{"id":5081,"date":"2026-06-06T13:34:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/?p=5081"},"modified":"2026-06-06T13:34:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:34:44","slug":"ai-has-come-for-serif-fonts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/?p=5081","title":{"rendered":"AI Has Come for Serif Fonts"},"content":{"rendered":"


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As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out\u2014and reject\u2014telltale signs of its use continues.One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes\u2014which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the \u201crule of threes,\u201d which is meant to scan as rhythmic, but often comes across predictable, hackish, and stale. And, of course, there are the clunky grammatical constructions of the \u201cnot X, but Y\u201d variety.Now certain fonts and typefaces\u2014specifically serifs\u2014seem to be defining (and giving away) AI, both in actual software, and in vibe-coded design boilerplates. Some are calling it \u201ctasteslop,\u201d the results of the effort to make generative AI designs seem superficially sophisticated or distinguished.The shift away from slicker, more conspicuously computerized typefaces is something the San Francisco Bay Area writer, designer, and type practitioner Keya Vadgama has termed \u201cthe serif renaissance.\u201d In a recent newsletter, published on her Substack, Vadgama suggests the move is a bid for companies to project more \u201cpersonality and warmth.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not that difficult to discern why AI-native companies in particular are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently cold and without opinion,\u201d she writes. \u201c(Using serifs) signals \u2018We\u2019re AI! But real humans use (and made) our product! We swear!\u2019\u201d\u201cSerifs have an origin in calligraphy,\u201d Vadgama tells WIRED. \u201cIt connotes a very human, fluid way of making letterforms.\u201d Vadgama has noticed that Anthropic\u2019s Claude was defaulting to serifs. Other AI companies\u2014Runway, Perplexity, Manus\u2014had also adopted similar typefaces in their UX and branding.Reached for comment, Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer tells WIRED: \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t we have human design? Perplexity is for people.\u201dVadgama believes the use of serifs is as much about aesthetics as building confidence between users and brands. Certain font choices signal, even at some preconscious psychological level, trust. Sans serifs (your Arials, Calibiris, Helviticas) are too clean, too computer-y. Good old Times New Roman, and similar typographic designs, can feel a bit more dignified. Recently, Vadgama was doing some branding work with a (since-shuttered) AI startup, which favored the serif text. \u201cA big part of it,\u201d she says, \u201cis, \u2018How do we position ourselves in a way that people are not afraid of us?\u2019\u201dSerifs can help build that conviction, or at least the illusion of it. Times New Roman itself was commissioned in the 1930s by Britain\u2019s Times newspaper. The typeface carries a certain authoritative heft. Books and newspapers are printed using it. It was all but standardized in the decades before screen reading. Perhaps most famously, the Encyclopedia Brittanica\u2014arguably the authoritative compendium of human knowledge, at least pre-World Wide Web\u2014was set in Times.\u201cIn the broad public, a serif carries connotations of scholarship,\u201d says Ali S. Qadeer, chair of graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. \u201cClaude is interesting. It\u2019s using this slightly brown background to mirror a book page. It\u2019s sort of emulating the feeling of reading print. And print has deeper associations with trust.\u201dAs reported by The New York Times, even the US State Department has returned to using Times New Roman after Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried Calibri as \u201cinformal,\u201d pegging the department\u2019s adoption of the sans serif typeface on some wider, Biden-era DEI initiative.Both Qadeer and Vadgama see the trend toward serifs as a rejoinder to AI\u2019s perceived (and, indeed, literal) lack of soul, and the wider public suspicion of the technology. They\u2019re not the only ones. Alongside the \u201ctasteslop\u201d discourse, people online have criticized the serification of AI aesthetics as \u201cgeneric\u201d and \u201cvery ugly.\u201d
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As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out\u2014and reject\u2014telltale signs of its use continues.One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes\u2014which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the \u201crule of threes,\u201d which is meant to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[676],"tags":[1811,751,1814,985,1249,1809,1813,1812,1810],"class_list":["post-5081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-ai","tag-art","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chatbots","tag-chatgpt","tag-claude","tag-design","tag-fonts","tag-typography","tag-ux-ui"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}