The AI Aesthetic

Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interaction design and will likely remain prevalent for a long time as a terse way of indicating “more menu-type content here”. As another example, before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ✨? Personally, I don’t know, but now it means AI. (AI = sparkles and rainbow colors — it’s funny when you think about it. They should’ve just thrown unicorns in there for the trifecta. AI = sparkles, rainbows, and unicorns ✨🌈🦄. Apt.) Some patterns are very specific to the interactions inherent to the nature of AI as a technology. For example: streaming text. This is a pattern made for and refined by…