The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet
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Matt Ström-Awn, an independent designer, works mostly with startups in their early stages. Recently, two different clients proudly showed him sales decks that they had produced to court customers. Both decks had a bright-colored first slide with a mission statement, written in three declarative bullet points. Both had second slides featuring four rectangles laying out “the playing field”—the market in which the startup was operating—and both had third slides with a centered line of text reading “our move” and describing the startup’s disruptive tactic. “They actually look like they were generated by the same company,” Ström-Awn told me. “The logo is different, but the design is the same.” The decks looked the same because both were made using Claude Design, an A.I. tool that Anthropic launched in April. The new technology, Ström-Awn said, “defaults to the same aesthetic for every single person that’s using it.”
As Claude Design catches on among Anthropic users, a generic-design aesthetic is emerging that’s as noticeable as text-based A.I. tics such as overenthusiastic em-dash usage or “not X . . . but Y” constructions. In slide decks and on website interfaces, there’s a predominance of beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces that are italicized and highlighted in zealous attempts to emphasize. Subheadings are often “tracked out,” in design parlance, with spaces between the letters, and there’s an inexplicable prevalence of ticker-like text bars, as if the website were a cable-news show. Another designer I spoke to, David McGillivray, pointed out how Claude often creates dashboard elements with multiple rounded rectangular outlines, sometimes with a neon glow underneath for good measure. The designer and writer Celine Nguyen identified a combination of “tasteful, slightly askew primary colors,” desaturated hues redolent of mid-century modernist design. Such qualities might be unobjectionable, even desirable, in and of themselves, but their ubiquitous appearance across the internet has turned them into instant design clichés. “Now I find myself instinctively repulsed by the warm tones even though I love this kind of color palette,” Nguyen said.
Newsletrix, a newsletter-analytics dashboard; Wesley Wang Media, a production house; GrassDX, a tool for diagnosing problems with your lawn; Haute Living, a real-estate-agent directory; and DeployGraph, a research firm on A.I. companies—these are just a few of the companies whose sites bear a Claudian sameness. This is not an entirely new problem in web design. In the early days of the internet, HTML code and the need to design simple, small-size sites downloadable on dial-up led many hosts to adhere to a strict, basic palette. Eventually, website-building services such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix offered templates that became popular clichés of their own (think of sans-serif text over full-bleed splash images). But A.I. tools instill a particularly swift and stubborn genericism. Anthropic concedes as much in its guidance documents, noting that, when left to its own devices, Claude’s model “has strong design instincts, with a consistent default house style. . . . This default is persistent.” Not coincidentally, this default has a lot in common with Anthropic’s own branding—beigey backgrounds, off-red highlight colors, big typefaces, lots of serifs and underlines. The company notes that giving the program “generic instructions” such as “don’t use cream” is likely to “shift the model to a different fixed palette rather than producing variety.” In other words, the user has to fight to produce visuals that stray from the formula. As Ström-Awn put it, “The preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery; it is always going to struggle to produce something that doesn’t look like A.I.” (An Anthropic spokesperson told The New Yorker that Claude Design should ideally be able to deviate from a “standard look,” when users prefer it. “This doesn’t always happen the way we’d like and the team is working hard to improve it,” he said.)
In addition to reinforcing graphic-design tropes, Claude Design tends to direct all of its users toward the same libraries of open-source code, the tools behind user-interface design. Shadcn UI and Radix UI provide ready-made building blocks for websites; Drizzle manages databases. Lucas Gelfond, a software engineer, likened the uniformity that these products encourage to the effects of mass manufacturing following the Industrial Revolution. Automated industrial processes left signatures: “seams on injection-molded plastic, industrial saw marks in wood,” Gelfond said. “I think about a lot of the tells in L.L.M.-generated software—bright accent serifs, overuse of dots, dividing characters, and emojis, high-contrast indicators—as similar marks of the tool.”
The advent of A.I. has caused Silicon Valley types to fixate on the concept of “taste”; when machines can spit out images and words instantaneously, the thinking goes, humans must be discerning enough to separate the quality output from the slop. Ström-Awn described Claude’s default design choices as a mark of complacency, “a filtering mechanism” that exposes “people who didn’t spend the time” creating something unique. Nguyen brought up a credo of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames that defined the ideals of modernism: “The best for the most for the least.” What Claude Design offers, Nguyen said, is “the pretty good for the most for the least effort, and pretty low cost.” She continued, “You’re just paying a twenty dollar a month Claude Pro subscription instead of hiring a designer. Is this the modernist world we wanted?”
Notably, none of the designers I spoke to are against A.I. altogether. All of them said that the technology is unavoidable, and shared that it’s possible to use A.I. tools such as Claude Design and OpenAI’s Codex to achieve a distinctive look, if you’re willing to put in the labor. Hilary Gridley is the founder of Writerbuilder, a newsletter focussed on A.I., and she previously worked as the head of core product at the A.I. wearable company Whoop. “Most people don’t want to go through a full creative process,” she told me, adding, “There’s no easy button for good work.” Gridley sometimes uses A.I.-generated bird illustrations in her own branding. To produce a finished product, she assembles mood boards of inspirational material and sketches out drafts of the illustrations by hand, then she feeds that material into an image generator along with a description of the final art she envisions. The result is highly textured A.I. imagery that could be mistaken for handmade. Loredana Crisan, the chief design officer of Figma, a popular digital product-design app that integrates A.I. features, told me, “The job of the designer is to stay with uncertainty long enough to discover something new.”
Anthropic’s recent branding choices suggest an effort to sidestep its own visual clichés. Its latest model, Fable 5—launched this month, then quickly suspended after the U.S. government cited national-security concerns—features marketing imagery comprising collaged vintage illustrations of insects, flowers, and other scientific ephemera. They call to mind the nineteenth-century moth illustrations of the French botanist and geologist Charles Dessalines d’Orbigny, source material that is redolent of human knowledge and the organic world. Even that new aesthetic is liable to become absorbed by the machine, however. As Gridley put it, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw that design showing up everywhere.” ♦