Ben Blumenrose has noticed that the floor for AI-generated website design is rising fast. As co-founder and managing partner at the venture capital firm Designer Fund, and a practicing designer for two decades, Blumenrose has been tracking the rapid improvement of AI-generated visuals. He can still spot the difference between a site designed by a professional human and one produced by a model (some tells: the proliferation of “pills,” floating dashboards, and gradients, gradients, gradients), but the AI results are “five times better than what the same kind of tools did a year ago.” He anticipates the trend will continue. “Probably in six months to a year it’s going to be very hard even for me to tell,” Blumenrose says. One of Designer Fund’s investments is Framer, a no-code website design platform. [Image: Designer Fund] The AI industry has been working hard to improve creative output from models through crisp evaluation metrics, rubrics, and automated tests and tools. A few years ago, the challenge was to reduce the volume of slop in the world by ensuring that AI-generated human hands had the correct number of fingers, or AI-generated essays didn’t mix metaphors. But now that “correct” has mostly become table stakes, the path to creative work that convinces, or even impresses, an expert like Blumenrose is less clear-cut.  Taste, or at least an approximation of it, has become one of the next frontiers in model development. A host of startups are promising that they can encode taste into AI. Meanwhile, the major frontier labs are thinking about how to edge their models into subjective domains like writing and design. Anthropic’s Claude Design, which launched in April, has already encoded a particular aesthetic that’s replicating across the internet. But as every human knows, even within a narrow profession, opinions on what’s considered “good” can vary based on each person’s alchemical mix of social, cultural, and work experiences. Developing taste in any creative

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