The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet

Illustration by Ariel Davis Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Matt Ström-Awn, an independent designer, works mostly with startups in their early stages. Recently, two different clients proudly showed him sales decks that they had produced to court customers. Both decks had a bright-colored first slide with a mission statement, written in three declarative bullet points. Both had second slides featuring four rectangles laying out “the playing field”—the market in which the startup was operating—and both had third slides with a centered line of text reading “our move” and describing the startup’s disruptive tactic. “They actually look like they were generated by the same company,” Ström-Awn told me. “The logo is different, but the design is the same.” The decks looked the same because both were made using Claude Design, an A.I. tool that Anthropic launched in April. The new technology, Ström-Awn said, “defaults to the same aesthetic for every single person that’s using it.”

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.

Newsletrix, a newsletter-analytics dashboard; Wesley Wang Media, a production house; GrassDX, a tool for diagnosing problems with your lawn; Haute Living, a real-estate-agent directory; and DeployGraph, a research firm on A.I. companies—these are just a few of the companies whose sites bear a Claudian sameness. This is not an entirely new problem in web design. In the early days of the internet, HTML code and the need to design simple, small-size sites downloadable on dial-up led many hosts to adhere to a strict, basic palette. Eventually, website-building services such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix offered templates that became popular clichés of their own (think of sans-serif text over full-bleed splash images). But A.I. tools instill a particularly swift and stubborn genericism. Anthropic concedes as much in its guidance documents, noting that, when left to its own devices, Claude’s model “has strong design instincts, with a consistent default house style. . . . This default is persistent.” Not coincidentally, this default has a lot in common with Anthropic’s own branding—beigey backgrounds, off-red highlight colors, big typefaces, lots of serifs and underlines. The company notes that giving the program “generic instructions” such as “don’t use cream” is likely to “shift the model to a different fixed palette rather than producing variety.” In other words, the user has to fight to produce visuals that stray from the formula. As Ström-Awn put it, “The preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery; it is always going to struggle to produce something that doesn’t look like A.I.” (An Anthropic spokesperson told The New Yorker that Claude Design should ideally be able to deviate from a “standard look,” when users prefer it. “This doesn’t always happen the way we’d like and the team is working hard to improve it,” he said.)