I design websites, mostly for fun, but I think I’m getting fairly decent at it. Lately, I’ve been playing with AI generated UI/UX; and… WOW. AI can generate some really cool looking websites. They look amazing, but the problem is… they’re lacking in human creativity. They’re lacking that human touch. They’re “inhumanly” perfect. And I think we’re going to get tired of all this perfection.
In fact, I would suggest that the human spirit has reached a point of novelty saturation. And I think we’re going to want to move, more and more, in the other direction.
More toward our misplaced humanity.
We’ve all gotten the perfectly worded email. We’ve all seen the beautiful website that looks remarkably like the last beautiful website. The message that knows our name, remembers what we looked at yesterday, and seems very concerned about whether we’ve finished buying it.
Someone has gone to considerable trouble to make us feel personally attended to. Except, increasingly, no one feels personally attended to. Go figure.
And I wonder how much more of it we actually want.
AI makes it possible to produce more information, more images, more of almost anything that can be delivered through a screen (and yes, I realize the hypocrisy of using AI to help me think through this situation and craft a treatise that most effectively optimizes my viewpoint). But hey, there are useful things in that.
Of course I use technology. I’m using it right now, in fact. But the assumption seems to be that, because we can produce more, someone must want to receive more.
It’s the same quality versus quantity discussion that I have with myself, and anyone who will listen… often.
So, here’s my thought.
There’s an economic idea called the Jevons paradox. An improvement in efficiency can lead to enough additional use that total resource consumption actually increases.
The idea comes from energy consumption, but I think there’s a useful parallel in what we’re doing with information. If an organization can produce a hundred articles with the effort it once spent on one, there’s a temptation to produce the hundred. Then everyone else, of course, would do the same.
Then all those articles get thrown out into the world looking for a reader.
Much of it is read by AI, but ultimately, aren’t we doing it for the humans? And if we’re doing it for the humans, doesn’t someone have to read all of that? Don’t we still have to be that reader?
But… we have to find the time. We have to decide what’s worth reading and whether we trust it. Meanwhile, we also have to make dinner, take care of the household, get some sleep, and attend to the people in our lives who need us. A machine’s ability to produce another thousand pages doesn’t give us another hour in the day.
I suspect this is where the next change begins. We may become much more particular about what, and who, we let into our lives. A sort of personal gatekeeping, if you will.
For years, looking professional took resources. A small business might struggle to afford the writing, photography, and design needed to present itself well. Making those tools more accessible is a good thing. People with something useful to offer deserve a chance to be seen too.
But when a polished presentation becomes easy to produce, it tells us less about who’s behind it. A beautiful website can belong to someone who has spent thirty years learning a craft. It can also belong to someone who started selling something yesterday and knows very little about it.
So we start looking for other things. Start subconsciously vetting everything. Who made this? Why did they make it? Can I talk to them if something goes wrong? Is there a person behind the work?
And we, increasingly, want some sense of that person.
The unevenness of human production may become part of what we appreciate the most. It becomes a sort of proof of humanity. It has its own peculiar character.
Of course, we can manufacture the appearance of all that, too. Add a little deliberate imperfection. But the claim eventually has to survive contact with another person. Someone has to answer the question. Keep the promise. Take responsibility when the beautiful thing doesn’t work.
That takes a human being willing to be involved.
The Internet has given us a digital third-place. But having somewhere to connect hasn’t always given us the connection we need. And this is a symptom of the entire problem. So much stuff, yet nothing worth having. Or more precisely, so much stuff that we can’t find the things that are worth having.
In that vein… There’s something called high-touch communities. And I like the intention behind that phrase. Someone is tending to the relationships. The community has a purpose beyond keeping people on a platform, and the people responsible for it have some sense of who’s there.
For a business or organization, that asks for a different kind of ambition. The community has to be worth belonging to even when no one is buying anything. If every conversation eventually becomes a sales pitch, people will notice… and leave.
I rather like that possibility.
That’s part of what I’ve been working toward with KommunityKoin. The idea is to help people build kommunities of mutual support through time co-ops (people sharing their time, skills, and care. Starting with the people around them and learning how to become people who can count on one another).
That’s what interests me. The possibility that technology could help us do something in service of humanity rather than drown our humanity in an endless sea of useless, yet perfectly rendered, information.
I don’t think human exhaustion with perfect automated content will bring a more human world into being on its own. The incentives to produce more will remain. We can put a membership fee on a digital space and reproduce the same pressures inside it. More posts. More notifications. More demands to remain visible.
So we have to make choices about what we’re building and what we’re willing to maintain.
If AI saves an organization time, where does that time go? Does someone have a little more room to listen? Can a staff member spend more time on a difficult question?
Or do we simply raise the production target?
I can see a useful place for AI in the administrative work that takes so much of our day. Help with the scheduling. Sort through the information. Make the work manageable. There’s value in having some capacity returned to us.
But we have to decide what to do with that capacity.
I’d like some of it to become time we can give to another person. Time to hear the longer explanation. To show someone how something works. To sit for a while without feeling that we should already be somewhere else.
And when someone begins, “I know you’re busy…”
To have enough room in the day to let them finish.
I’m still going to have fun designing websites and seeing what AI can do. And I’ll still appreciate a beautiful website when I see one. But more and more, I’m judging websites on their humanity rather than the flashy presentation.
And I’ll continue to be more interested in the person behind the information that I consume, whether that be websites or articles. More interested in what they care about. Whether they care about me. And whether all that time they’ve saved means they have a little more time for us… me and you.
After all, it’s just a part of being human. And that’s what we’re starting to miss.
