A bunch of these patterns are things that real human designers have been using for a while (with the exception of emojis everywhere). This is like how some people assume an em dash automatically means AI generated text.
Can we get some examples of what a good UI looks like then? I would like to see a UI design expert take a couple of these slop designs and show what each should look like according to their taste.
Even better would be some UI expert come up with an application interface for 10 common use cases. Then, give that to a group of designers, say it’s AI generated, and ask them to point out AI tells.
I’ve seen several of these “slop design” critiques lately. They don’t seem to be coming from people with strong design skills. (Presumably qualified designers have better things to do than critique AI designs. Also they probably know how to get what they want out of the AI instead of accepting what it creates.)
And that’s ok, I am at the point where I would rather to see typos or grammar errors too than a very well written text, as I know a human put the efforts to write it
That is not how the real world works outside of anti-AI communities. Typos/grammar are seen as unprofessional and are more likely to cause negative sentiment/backlash than overused design.
Ironically, your portfolio website gave me some 'slop vibes'. Not saying in any way that it was made with AI, maybe seeing monospace fonts where none are necessary triggers me now.
Author unapologetically uses AI. They just want people to put effort into it beyond posting the first result of a generic prompt.
After all the post ends with "This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good"
But this looks really good. Great contrast, simple and quiet, background image does not take up the whole page, the only thing really wrong is the animations. It's proof that slop can be turned into gems by someone with an eye for it.
Love this blog mentioning the issue of implementation detail in prose. Likely my biggest irk of vibe coded apps.
Much of this is it's a simple problem to solve - just prompt agent of choice "Put all user visible text into a translation file for i10n" and then go through and edit said prose as a human.
It’s not even that it’s bad; it’s just so overused by literally every LLM in every single place that it just looks bad now.
It looks kinda cool till it gets overused and then you start hating it.
This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho.
This sounds like more of a no true scotsman/elitist argument rather than an indictment of AI use in UI. The author doesn't seem to have a problem with AI UI, other than whatever they decided doesn't vibe with their somewhat contrarian taste.
There are styles which are timelessly bad and then there are styles which are only "bad" because they are overused. That's not the fault of the style, it was good style, that's why it became overused. The problem is us. We have a natural aversion to repetitive things, and I wouldn't call that contrarianism.
Can we please stop with the "AI = Slop" rhetoric? I'm fairly bearish about AI, and even I'm getting annoyed by it.
"Slop" just means something is low-quality and of poor craftsmanship, irrespective of who or what made it. If it's slop, you don't need to look for tells, you can just tell it's slop. Sure, AI is prone to specific types of mistakes, and humans are prone to other types of mistakes, and you can often tell whether a specific poorly-crafted UI is man-made or machine-made, but bad is bad is bad.
Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.
This is seen in vibe-coded UI without a vision. Vibe-coded UI can look great when done right, but most don’t. And it makes the apps look cheap and unappealing to use.
This blog post uses Slop correctly. In this case the specific slop type that results when you give AI a very generic prompt with no direction and then don't iterate over the result
The closing words of the post are "And it’s not even that I am against vibecoding. This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good."
A lot of these are examples of bad prompting (i.e. "build me a website for x y z"). Gradients can be prompted out, same as emoji slop. One line in the prompt / agents.md and you never see those. Color "rainbow" should be avoided by specifying a color palette. In case you don't have one, ask it for one "from literature / best practices" first. LLMs know the theory, but you have to have it in the context for it to be applied.
Misaligned stuff is the prompter's fault. Those should be caught by the human. they're the types of tasks that are fast/cheap to verify.
It’s the next evolution of applications where nobody actually cares about the users, as long as some checkbox can be ticked to mark it done and get paid.
The implementer is not paid by the end-user and they have no reason to care about the user’s opinion - the only thing that matters is to minimise cost and maximise profit.
The client doesn’t care as long as it’s cheap and technically works. The career prospects of the “project lead” on the client side are likely not affected in any way if the result is poor, so they won’t care much either.
