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quotemstryesterday at 4:15 PM3 repliesview on HN

Postmodernists are annoying because they are right about design. "Taste", aesthetics, design, vibes they're all as socially-constructed and post-truth as that annoying sophomore says everything is. The world is design is an isekai manga in which Derrida's delusions are the rules of physics. It's weird.

Part of this weirdness is the continual relativism of design. A taste-meme is good or cringe only relative to the prevailing social environment, never itself. An AI can never do "design", properly understood, because design is the work done by a reluctance motor, spinning endlessly in a Sysphean quest to align itself with a moving magnetic field and producing torque by side effect.

All efforts like this can do is capture the field alignment at an instant in time. It cannot do work. It cannot produce motion, not as long as its weights are as fixed as the field lines of a neodymium magnet. The instant AI design is good, it becomes bad through the act of becoming good.

Producing work through motion of taste may be one of the last human endeavors to be absorbed.


Replies

hellohello2yesterday at 8:23 PM

Interesting take. What do you think of using AI exploitatively? I have no doubt it can easily generate drafts or copy the style of one thing onto another, letting us rapidly try out ideas.

show 1 reply
xpctyesterday at 5:56 PM

I agree with what you're saying, but I imagine products like this one aren't aimed at replacing this. LLMs are partially a dashboard business, and this is just one tool to aim at your boring business data

pembrookyesterday at 6:43 PM

Interesting take and I pretty much agree (also, I find it funny that now the only interesting comments on HN are all found at the bottom).

However, there is of course a raw mechanical side to design that comes more into play on practical applications like a software UI vs. pure play memes/vibes like branding or a landing page.

Think hierarchy, leading, kerning, scale, contrast, balance, etc. These things remain constant throughout trend cycles and can absolutely get you half way there. Then aesthetic memes can be sprinkled on top by a human to make people believe "this feels cool."