What Happens to Design After AI?

Designers when using Claude, as opposed to engineers using Claude, would consistently get better results. And it's because of the language that they use. We have to remember that design in the European sense came from royalty and the desire to be distinctive because they were working with scarce materials. What's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials available to everyone. Right now, everybody's trying to solve whether LLMs have taste. These models have millions of definitions of taste. LLMs have been trained on the output of humanity, not on the input. So what led to a design decision is not something that the LLMs know. Maybe advice for our design engineers in the room. How have you in the past effectively communicated the value of an instinct versus a deadline or even another instinct which may be less important? Yeah. That's a tough one because AI is making it easier than ever to create software. But what happens to design when anyone can generate an interface, a website, or an application with a prompt? Some argue that AI will commoditize design. Others believe it will make great design even more valuable by automating routine work and freeing people to focus on higher order creative decisions. In this conversation, a sixteen z general partner Anish Acharya sits down with Microsoft VP of Design John Maeda and impeccable founder and CEO Paul Backus to discuss design, software, creativity, and what happens when AI becomes part of the creative process. I wanna actually talk a little bit about, perhaps to begin, with the relationship between design and technology. I think there's some people who may view design as sort of more spiritually close to art and others who see it perhaps in a more utilitarian fashion, you know, the design of everyday things. So perhaps, John, I can sort of ask you to kick us off and talk to us about how you see the interplay between the two. Well, first of all, glad to be here. I used to think about this a lot when I was at Kleiner Perkins and thinking, like, why is it that design is important in twenty fourteen, fifteen? Like, why was it important? It was because this weird company called Airbnb was unusually successful. And if you connect to why design became important, it was because of mobile. Before mobile, desktop experiences could be crappy and it was okay because you didn't use them very often. But mobile had high usage and therefore it was bad all the time. It would be painful. So that's when it sort of started to happen. In terms of the relationship now, however, I'm so excited to be on this with Paul because I've been a fan of this moment when we'd be able to auto design. And that's since the nineties when I was at MIT. We thought it was gonna be possible one day, and now it's very …