Artificial Intelligence has come to Serif fonts

As a popular reaction To exist seemingly everywhere artificial intelligence The collective quest to get rid of – and – intensifies He refuses– Visible signs of its use persist.

One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was cross-dashes – a great and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There is also the “rule of threes”, which is meant to scan as rhythmically, but is often predictable, innovative and outdated. Naturally, there are the hackneyed grammatical constructions of a variety of “not X, but Y”.

Now it seems that some fonts and typefaces — specifically serifs — are defining (and abandoning) artificial intelligence, both in actual software and in coded design models. Some call it a “collapse of taste,” the results of efforts to make generative AI designs appear complex or superficially distinct.

The shift away from sharper, computerized fonts is something San Francisco Bay Area writer, designer, and type practitioner Kia Vadgama has called “the serif renaissance.” in recent newsletter, Posting it on its Substack site, Vadgama notes that the move is an attempt by the companies to show more “personality and warmth.”

“It’s not hard to see why AI-driven companies in particular are drawn to serif lines: AI is inherently cold and without opinion,” she wrote. “(using serif) indicates ‘We are artificial intelligence!’ But real humans use (and make) our product! We swear!”

“The origins of serifs have their origins in calligraphy,” Fadgama tells WIRED. “It connotes a very humane and fluid way of making letterforms.” Vadgama noted that Claude the Anthropic was falling behind the use of slaves. Other AI companies, such as Runway, Perplexity, and Manus, have also adopted similar fonts in their user experience and branding.

When reached for comment, Jesse Dwyer, chief communications officer at Perplexity, told WIRED: “Why don’t we have a human design? People are confused.”

Vadgama believes that using serifs is as much about aesthetics as it is about building trust between users and brands. Some font choices indicate trust, even on a pre-conscious psychological level. Sans serifs (Arials, Calibiris, and Helviticas) are very clean and compatible with computers. Good old Times New Roman, and similar typographic designs, can make you feel more dignified. Recently, Vadgama was doing some branding work with an AI startup (since shut down), which favored serif text. “A big part of it is: How do we position ourselves in a way that people won’t be afraid of us?” she says.

Serifs can help build that conviction, or at least the illusion of it. The Times New Roman newspaper itself was created in the 1930s by the British newspaper The Times. The typeface carries a certain authoritative weight. Books and newspapers are printed using it. It was almost uniform in the decades before screen reading. Perhaps the most famous is the Encyclopedia Britannica – arguably the authoritative compendium of human knowledge, at least before the World Wide Web – which was featured in The Times.

“In the general public, serif has scientific connotations,” says Ali Qadir, head of the graphic design department at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. “Claude is interesting. He uses this slightly brown background to reflect the page of a book. It kind of emulates the feeling of reading print. And print has deeper associations with confidence.”

As reported New York TimesEven the US State Department returned to using Times New Roman after Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized Calibri as “casual,” linking the department’s adoption of the sans serif typeface to some broader DEI initiatives under Biden.

Both Qadeer and Vadgama see the trend toward slavishness as a reaction to AI’s (and indeed literal) lack of soul, and a broader general skepticism of technology. They are not the only ones. Along with the “taste” rhetoric, people online have criticized the aestheticization of AI as “qualitative“and”Very ugly“.