The remarkably human task of giving AI ‘good enough’ taste

Ben Blumenrose has noticed that the floor for AI-generated website design is rising fast. As co-founder and managing partner at the venture capital firm Designer Fund, and a practicing designer for two decades, Blumenrose has been tracking the rapid improvement of AI-generated visuals. He can still spot the difference between a site designed by a professional human and one produced by a model (some tells: the proliferation of “pills,” floating dashboards, and gradients, gradients, gradients), but the AI results are “five times better than what the same kind of tools did a year ago.” He anticipates the trend will continue. “Probably in six months to a year it’s going to be very hard even for me to tell,” Blumenrose says.One of Designer Fund’s investments is Framer, a no-code website design platform. [Image: Designer Fund]The AI industry has been working hard to improve creative output from models through crisp evaluation metrics, rubrics, and automated tests and tools. A few years ago, the challenge was to reduce the volume of slop in the world by ensuring that AI-generated human hands had the correct number of fingers, or AI-generated essays didn’t mix metaphors. But now that “cor…