This is Kyle Chayka’s work newsletter. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter publication One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m primarily on X and Instagram.
The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet
Continuing my work on ~technology flattening culture~, I wrote a column on the homogenized websites that Claude Design produces, along with every other AI coding tool. There are defaults and standards baked in to large language models (LLMs) no matter what purpose you use them for, whether producing text or an image or an entire website or brand. If the user doesn’t actively push back against the AI model, then they get the generic output, the lowest common acceptable denominator of aesthetics and taste. This is what the AI generic style looks like in web design:
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.
This piece also tracks my theory that the AI era is an extension of the algorithm era, not a total sea change but an evolution. In Filterworld, I argued that over the 2010s, algorithmic recommendations and the incentives of digital-platform feeds pushed human creators to produce generic content, in order to game the system and get attention. Now, AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT are simply creating the generic content instantly from the get-go. And as soon as the model locks on to a pattern that works, it reproduces that infinitely for every user who requests something in that vein — hence the generic palettes, buttons, and typefaces on these Claude websites. I don’t know if you can outrun this reproduction of style. You have to work very hard, against a lot of friction, to get anything remotely original out of AI. The deeper question is, does originality matter at all? In many cases — wanting a decent portfolio site, for example — it doesn’t. But in art, or niche / elite culture, it absolutely does. The second the informed viewer realizes that you fell for the AI generic, they’re turned off.
This newsletter is too short a space to flesh the argument out, but this kind of instantly ubiquitous homogeneity is going to happen across every field of human endeavor in the era of AI, until AI gets so powerful that it actually becomes original (doubtful) or until we shut it down. Or til we shame and devalue the tide of boring and shallow AI output as a society in a kind of technological version of the 16th-century Dutch iconoclasm.
Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives?
I reviewed the Atlantic columnist, professor, and gaming theorist Ian Bogost’s new nonfiction book “The Small Stuff,” which encourages us to take more delight in our sensory surroundings, which digital technology has encouraged us to ignore: the clunk of an ice-maker or the smoosh of house paint as we slather it on. Bogost seems to want a revived culture of DIY, taking pleasure in the mundane physical stuff of life. It’s a fun, well-crafted book but I left wanting a more ambitious argument:
Bogost’s book taps into a familiar strain of digital exhaustion. Nearly two decades after the release of the first iPhone, always-online technology has become a scourge. It sucks, in a way, that this one device has taken over activities as varied as entering the subway, paying for things, navigating streets, and chatting with our loved ones. The phone’s frictionless services are phenomenally convenient and yet lacking in texture; they flatten experience because they all take place through the same smooth, rectangular portal. Embossed business cards, account ledgers, bins of bolts at the hardware store—all are pleasurable physical artifacts that have been more or less outmoded by technology. Bogost is adept at pinpointing the losses that come with the digital ease of Amazon, Uber Eats, and Netflix: “Home has become a prison of convenience that we need special help to escape.”
I am back on parental leave with our beautiful six-month-old through mid-September, so these will be my last New Yorker columns for a while! I hope to do a little more writing in the meantime in newsletter form. You can always reach me at chaykak@gmail.com.
always poignant, kyle. if anyone has seen really overt examples of this, please drop them here also!
I am reminded of the early blogging days. Remember Blogger? It was fine. Remember how no one cared about quality typesetting after we got the early Macs? I hate fancy websites. Flash animation? No thanks. I think you’re on the wrong side of this argument. And ps: Aren’t babies fun?