Generating Beautiful UIs May 08, 2026
With contributions from Sherif Cherfa and Halley Chang There’s an intuitive skepticism we have toward AI-generated work. We see it clearly in writing, where the patterns have gotten familiar and punctuation (the em dash — ) has become a universal signal that AI has been used. Design has lagged behind writing, but it’s catching up. Recent models can produce better UIs, yet it still requires heavy hand-holding and prompt “band-aids.” Overall, AI-generated designs often lack that feeling of deep satisfaction, joy, or whimsy that human designers create. Basic prompts produce boring outputs Media theorist Marshall McLuhan is often credited for his beliefs on the co-evolution of humans and tools: “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Although AI can create superficially “beautiful” designs, they’re often shallow. When you give a model a generic prompt, you get a…