The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.

For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.

I’m glad people will have to evaluate the substance of the deck rather than using a cheap heuristic like how visually appealing the presentation is.

I understand there tends to be a correlation between visual appeal and effort, and correlation between effort and merit, but correlation is notoriously flawed. Flawed models can be useful, but only if one qualifies their use sufficiently. I don’t think most people who used are using the aesthetics heuristic you mention to gauge merit are using it rigorously to sharpen their thinking, they’re using it as a shortcut to prevent themselves from needing to think.

An equally plausible scenario to that of which you mention is that technical people can make presentations that are similarly visually appealing as the non-technical people, and that their opinions will be valued more than before. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won’t happen, but I am certain that we do not know yet.

> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.

I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.

The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).

Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.

Look I'm speaking here as a career designer:

I think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.

Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.

One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.

Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).

Human communication moves ever closer to its final form: bullet pointed lists of lower case text and emoji

https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

>The modern world is design rich and art poor. That is to say that with the introduction of mass production it became possible to distribute everywhere items that in previous eras would have been seen as full of Mana, but now, not unique — they have none.

That was in reference to mass produced design, but it seems to apply 10X to AI produced Art.

That idea around LLMs reducing the signaling value of certain types of work is very interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it.

I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.

> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise.

Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that.

The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent honing a message into its most concentrated form.

True. But this makes it easier to stand out in a sea of monotony.

This is true if you that assume the only purpose of design is aesthetic differentiation. There actually is a lot of science in how you scan information in a design, how it's presented, the visual hierarchy, grouping and things that actually have utility in and off itself.

I don't disagree, but I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make.

It's cheap. That's all.

And the result will be people creating their own flawed but unique designs as a counter signal. Think of the early internet and the janky but wonderfully personal websites it spawned.