This is an area where the vision is very desirable, but user expectations also run sky-high.<p>A company called The Grid collected about $5 million from users (and another sum in the same ballpark from VCs) with the promise of an AI that designs websites for you. Years later, they still have very little to show.<p>It seems like most of those tens of thousands of aspiring web creators who paid $96 to be "founding members" of this AI revolution have quietly licked their wounds and given up, because there doesn't even seem to be too much active discussion about the product anymore. (The Reddit forum is dead, with a few messages of the "Can we sue?" kind.)
Great article. Covers a lot of aspects on how ML can help designers be more creative and productive!<p>At Huula, I'm a firm believer that ML can automate various parts of web designs. We just released a new experiment CSSToucan[1] to auto color texts on web pages with Recurrrent Neural Networks. It learns to color texts on web pages without a single line of color theories in the code. All learned from the data. Hope to see more and more ML powered design tools emerging!<p>[1]: <a href="https://huu.la/ai/csstoucan" rel="nofollow">https://huu.la/ai/csstoucan</a>
It sounds like one of the core issues is dimensionality reduction. I would suggest reducing everything to text. Text is one-dimensional.<p>In this case:<p>>> Like any other map, we can add textual labels — street signs if you will. This allows us to navigate the design space verbally with commands like: “take me to a maple leaf.” Once there, we could say something like: “take me a bit closer to an oak leaf.”<p>The change here would be subtle. Rather than a two-way conversation between tool and user, instead it's more like the user is telling a story and the tool is making suggestions along the way:<p>start:<p>"Create a leaf"<p>tool inserts a suggestion:<p>"Create a [maple,oak,cherry,...] leaf"<p>user updates the story with the clarification:<p>"Create a maple leaf"<p>tool suggests:<p>"Create a [red,green,...] maple leaf"<p>user:<p>"Create a green maple leaf"<p>user starts typing more:<p>"Create a green maple leaf on a"<p>tool inserts suggestions:<p>"Create a maple leaf on a [branch,wreath,...]"<p>Hope this is helpful.