There need to be consequences for negative feedback, which would make people strive for a better result. Otherwise people just don’t care.
Every time someone puts precise language to what makes ai slop sloppy it feels like frontier labs get an ever clearer RL target. Not to say people shouldn’t publish these types of posts. I enjoy reading them and I hope they continue to be published.
lol, the vast majority of the public does not care that it is "slop ai" or your carefully crafted UI is "hand-crafted". those days are long gone and were already dying when bootstrap was a thing (curious to know if people even remember it now). people who are quick to demonize slop ai ui are missing the point. do u think shadcn is any better? for 99% of us it's long as people can navigate your UI and your copy isn't a big ball of shit.
the vast majority of the public does not care that it is "slop ai
The people (that count, i.e. that has disposable income) has started to notice when it comes to AI images, I'm pretty sure the same will start happening when it comes to web design. It just reeks of cheapness, of not caring, i.e. of slop.
I agree. I know these things makes designers anyone who values UX, aesthetic, craftsmanship eyes bleed. But for a lot of websites that are utilitarian in nature much of the AI generated design is simply good enough. We’ve had plenty of human web design fouls since the beginning. For pages that are a means to an end I think it’s a great because energy can be directed towards the product itself. In a word where agents summarize sites and return the content design matters even less outside the actual product experience. Much of that will become per experience UI which will relinquish designer control further. One thing that’s helped me is telling an LLM to focus on information architecture then it stops overloading the view with page chrome and noise presenting instead the information for the use case at hand.
I find some models don't use icons enough. They will have links and buttons with text only labels when an icon and tooltip will do. I'm talking for links like "Files" with already well known associations with icons.
All modern multimodal models can do vision sufficiently well for web design, with the exception of respecting negative space and seeing poor padding/margins on text. The issue is that prompts are often egregiously underspecified so the design -> vision loop doesn't know how to refine.
They can be solved now with a follow-up prompt to remove the bad things, or preemptive rules to not do the bad things in the first place. That's different from "AI can't do hands" which was an intrinsic issue with the model and its robustness (there were tricks to mitigate it such as negative prompting, but far less comparatively successful than the web design analogy).
LLMs will always have a bias towards a specific style unless the model provider is injecting the entropy themselves and due to how human taste works that style will quickly become out of favor because it will be associated with lazy work.
Part of it is also lack of care, taste or vision from the slop-pilot. Sure the clanker designed and built the UI, but someone looked at it and went "Hell yeah! Ship it!".
Developing good UI/UX is hard, like really hard. Very few people are good at it and if you're not good at it, what makes you think you're able to recognize a good UI when you see it? So much thought and and foresight goes into a good UI that it requires a serious amount of prompting. When I've worked with actual UX/UI designers, my job has been that of the LLM. The designer spends ages on planning and understanding, then prompts the developer to create the actual UI and iterated endlessly.
Industry most hasn't cared about UI/UX since the 1990s and even if it started to cared now, employment is fairly safe, because it was always mostly research, labs and prompting. It's just that now we can iterate faster because prompting the LLM is faster than prompting your five .Net developers hidden away on the second floor, in the office behind customer service.
This is a separate thing. It's not about imperfections: most of these websites work just fine. It's that everyone gets the same LLM, and if you just ask "hey LLM, make me a website", you get a very similar product. Eventually, people learn to recognize and hate that aesthetic because it's overused.
The exact same thing happens with LLM writing. There's nothing wrong with "it's not X, it's Y", but I not do my best to avoid that phrasing because it's tainted by AI slop. I did use it in this reply and part of me is bracing for the accusation...
You can overcome that by exercising more control, but most people don't know they can, and if you start micromanaging an agent, it slows you down and negates much of the speed advantage.
The alignment thing is just plain bad but a lot of these are like the em dash issue. It's simply overused.
