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 Why millenial flannel went from hip to standard to outdated.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.
I think what you’re talking about is real, but it’s only part of the problem. The issue is it’s poor design. There’s a lack of consistency that is really off putting. Spacing is inconsistent and doesn’t create a sense of visual hierarchy. Buttons, inputs, selects, call-outs, table cells are barely distinguishable from each other, but also inconsistent within their own categories. The copy is also confusing. I don’t even know what this does.
This is, once again, about diversity and the lack thereof (and I don't mean diversity in a political sense).
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.
RL causes distributional collapse, it's how the models get consistent. Anyone who generated images with early gen (SD1.5-2) models will remember the wild variance between seeds, which newer models have mostly lost, and similarly GPT3.5/4 could produce weirder, more original outputs even if they were less consistently "good" in some sense.
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.
I don't know, I think you have a point that aesthetic preferences are subjective and shifting. But there is also all-caps monospaced text with emdashes in it on the site; just an example of something I think would not turn into a fashion at any point because it just looks silly (subjectively, to me at least). Thus I don't think the antipathy of people towards these llm-generated landing pages is entirely based on associating it with other LLM sites, there is at least an element of it clearly not being through as much human review and interaction as a hand-crafted landing page necessarily would be.
This is a problem that i'm actively working on (https://fudge.design), what i've realised is that it's simply not an issue of capability - given a well crafted site and a competently written visually aware harness, most recent models can replicate that website.
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)
I really want to create a nosology of common generic memes that can be applied to literally anything without context. Saying that the evaluators are just stupid and arbitrarily chasing the fashion of the week instead of the evaluators possibly actually latching onto some structure is a tale as old as time.
I find the models conceptually design the structure, then fill it up with text.
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.
You'd think they'd have addressed verbosity in the last couple of quarters since it's burning their inference at rates they seem to care about. But instead they're more focused on their cyber security FUD distribution so they can lock out all competitive angles possible. I can't wait for the American Greed miniseries.
I appreciate a nice brutalist aesthetic like this tbh. It’s also good that there’s a baseline for quality in terms of layout and spacing and contrast and whatnot usually, so the HN webshit meta conversation has shifted from that to whinging about an LLM making it.
The overall arrangement and useless shit LLMs put in the copy is often annoying though.
This site actually reminds of the TUIs that one uses to install an OS from the text-console. It's not so bad. The prose itself is irritating. The site itself also has some bugs (text overlapping with UI borders for no reason). The lime-green color is a little awkward to my eye, but maybe that's just me (I say this as someone who usually likes lime-green -- maybe the problem is that this site needs _more_ lime-green).
It's overly automated and repetitive in its styling. Humans make odd stray adjustments to styling manually. LLMs build pages very efficiently. Unless you're very anal-retentive when building a site, there's going to be some distinct flair that isn't just a repeating segment.
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.
Mainly cause you never know what you’re getting. Over time, we trained our minds to believe that a well put site = effort, so at the very least people behind it cared. Now, it takes zero effort to make a site look good. So appearance in general means even less. In fact, now a poorly put together site might mean someone cared, wrote it by hand, flaws and all, to give you the human to human experience.
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.
Because "Make a website" (however more sophisticated the prompt might be) is not a path to knowing what to put on the website, what the personality of it should be, what the hierarchy of information should be, etc.
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.
Even when I'm interested and invested into the topic, somehow I just zone out and can't force myself to read it or read it with comprehension. Be it a website or a PR, there's just something to it that if it's more than a few sentences of it I just can't.
There must be a name to this phenomenon and I surely can't be the only one?
i dont see it visually, but the text on the page reads like the model is bending over backwards to comply with the prompt. i have that same voice on my website too and i am going to get rid of that text asap.
In the future I imagine we won't even visit websites anymore. We'll tell our own LLMs to visit the website and summarise it with information the LLM knows is relevant to us.
The sites Claude generates by default are almost always in dark mode (no option to switch) and are difficult to read when it comes to font, font color and size choices. It's almost telling you the "author" has zero interest in user experience and doesn't care. This site is several levels above that.
Is your system set to dark mode? These days I find Claude often generates pages (like reports) with light & dark mode styles, and rightfully defaults to system preference.
I find your comment off-putting. I think it's a great example of bikeshedding. Do you have anything to say about OpenJev the project, or just the bikeshed?
People say as much for AI generated images? They're alien intelligence with still some IQ challenges. Their behaviors therefore cause uncanny valley response. Nothing strange about that.
... 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.
That’s a scary thought (at least, to me). But all change is scary.
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.
Maybe it’s my weird aesthetic but I liked this style since before llm. My designs were pretty similar and boxy with fake shadows. Also, this specific one reminds me of the style that dev.to I think had a few years ago, and back then it was very different. So I would say I like it even though I have seen other designs. I also like very brutalist, Craigslist like design and Japanese websites. Not a fan of very advanced designs.
Unsolvable problem.
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.
I think what you’re talking about is real, but it’s only part of the problem. The issue is it’s poor design. There’s a lack of consistency that is really off putting. Spacing is inconsistent and doesn’t create a sense of visual hierarchy. Buttons, inputs, selects, call-outs, table cells are barely distinguishable from each other, but also inconsistent within their own categories. The copy is also confusing. I don’t even know what this does.
This is, once again, about diversity and the lack thereof (and I don't mean diversity in a political sense).
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.
RL causes distributional collapse, it's how the models get consistent. Anyone who generated images with early gen (SD1.5-2) models will remember the wild variance between seeds, which newer models have mostly lost, and similarly GPT3.5/4 could produce weirder, more original outputs even if they were less consistently "good" in some sense.
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.
I don't know, I think you have a point that aesthetic preferences are subjective and shifting. But there is also all-caps monospaced text with emdashes in it on the site; just an example of something I think would not turn into a fashion at any point because it just looks silly (subjectively, to me at least). Thus I don't think the antipathy of people towards these llm-generated landing pages is entirely based on associating it with other LLM sites, there is at least an element of it clearly not being through as much human review and interaction as a hand-crafted landing page necessarily would be.
> Its why sites that are "well designed" but obviously just use a squarespace or wix template feel so cheap.
Same. I honestly am very satisfied with the aesthetics of free Wordpress blogs. Like Terry Tao has. I also have one.
This is a problem that i'm actively working on (https://fudge.design), what i've realised is that it's simply not an issue of capability - given a well crafted site and a competently written visually aware harness, most recent models can replicate that website.
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/
On iOS 27 Safari design.withfudge.com crashes on about half of my attempts to scroll down the page…
I really want to create a nosology of common generic memes that can be applied to literally anything without context. Saying that the evaluators are just stupid and arbitrarily chasing the fashion of the week instead of the evaluators possibly actually latching onto some structure is a tale as old as time.
What do you mean flannel is outdated? I never got that memo.
flannel is forever.
The problem is the overabundance of text, they can’t let it breathe. Everywhere has to be filled up with bits of hardly-relevant text.
I find the models conceptually design the structure, then fill it up with text.
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.
Language models, amiright?! Text is the blood flowing through their veins. It’s all they care about.
As they say, to a hammer, everything is a nail.
In Spanish there's a wonderful portemanteau of verbal and hemorrhage 'verboragia', that means something like 'they won't shut up'.
You'd think they'd have addressed verbosity in the last couple of quarters since it's burning their inference at rates they seem to care about. But instead they're more focused on their cyber security FUD distribution so they can lock out all competitive angles possible. I can't wait for the American Greed miniseries.
I tell the agent to outline the greebling, which is the when you add extra details that aren't really necessary.
Initially it feels like the result will be too empty, but once the greebling is removed it most often looks better
Honestly I prefer that over the overabundance of empty space that's been the norm in “modern” web design for more than a decade now.
I appreciate a nice brutalist aesthetic like this tbh. It’s also good that there’s a baseline for quality in terms of layout and spacing and contrast and whatnot usually, so the HN webshit meta conversation has shifted from that to whinging about an LLM making it.
The overall arrangement and useless shit LLMs put in the copy is often annoying though.
This site actually reminds of the TUIs that one uses to install an OS from the text-console. It's not so bad. The prose itself is irritating. The site itself also has some bugs (text overlapping with UI borders for no reason). The lime-green color is a little awkward to my eye, but maybe that's just me (I say this as someone who usually likes lime-green -- maybe the problem is that this site needs _more_ lime-green).
Same. I can’t really put my finger on what exactly is turning me off though. I mean, apart from the obvious AI-generated text.
It's overly automated and repetitive in its styling. Humans make odd stray adjustments to styling manually. LLMs build pages very efficiently. Unless you're very anal-retentive when building a site, there's going to be some distinct flair that isn't just a repeating segment.
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.
Mainly cause you never know what you’re getting. Over time, we trained our minds to believe that a well put site = effort, so at the very least people behind it cared. Now, it takes zero effort to make a site look good. So appearance in general means even less. In fact, now a poorly put together site might mean someone cared, wrote it by hand, flaws and all, to give you the human to human experience.
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.
As a designer; only slightly. I'm not there to be blown away by awesome design.
Isn't this one mimicking the typesafe ai horror website ?
Because "Make a website" (however more sophisticated the prompt might be) is not a path to knowing what to put on the website, what the personality of it should be, what the hierarchy of information should be, etc.
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.
Even when I'm interested and invested into the topic, somehow I just zone out and can't force myself to read it or read it with comprehension. Be it a website or a PR, there's just something to it that if it's more than a few sentences of it I just can't.
There must be a name to this phenomenon and I surely can't be the only one?
Cannot speak for all website, but this one is bad. I was clicking on some text thinking they were tabs or buttons, not the best UX
For me it's a bit like with some of the LLM prose - uncanny valley territory.
i dont see it visually, but the text on the page reads like the model is bending over backwards to comply with the prompt. i have that same voice on my website too and i am going to get rid of that text asap.
In the future I imagine we won't even visit websites anymore. We'll tell our own LLMs to visit the website and summarise it with information the LLM knows is relevant to us.
This one is so much better than the vast majority of sites though?
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.
The sites Claude generates by default are almost always in dark mode (no option to switch) and are difficult to read when it comes to font, font color and size choices. It's almost telling you the "author" has zero interest in user experience and doesn't care. This site is several levels above that.
Is your system set to dark mode? These days I find Claude often generates pages (like reports) with light & dark mode styles, and rightfully defaults to system preference.
LLM copyedits such as these aren't my idea of clear.
I find your comment off-putting. I think it's a great example of bikeshedding. Do you have anything to say about OpenJev the project, or just the bikeshed?
I don’t mind the generic dark themed LLM ones even if they all look the same but this particular block looking one is not my fav
People say as much for AI generated images? They're alien intelligence with still some IQ challenges. Their behaviors therefore cause uncanny valley response. Nothing strange about that.
... 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.
Yes, it's overly generic and provokes negative feelings in me, only.
Worse is better, apparently it is finally dead.
People rushing to throw a thing out into the world, rushing so much that they don't even bother to use it or look at it themselves.
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.
https://ssi.inc/ comes to mind
you're not alone
Maybe I am conditioned, but I found it nice and clean.
That’s a scary thought (at least, to me). But all change is scary.
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.
Maybe it’s my weird aesthetic but I liked this style since before llm. My designs were pretty similar and boxy with fake shadows. Also, this specific one reminds me of the style that dev.to I think had a few years ago, and back then it was very different. So I would say I like it even though I have seen other designs. I also like very brutalist, Craigslist like design and Japanese websites. Not a fan of very advanced designs.
It's not just you.
Yes, and when they contain pithy little mic-drop LLM phrases they're intolerable. But I'll still take them over marketing department scrollslop.