I removed a glow but kept the purple
A federal judge had to rule that em dashes weren't enough to prove a student used AI. The same flattening is hitting design now. Why I cut a glow on Beacon and kept the purple, and how I tell which design choices to defend.
In February, a federal judge had to rule that em dashes weren't enough to prove a college student used AI.
The student was at Adelphi University. Turnitin's AI detector had marked his essay as fully AI-written. Two other detectors said it was human. The university accused him of plagiarism. The court ruled the finding was without merit and ordered the charge removed from his record.
The em-dash discourse, by 2026, has hit mainstream literary publications. McSweeney's ran a piece called The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations. The Walrus published I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too. The Globe and Mail called it AI's theft of the em-dash. The novelist Chuck Wendig made the point that should have ended the discourse before it started: AI didn't invent the em dash. It inherited it from us.
That observation is doing the work of two arguments. The first is the obvious one — em dashes existed before language models existed; you can't lose ownership of punctuation to the thing that learned it from you. The second is harder to land. The techniques that read as "AI-generated" are techniques humans used on purpose, often, for years. The convergence is upstream of the model. Models flattened it because models flatten everything they touch.
This is happening to design too. The pattern is the same; the discourse is younger.
In design, the equivalent term is the AI Purple Problem. The piece by that name lists the tells: the purple-to-blue gradient, glassmorphism on every surface, soft drop shadows on flat elements, gradient buttons that go from a brand color to a 20%-lighter version of the same brand color. Hover-lifts on cards that are supposed to feel grounded. Gradient mesh in every hero section. Loading skeletons that pulse at the same cadence as every other AI-generated loading skeleton. None of these are bad in isolation. They show up everywhere in concert and now they read as default-AI.
Beacon's brand color is purple.
The product page is shades of dark purple with a magenta sunset gradient. I picked that for a literal reason: a lighthouse's beam turns on at dusk. Sunset is the moment the metaphor activates. Sunset isn't green. Dusk isn't yellow. The product is named Beacon and the visual story has to match.
If I redesigned the page tomorrow to dodge the AI Purple Problem, I'd be picking a color that doesn't mean what the brand means, in order to avoid being mistaken for the people who picked purple because their model suggested it. That's a worse outcome than the occasional misread. The brand is the brand because of what it means; the meaning came first.
Which is not what I did with the glow.
The Beacon builder used to put a soft glow around the active style preset card. I designed it; I liked it for two days; one morning I looked at the row and thought: this is the visual equivalent of "let's delve into a rich tapestry." It wasn't load-bearing. It wasn't named for anything. I couldn't tell you why it was there beyond "that's what selection states look like in modern UI right now." Replaced with a one-pixel border in the brand color and the row got quieter immediately.
I removed the glow because I couldn't defend it. I kept the purple because I could.
The work is to know which design choices you can defend. Restraint is one honest answer to the burned-techniques moment. Conviction is another. The discipline is in the asking.
What I wanted to write a year ago was an essay about how AI is taking my tools. What I'm writing now is closer to: AI inherited my tools from me, and the inheritance is forcing me to know which tools I actually use on purpose. That's not a worse outcome for craft. It's just an unfamiliar one.
If you have a glow on a button somewhere and you don't remember why, it's probably a glow you can lose. If you have a brand color you can defend in one sentence — "sunset, because that's when the beam turns on" — keep it. Even if a model would have suggested the same color. Especially then.
This post brought to you by emdashes. On purpose.