As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—telltale indicators of its use continues.
Certainly one of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are an incredible, and really human type of punctuation, by the means! There’s additionally the “rule of threes,” which is meant to scan as rhythmic, however typically comes throughout predictable, hackish, and rancid. And, after all, there are the clunky grammatical constructions of the “not X, however Y” selection.
Now sure fonts and typefaces—particularly serifs—appear to be defining (and gifting away) AI, each in precise software program, and in vibe-coded design boilerplates. Some are calling it “tasteslop,” the outcomes of the effort to make generative AI designs appear superficially refined or distinguished.
The shift away from slicker, extra conspicuously computerized typefaces is one thing the San Francisco Bay Space author, designer, and sort practitioner Keya Vadgama has termed “the serif renaissance.” In a recent newsletter, printed on her Substack, Vadgama suggests the transfer is a bid for firms to undertaking extra “character and heat.”
“It’s not that troublesome to discern why AI-native firms specifically are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently chilly and with out opinion,” she writes. “[Using serifs] alerts ‘We’re AI! However actual people use (and made) our product! We swear!’”
“Serifs have an origin in calligraphy,” Vadgama tells WIRED. “It connotes a really human, fluid means of constructing letterforms.” Vadgama has observed that Anthropic’s Claude was defaulting to serifs. Different AI firms—Runway, Perplexity, Manus—had additionally adopted comparable typefaces of their UX and branding.
Reached for remark, Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer tells WIRED: “Why wouldn’t we now have human design? Perplexity is for folks.”
Vadgama believes the use of serifs is as a lot about aesthetics as constructing confidence between customers and types. Sure font decisions sign, even at some preconscious psychological stage, belief. Sans serifs (your Arials, Calibiris, Helviticas) are too clear, too computer-y. Good outdated Instances New Roman, and comparable typographic designs, can really feel a bit extra dignified. Just lately, Vadgama was doing a little branding work with a (since-shuttered) AI startup, which favored the serif textual content. “An enormous a part of it,” she says, “is, ‘How can we place ourselves in a means that folks are not afraid of us?’”
Serifs may also help construct that conviction, or at the least the phantasm of it. Instances New Roman itself was commissioned in the Nineteen Thirties by Britain’s Instances newspaper. The typeface carries a sure authoritative heft. Books and newspapers are printed utilizing it. It was all however standardized in the a long time before display screen studying. Maybe most famously, the Encyclopedia Brittanica—arguably the authoritative compendium of human data, at the least pre-World Broad Net—was set in Instances.
“In the broad public, a serif carries connotations of scholarship,” says Ali S. Qadeer, chair of graphic design at the Ontario Faculty of Artwork and Design in Toronto. “Claude is attention-grabbing. It’s utilizing this barely brown background to mirror a ebook web page. It’s form of emulating the feeling of studying print. And print has deeper associations with belief.”
As reported by The New York Times, even the US State Division has returned to utilizing Instances New Roman after Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried Calibri as “casual,” pegging the division’s adoption of the sans serif typeface on some wider, Biden-era DEI initiative.
Each Qadeer and Vadgama see the pattern towards serifs as a rejoinder to AI’s perceived (and, certainly, literal) lack of soul, and the wider public suspicion of the know-how. They’re not the solely ones. Alongside the “tasteslop” discourse, folks on-line have criticized the serification of AI aesthetics as “generic” and “very ugly.”
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