July 15, 2026
Serif Wars: Humans vs Hype
We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes
Type designer rejects AI, and the comments instantly turned into a site-roast showdown
TLDR: The article argues that fonts and design should stay human-made because writing carries history, culture, and craft that machines can’t truly understand. Commenters split between cheering that message and roasting the site for breaking, with some joking that maybe AI should fix the homepage first.
A type designer published a passionate anti-AI manifesto arguing that letters are living history, not empty shapes to be remixed by machines. The piece traces the letter A from an ancient ox-head carving to modern fonts, making the emotional case that writing carries generations of human craft, awkward hand movements, cultural memory, and trial-and-error. The big message: if design is handed to image and text generators, we risk freezing culture into bland copy-paste patterns and leaving smaller languages and underrepresented traditions behind.
But in classic internet fashion, the comments quickly became their own chaotic side show. Instead of only debating the big idea, people also started dragging the website itself. One camp joked the page had been "hugged to death" after a burst of traffic, while another snapped back that it loaded fine and maybe the problem was, quote, "something sucks ass on your end." That instantly turned a thoughtful essay about human creativity into a mini battle over whose internet connection was guilty. One commenter even snarked, "Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site," which is exactly the kind of irony the internet lives for.
Still, support for the author was real. Some readers strongly agreed that the human touch has value in itself, even if the market doesn’t reward slow, careful craft. Others got distracted by a tiny bit of website code they found "clever," proving once again that online communities can turn philosophy, outages, and nerdy nitpicks into one deliciously messy comment thread.
Key Points
- •The article presents letterforms as the result of a long historical evolution, using the transformation of the ox-head symbol *aleph* into the letter A as a core example.
- •It explains that serifs and stroke contrast in Latin type are connected to practical brush-writing methods used in ancient Rome.
- •The article references Edward Catich’s work as an example of scholarship linking typography to calligraphic practice.
- •It states that the author does not use generative AI in design or production and argues such tools remove human agency and embodied experience from the process.
- •The article argues that AI systems are constrained by training data and therefore cannot adequately address underrepresented languages, cultures, and the need for new typefaces.