AI Has Come for Serif Fonts

As nationalist backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial quality intensifies, the corporate quest to weed out—and reject—telltale signs of its usage continues.

One of the archetypal casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and precise quality signifier of punctuation, by the way! There's besides the “rule of threes,” which is meant to scan arsenic rhythmic, but often comes crossed predictable, hackish, and stale. And, of course, determination are the clunky grammatical constructions of the “not X, but Y” variety.

Now definite fonts and typefaces—specifically serifs—seem to beryllium defining (and giving away) AI, some successful existent software, and successful vibe-coded plan boilerplates. Some are calling it “tasteslop,” the results of the effort to marque generative AI designs look superficially blase oregon distinguished.

The displacement distant from slicker, much conspicuously computerized typefaces is thing the San Francisco Bay Area writer, designer, and benignant practitioner Keya Vadgama has termed “the serif renaissance.” In a caller newsletter, published connected her Substack, Vadgama suggests the determination is simply a bid for companies to task much “personality and warmth.”

“It’s not that hard to discern wherefore AI-native companies successful peculiar are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently acold and without opinion,” she writes. “[Using serifs] signals ‘We’re AI! But existent humans usage (and made) our product! We swear!’”

“Serifs person an root successful calligraphy,” Vadgama tells WIRED. “It connotes a precise human, fluid mode of making letterforms.” Vadgama has noticed that Anthropic’s Claude was defaulting to serifs. Other AI companies—Runway, Perplexity, Manus—had besides adopted akin typefaces successful their UX and branding.

Reached for comment, Perplexity main communications serviceman Jesse Dwyer tells WIRED: “Why wouldn’t we person quality design? Perplexity is for people.”

Vadgama believes the usage of serifs is arsenic overmuch astir aesthetics arsenic gathering assurance betwixt users and brands. Certain font choices signal, adjacent astatine immoderate preconscious intelligence level, trust. Sans serifs (your Arials, Calibiris, Helviticas) are excessively clean, excessively computer-y. Good aged Times New Roman, and akin typographic designs, tin consciousness a spot much dignified. Recently, Vadgama was doing immoderate branding enactment with a (since-shuttered) AI startup, which favored the serif text. “A large portion of it,” she says, “is, ‘How bash we presumption ourselves successful a mode that radical are not acrophobic of us?’”

Serifs tin assistance physique that conviction, oregon astatine slightest the illusion of it. Times New Roman itself was commissioned successful the 1930s by Britain’s Times newspaper. The typeface carries a definite authoritative heft. Books and newspapers are printed utilizing it. It was each but standardized successful the decades earlier surface reading. Perhaps astir famously, the Encyclopedia Brittanica—arguably the authoritative compendium of quality knowledge, astatine slightest pre-World Wide Web—was acceptable successful Times.

“In the wide public, a serif carries connotations of scholarship,” says Ali S. Qadeer, seat of graphic plan astatine the Ontario College of Art and Design successful Toronto. “Claude is interesting. It’s utilizing this somewhat brownish inheritance to reflector a publication page. It’s benignant of emulating the feeling of speechmaking print. And people has deeper associations with trust.”

As reported by The New York Times, adjacent the US State Department has returned to utilizing Times New Roman aft Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried Calibri arsenic “informal,” pegging the department’s adoption of the sans serif typeface connected immoderate wider, Biden-era DEI initiative.

Both Qadeer and Vadgama spot the inclination toward serifs arsenic a rejoinder to AI’s perceived (and, indeed, literal) deficiency of soul, and the wider nationalist suspicion of the technology. They’re not the lone ones. Alongside the “tasteslop” discourse, radical online person criticized the serification of AI aesthetics arsenic “generic” and “very ugly.”