Should AI Design Your Website?

So I’m currently in the process of making a new website – and it’s caused me something of a dilemma.

Should I take the old expensive path of designers, developers, and all the rest of it?

Or should I move with the times, and use Lovable or whatever and unleash the mighty power of AI to create something far more smoothly and cheaply?

Now this might be foolish, but in the end I decided to take the old school route. I have various reasons for this that I won’t bore you with, but there was one deciding factor that I think you might be interested in that is far more consequential.

I call it:

The law of average.

The law of average is very simple, very obvious, but at the same time I think very under-appreciated. And it goes something like this:

If you do the same thing as everyone else, you’ll get the same results as everyone else.

It’s funny, we’ve all heard that supposed Einstein quote about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Well for me the definition of insanity is doing the same thing as other people and expecting different results.

 

If we apply this rule to a very small node in the business ecosystem – like a website – we can imagine what the smoothest and cheapest path might be (getting AI to spin something up). And then we can imagine what the hardest and most effortful path might be:

• Strategising the role of the site in the business
• Working on the copy personally, and manually
• Employing the advice of yes, AI, but also other experts
• Hiring the most senior and heavyweight designer I can find
• Getting it built to my exact specifications

In this scenario we can infer that the most outlying results (for better or worse) will come from the higher friction path, because it’s less likely to produce an average output.

Now don’t get me wrong, this might be a terrible example of the law. You might claim to me that Lovable or whatever is able to produce an objectively better final product than a human designer will. You might also claim that at this moment in time, it is the old school system that is the “average” path, and the AI system that is the outlier path.

But whatever – even if you’re right, it’s still just the rule spun in another direction:

You need to go a couple of clicks beyond what other people will in any domain in order to outperform them.

The reason I think this is so important and worth writing about – despite being embarrassingly obvious – is that it’s not the default mode of most people, and most businesses.

When something needs to be done, most people’s default mode is this:

“What is the cheapest and easiest way to do this”

In fact I would argue that this has almost become our highest cultural good. Almost every ad you see, and every new business that’s created, is built on the seductive promise of cheap and easy. It’s become almost like the omni-value-offering, which clearly says something about our collective psyche.

Still, because this is the default mode, it is of course also the average mode – and so then you create something (a business, a product, a life) that is just a big old stack of average. And then you complain about how crap it is!