Alien Designers - Asking Large Language Models to Design CSS
I prompt Claude, a Large Language Model, to write CSS templates, and try them out in a single HTML layout, giving my opinions. I find that it is great for first-iteration prototyping.
People keep debating whether Large Language Models have an internal model of the world (encoded somewhere in their weights or their correlations) or not. Some go as far as to entertain the idea that a model may be sentient though, in my opinion, we’re still far from that.
I work as a full-stack web developer, among other things, but I am no designer. This made me wonder: can a Language Model write CSS for a design at least close to as good as what I could come up with? Definitely far from the level of a professional designer, but still good enough for a fast MVP?
To answer this question, I decided to ask Claude Sonnet -as Claude is considered by many the best model for aesthetic or artistic purposes, over GPT- for designs with several style cues (thinking back to my experiences with text-to-image models). I then tried each CSS file, with no modifications, in the same HTML template so the competition is fair. This idea was also partially motivated by CSS Zen Garden, a website where people submit their own spin on the design for a fixed HTML.
