Comment by vintagevibe
19 hours ago
Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.
So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.
It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
Taste is a great solution for abundance, so I agree. Also, there's definitely a rubberband effect where products & designs need to differentiate on their design to stand out in a homogenous world, and you truly do need creative professionals having that judgment. Even using AI as a tool, you have to have the sayable vocabulary (at the very least) to agitate the aesthetic status quo.
And low-skill graphic design had already been mostly replaced by Canva, so I don't think AI is really having as much impact on the design industry as people might suppose.
Knowing what is in the realm of possibility can help you get much more out of genAI.
For example, you have to know about a style to know to ask for it or some variation on it.
I think we ALREADY at the point when AI is capable to replace like 99.7% of designers. It is only a question of market inertia and personal brands that prevent it from happening right now.
I think this generalizes to a lot of professional work.
LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.”
“Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything.
I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.
>It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter
Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
(Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalist and flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
>Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.
That's a really backwards explanation for styles that executives commissioned, funded, and popularized in the first place
I think it's in fact forward thinking, in that modern executives lost the taste their older elites had. Or at least they fired the tastemakers for those who pleased them personally, to the sacrifice of proper design. Probably a bit of both, along with other factors.
The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.
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De-tracked link: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s