Designing Content

Let’s take Dall-E for a spin.

“a watercolor painting of a monk walking to a shrine in the woods in the snow”

“an impressionist painting of the sun setting on a small temple near the himalayas”

“a watercolor painting of a woman walking to the woods at night”

“a watercolor painting of a red fox in an opening of sunlight inside of the woods surrounded by trees”

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What is so amazing about Dall-E? It’s captured people, but why?

Dall-E is so beautiful because it is the internet as art. Here is a trained artificial intelligence whose soul purpose is not to mindlessly perform a task, but to create imaginative, strange, perplexing, and stunning pieces of art.

It does what you tell it to do, but it also doesn’t do what you tell it to do at all. It does what it will do. And that result is mesmerizing, not necessarily for the images it produces, but for the fact that it can produce images like that at all.

I think we’ve so closely associated the internet with utilitarianism that when something comes along that ostensibly should fall into that realm and doesn’t, we are shocked out of our slumber by it. It is like waking up to the full milky way in the middle of the night. It’s incredible and doesn’t seem possible. But it’s everything we wanted and didn’t know we needed.

Dall-E, like good writing, transcends the personal. It is an artificial intelligence performing what we’ve known to be an inherently human act. In its own strange and elegant way, Dall-E is communicating something to us. It is pulling back the curtain on not only what is possible, but the placement of beauty in this vast and untamed realm of the internet.

As content designers, our job is to write simple, sometimes thoughtful, user experiences that help people do a job easily. But, as writers, we write to communicate with each other, often across boundaries like culture, laws, and time. We write to create an experience similar to what Dall-E creates.

We are in a similar predicament as other artificial intelligence not named Dall-E then. We have our work and, done well, our work does what it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s the gig. But, wouldn’t it be way more amazing if we didn’t stop at just getting the job done? Wouldn’t the internet be better if we did in our work whatever it is Dall-E is doing in it’s?

But how do you actually reconcile this philosophy of writing and working with a practice in the field?

The answer feels pretty simple to me. You either do it, or you don’t. It’s your choice. As a writer, you can write plain copy that gets the job done. Fine. It’s probably pretty usable, and won’t create too many headaches in your strings. Or, you can dive a bit deeper with your work. You can make the experience special and beautiful, you can push your peers and leads to take more risks.

Hemingway has this mantra, “Write the truest sentence you know.” One of the hallmarks of his style is that through simplicity, a beautiful tapestry of a story unfolds. Singularly, each sentence is simple and straightforward (as, often, the most beautiful truths are). But it’s the experience of the novel that we long for. Every sentence strung together that leads you to the last sentences in A Farewell to Arms.

Sure, we may have a quick hit list of amazing quotes from books we love. But it’s the experience of the whole book that compels us. It’s the culmination of all these sentences, put in such a particular way, that has now created a world that we step into for a limited period of time. The whole thing passes a space to us that we only experience through that particular book or medium.

It’s exactly like Dall-E. You can only experience it when you’re using it. It’s not going to be the same experience somewhere else. Try as the imitators might, Dall-E is Dall-E.

Why can’t our user experiences be like that? What would it be like if Hemingway was a UX writer? Or Haruki Murakami? Or Emily Dickinson? Would we look at the internet as something more than a tool to blandly use as we zone out from our lives and ourselves?

Think about it like this: Clarice Lispector has a pretty niche readership. Sure, she could go write an everyman’s novel, but it wouldn’t be the same. Dickinson could try to write a T.S. Eliot poem, but it just wouldn’t be the same (let alone the question of if it would be possible). The reality is, we don’t want our favorite writers to imitate others. So why are we so quick to imitate others? And that’s exactly what we’re doing when we prioritize utility in our work.

I know it’s probably not a popular opinion in this field, but I’m tired of the cookie cutter approach to our work. We are writers, but somehow most of us have forgotten what that means. Or, we’d just like to go with the flow of a booming industry that prioritizes utility over beauty. Or any number of justifiable reasons to strip an aspiration for art and uniqueness away from our work.

Utility is simply the group assumption that this one specific way of doing something is the best way to do it. And in that assumption, you give up your intuition, you give up your creativity, and you give up your agency to create incredible things. You become Dall-E trying to imitate the Mona Lisa: it can probably be done, but it’s going to be weird. And maybe not in a good way.

In my opinion, your work as a UX writer can be Hemingway’s writing, complete with its aim towards Art and Truth. Or, it can just be plain words on a page with its aim towards industry standards, utility, and parroting of what everyone already knows.

But wouldn’t the internet be a better place if artists were behind all of it?