My allies have failed me in the fight against AI

I attended a design conference once, an impostor in converse and a side part. As the speaker talked about avoiding AI slop in design, I noticed something. He was reading from a teleprompter, just off the stage. And the writing was AI-generated.

You can tell, oftentimes, even when the em dashes are silent. It’s the “it’s not x, it’s y” sentence structure. It’s the way every illustration needs to have three tidy examples, wrapped in a bow. It’s the thinking that’s structured so plausibly and logically-ordered, without wild side tangents and desire paths that a human author might create when thinking through a topic.

As the speaker was admonishing AI slop in design, the talk itself was AI slop in a long trench coat. Any writer could tell. It couldn’t grab my attention. It felt hypocritical.

On the floor under my seat, in my tote bag, sat another piece of AI slop, made physical. It was a magazine produced for the conference. It was a beautiful object. I was excited to go home and read it. But after settling down with a cup of tea, I opened the cover to find no less than four em dashes on a one-paragraph page.

My heart sank.

These designers were supposed to be my allies in the fight against slop. They care about it when it affects their domain. So why are they active in producing slop in mine?

I’m an artistic person, but for some reason when I try to design with a computer or tablet, nothing good ever comes out. There’s a skillset that I still lack. For this reason, I know that I’ve produced AI design slop, more than once.

Similarly, being good at design doesn’t mean you’re a skilled writer. Maybe that’s why we resort to using a tool that produces something plausible, but soulless. We lack the skills, and the LLMs outpace both our abilities and our taste in unknown realms.

So how can we fix this? How can we be good allies to each other?

What if the answer is being comfortable at being bad at things? I care about writing. I’ve read a lot of it. I’d much rather read a poorly-structured, grammatically-fraught piece written by a thinking, feeling person, than something generated by an LLM. Do designers feel the same way? If I hand-design something with an awful color palette, arbitrary font sizes, and too little padding, is that more or less offensive than purple gradients and too-wide kernings? Is this something I can even spend precious time on, when things are moving at AI-speed?

What if the answer is working together? You design a piece, and I’ll write the copy. I’ll build the site if you promise to review it. Do friends do this for each other? Is this too reductive, anyway, since design and copywriting are both more about the storytelling and creative thinking than the actual acts of arranging pixels and glyphs on the screen?

What if the answer is acquiring the skills? This is untenable, right? LLMs are reasonably okay at both writing and design, now. They get better with each model release. I’d love to learn to design better than an LLM, someday, and I do hope I get there. But can we expect that from everyone, for every domain?

I don’t have a buttoned-up solution. And that isn’t just a thinly-veiled attempt to prove my own humanity. I actually just don’t know what to do with this problem.

There’s a feeling that writer Mark Slutsky calls “good-handedness.” It’s “the immediate feeling on reading the first lines of a book, or starting a movie, etc, that you are in good hands.” I want my design friends to feel good-handedness and hospitality when they visit a website I made. I want to feel like I’m in good hands when I’m a guest in a designer’s world—even when I’m wearing the wrong shoes.

The best hospitality isn’t always the house that looks like it’s straight out of a magazine. Sometimes, it’s your friend inviting you over for a movie night. They had a long week at work, and their apartment is a mess, and they thought they had popcorn but they must have run out (the Sour Patch Kids you brought will do). Sometimes those nights are the ones you’ll remember most. Nothing is perfect, but it’s all deeply human, and you’re in the best of hands.

Maybe that’s what we need. The humility to have a messy home. To take a crack at writing that article, even when it doesn’t turn out to be any good. To be assisted by AI, rather than replaced by it. To refuse to outsource our thinking, even when the thinking is hard, and slow, and there are no right answers.

How else can we be more hospitable allies to each other? Let me know on Twitter, or email me at hi @ christinacodes.dev.