AI Comes to Serif Fonts

Like revenge on people to be seen everywhere artificial intelligence is growing, public willingness to remove-and denial– signs of its use continue.

One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was the dashes – which are large, and of a human nature of signs, by the way! There is also the “rule of threes,” which is meant to appear rhythmic, but is often predictable, concise, and consistent. And, of course, there are the grammatical constructions of “not X, but Y”.

Now fonts and other types – especially serifs – seem to define (and provide) AI, in real software, and as boilerplates for creating vibes. Some are calling it “tasteslop,” the result of trying to make AI designs look fancy or popular.

The move away from minimalist, familiar desktop fonts is what writer, illustrator, and San Francisco Bay Area typographer Keya Vadgama has called “the serif renaissance.” In latest news, published on his Substack, Vadgama points out that the move is a call to companies to show “humanity and love”.

“It’s not hard to see why the AI ​​industry is attracted to serif fonts: AI is cold and emotionless,” he writes. “(Using serif) signs ‘We’re AI! But real people use (and make) our products! We swear!'”

“Serifs came from calligraphy,” Vadgama told WIRED. “It means a humane, fluid way to create characters.” Vadgama saw Anthropic’s Claude as a betrayal of serifs. Other AI companies – Runway, Perplexity, Manus – have adopted similar models in their UX and brand.

Asked for comment, Perplexity’s director of communications Jesse Dwyer tells WIRED: “Why can’t we have human designs?

Vadgama believes that using serifs is as much about aesthetics as creating trust between users and the brand. Some font choices show, even on a more familiar emotional level, dependence. Sans serifs (Arials, Calibiris, Helviticas) are very clean, and computerized. Good old Times New Roman, and similar fonts, can feel regal. Recently, Vadgama was working on branding and introducing (initially closed) AI, which favors serif fonts. He said: “The big thing is, ‘How do we live in such a way that people don’t fear us?'”

Serifs can help reinforce that belief, or the illusion of it. Times New Roman itself was commissioned in the 1930s by the British newspaper The Times. The pen has an acceptable heft. Books and newspapers are published using this book. It was all set in the decades before reading on the screen. Perhaps most famously, the Encyclopedia Brittanica – arguably the most comprehensive guide to human knowledge, especially before the World Wide Web – was launched in The Times.

“For a lot of people, serif has an academic connotation,” says Ali S. Qadeer, chair of graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. “Claude is fascinating. He’s using a little brown background to highlight a book page. It’s like what you’re reading and writing. And print is very much about trust.”

As he said The New York Timeseven the US State Department has reverted to Times New Roman after Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized Calibri as “accidental,” considering that the department adopted the sans serif font for many other, Biden-era DEI systems.

Both Qadeer and Vadgama see the development of serifs as a return to AI’s perceived (and, indeed,) lifelessness, and a profound skepticism of technology. They are not the only ones. Along with the “tasteslop” issue, people on the Internet criticized the validity of AI aesthetics as “generic” and “very ugly.”