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#design#deck#using#actually#value#don#more#stars#making#slides
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Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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 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.
> 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.
The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.
You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.
This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.
I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.
On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
That's impressive, although I'd hesitate to call that "standing", it's more a crawl I'd say.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
I just basically define what I need in a UI in plain text
when the prototype is built.
I extract the repeating units, then add design to it.
If you're tech first, you do what you do.
Oh look, they are gaining stars at a rate of pretty much exactly 1400 per day: https://www.star-history.com/?repos=nexu-io%2Fopen-design&ty...
Yeah, nothing shady here at all.
Edit: yep, quick search turned up a site to buy upvotes. All these vibe coded slop projects getting to the front page make sense now
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
But you're wrong in implying (if you are) that it's not valuable to be impressive to a non-expert.
Your site is actually really nice except the red color burns into my retina, so that's the only thing I would change about it (change your --primary to something more like #7c2c3e)
But a small percentage of people get rich, so we're all in.
I love writing but even there I have to work doubly hard to make sure I'm doing something valuable.
My point is that the space within which human creators can distinguish themselves is diminishing rapidly.
There's so much joy to be found in regular human creating and sharing.
The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Regular, non-groundbreaking creative work seems ... less worthy of sharing?
Why? Is a chair that you made with your own hands not as valuable to you because somebody else got one from Ikea? Would you not show it to your friends for this reason?