Do LLMs have style?

As a primarily backend software developer, the intricacies and great depth of frontend software development are uncharted territory. I can cobble together something basic (like this site) and adhere to its style of "mainly white with some gray and black text" and things don't look too terrible.

I recently made a website to send out marriage invitations, and suddenly my stock standard card didn't cut it any more:

I gave an LLM my <Card> component and said something like: "Make it fit for a wedding invitation!", and it created a nice friendlier, lighter card, which when paired with pink accents, looked quite nice:

And this got me thinking: "What other tailwind themes can LLMs generate?" I'm sure they can spew out some more generic cards, but can I prompt them to give me anything freaky? Let's test this idea.

All the cards below were generated with ChatGPT with the following prompt:

Please generate me a 'card' component for my next.js website. Please make the card look good on mobile and desktop. The card is designed to hold only a single sentence inside it. The card should wholly embrace the following theme in every way, with no limits as to what can be customised and how. The only limitation is that all modifications must be made in a single tsx file.

Any further text I added after this prompt has been inserted into the tastefully created cards below. Never fear, all other text on this page was artfully regurgitated by a human.

🤔 - Not half bad! The brutalist card appears to be a watered down version of this brutalist card which was lovingly created by a human. So while it's 'neat' that this can be done, I'm not hugely surprised.

Ok, so we can recreate themes that have been flogged half to death. LLMs are professionals at regurgitating tailwind, so when combined with the creativity of an actual human, maybe we can cook up some new never-before-seen themes.

I enjoyed this one a lot, so I got Gemini to take a hack at it too:

The rest were created by ChatGPT. Gemini has a penchant for external libraries, custom global styles, and generally disobeying the prompt in order to create gratuitously complex components.

Takeaways

• LLMs seem to overuse large rounded components. These cards were made with tailwind, and ChatGPT loves to slap on rounded-3xl by default. rounded-3xl is to frontend style as the hand-with-too-many-fingers is to image generation.
• The vibe was captured surprisingly well.
• I don't think these cards look very good, and I probably wouldn't use them. I do think that they're a fairly good jumping off point though for further refinement.