As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—telltale signs of its use continues. One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” 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 “not X, but Y” variety. Now certain fonts and typefaces—specifically serifs—seem to be defining (and giving away) AI, both in actual software, and in vibe-coded design boilerplates. Some are calling it “tasteslop,” 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 “the serif renaissance.” In a recent newsletter, published on her Substack, Vadgama suggests the move is a bid for companies to project more “personality and …