) is the same one whose quality they're assessing, not a different one (source code).
You're suggesting that (a) their UI skills are lacking (based on what? isn't UI exactly what they were iterating on and trying to improve?), and (b) that a real UI expert would've somehow felt the UI they were working on was consistently garbage, despite how many times they iterate on it?
Which means you're saying you don't believe anyone can actually produce high quality (to an expert) output with AI on the same target they're working on, and if they think they are, that just means they don't have a good sense of quality?
It's not confusing. It makes sense.
no, it is confusing.
the llm produced something the operator thought was garbage for the design too, and the operator iterated it from garbage to good.
they could also have the llm iterate the underlying code from garbage to good, if they wanted.
most likely a specialist would say its neither good nor bad, since its not considering the right things, and hasnt collected the right useability feedback, but making straightforward designs isnt that hard, and counting clicks and interactions, and avoiding hidden functionality is all measureable stuff
2 replies →
Without proper training, what looks good may be trash. I always thought pixel art generated by diffusion models looked damn good. Then I started watching and reading reviews by actual pixel artists, and all they saw was flaws. And it wasn't just nitpicking, it was things that were fundamentally wrong, difficult to fix and would look awful and amateurish and distracting to the player in production.
Much of this comes from the fact that, as is true for almost everything, an LLM (generative model etc) presents itself as an expert. It'll very confidently produce results that, to a layperson, look quite good. But the more of an expert you are in a field, the more apparent the cracks become.
AI pixel art looks particularly bad because most users don’t even go through the effort of downscaling and then upscaling it using something as simple as nearest-neighbor scaling, which by itself will squash out a lot of high-frequency noise that manifests in the form of terrible looking "fringing". Proper grid alignment also makes a big difference. It’s not perfect by a long shot, but it helps.
Ai is a hammer. Use it right and it makes you very powerful. But it's not an easy tool.
this is why people still enjoy eating at Olive Garden and Chipotle and Sweetgreen
basically the AI-slop version of food, yet still they thrive
Good point on "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect."