alt Hacker News> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces
Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.
It was something I saw when I was working on AI tooling over at Figma. It was very hard to get creative, unique outputs out of LLMs.
One thing I'd recommend if you're trying to avoid this is try a diffusion model as a starting point. Gpt-image-2 is a VERY capable designer, and Opus and Fable are fantastic at converting images to webpages. Starting with images will let you sidestep a lot of the uniformity of output that LLMs have. I'm heavily biased here as this is what I left figma to build (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995754), but even starting with gpt-image-2 to give you a general sense of the look/feel will heavily differentiate you on the design front.
Here are some examples of image->webpage outputs I've been playing with:
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I hate to be crass, I’m consciously trying to avoid well defined HN guidelines here, but the article is about discussing design aesthetics we encounter when we are interacring with AI not design asthetics the AI outputs when we ask it to write code for us. I get the confusion though, the title is a bit of a trick, probably on purpose
I like your product and I’m gonna try it because I’m growing to hate the “Claude generated website aesthetic” but $0.13 is way too cheap.
maybe, but you can do wacky things, eg I put together https://scores.lazer-kiwi.workers.dev/ It's a dota2 guild (#1 guild in autralasia) website and I have a bot that extracts the scores and publishes peoples progress on the website with a relatively basic table and stats, as a random side quest all kinds of weird stuff got built in ( you can shoot all kinds of things, if you hover over the number in the # column of the members and it turns into a gold sights, then you can click that and there are all kinds of weird cinematics. Lots of semi crude humor and Kiwi / Aussie rivalry Jokes and internal digs at some of the players. The art is...errr... basic. There's a secret counter down the bottom left so you can tell if you have seen all the weird things or not. Note, on mobile it doesn't include the extras.
I tried your tool just now, on my iPhone. I am really kind of stuck and frustrated. I cannot get that first box, the one you can type into, that’s on a grid into a state where I can interact with it.
Stuff is jumping around after I try to move the canvas around, unexpected stuff. I can’t figure it out.
How do you prompt your diffusion models? I see that you are a founder in this space :)
For Tarot, did you generate base-color, roughness and normal maps? How do you make sure something like the roughness map doesn't deviate slightly from the base-color?
The ramen one looks extremely AI. It's mostly the atrocious copywriting, and wonky responsiveness, but even overlooking those things you can tell.
On the Tarot one, the 3D card in the bottom is both very elaborate and also pointless. No human would've put effort into making that. Not bad per se! But AI.
I wanted to try out your service but I don't have any accounts with Google or Microsoft properties (incl Github), so I can't sign up
> The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.
The funny thing is that looking like everyone else was once considered the definition of good UI design, because it helps users understand a new interface. Then mobile apps came and suddenly UI design was about “expressing your brand” or whatever.
I was expecting Papyrus for the tarot page :)
Context priming all the more important for design work over raw model vanilla experience
Honestly these examples absolutely DO look like generic AI slop, no offense.
I don't think these look "bad" exactly, but they do look like AI, and I don't think that's just because I know they are.