It's super easy to generate content with AI and everybody's doing it but most content frankly doesn't really deserve to be generated or at the very least shown to the masses. There's nothing wrong with em-dashes but when people associate it with spam it directly devalues them.
Same thing with the badges, emojis, gradients etc. Your brain will simply start associating these tells as an indicator of cheapness just because the large majority of websites using it are just someone's side project that you probably shouldn't waste too much time engaging with.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that is happening when the robot writes stuff like “3 campuses, one app” example, I’m glad the author was able to identify it as chat context leaking through.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.
I think lots of AI tells these days are leaks from the ai/writer connection into text for the reader. It partly feels like the inevitable result of RLHF with the wrong human's feedback ("I did it! Pick me!") and partly feels like thinking tokens leaking into the main text.
"Here's the argument, in plain terms", "It's not just X, it's Y", "It's worth stating precisely", "The sharper distinction here"... They're things that gesture toward the relationship between the text and the prompt, making it clear where it matched the author's expectations and where it deviated.
Not that humans are immune from coding/writing for their boss instead of their user/reader!
The thing is, that kind of screen has existed long before vibe coding was a thing. Discord, for example, has had it for years. And the purpose is to reassure the use that the app is still doing something (since users have cottoned on that spinners are meaningless).
Some of the other examples there are equally error prone. The glass example, is something pioneered by Apple too. And was added to CSS before vibe coding. It’s also an effect I mirrored years ago in a UI I built in SDL.
The coloured box example struck me as good UX too. The stuff that needed more urgent attention had a more reddish tone. That makes complete sense. And having those fields a different colour makes it easier for users to pick out specific elements quickly (like how icons are used too).
The problem with AI slop is that it’s trained on good code as well as bad. This is like the arguments against the Oxford comma and em dash all over again.
I'm not particularly keen on the font selection observation. Boring is ideal for the vast majority of interfaces. Far worse is the vulgar font selections guided by design skill documents which disallow common font selections.
Something missing from the list of tells is overuse (or even any use at all) of the middle dot (·).
AI is just another tool and I have actually found it really fun to dive into design as a non-designer. It still takes a lot of time and effort but I can now create designs that I'm quite happy with that I'd have never been able to do before.
Wrote a bit about my process in a blog post [1]. Obviously my designs are far from perfect but I'm really happy with my company's website.
The rollercoaster on your landing page could use some better logic for when to restart. Or not do it at all. I kept restarting it automatically by moving a little bit.
I just can't fathom how a multi-billion dollar company like Cloudflare could forego their design standards. They seem to have updated their landing page [0], but it's still very sloppy.
They can probably get away with it at this point. Cloudflare already has the name and reputation, so I doubt a sloppy landing page costs them much business.
tbh, they don't really need the website, it could just be a simple pure text website with a simple tagline explaining what they do, a sign in and sign up button, that's it.
The site is utter shit. Total amateur hour. Terrible contrast, barely anything guiding the eyes, the padding to the sides is inconsistent. So is the entire design language from leading with some numbering that never goes beyond 01, round buttons, round input elements, interrupted by somewhat decorated layered elements which then leads to some kind of terminal window that doesn't resemble any terminal UI I've ever seen or used. It's all filled by various sloppy mentions of keywords that barely form some coherent narrative.
This page looks like some junior cobbled it together based on a hastily written ticket by some overworked product guy.
Cloudflare is a complete disaster these days, its quite an embarrassing fall from grace. I feel for the few engineers that still remotely care about their craft that work there.
Really? I'm more surprised when I see a large company still have design standards. It seems it's all the rage to fire all your UX people and have your devs wipe up a UI because "UI is so easy."
Follow design standards? Fuck no, we need to STAND OUT instead. If you find the design hard to use as a result of not following standards your just an old curmuddgen.
More guidance is needed on how to efficiently prompt an LLM to generate a correct UI. Describing the appearance, placement and behavior of UI elements for this is quite time-consuming. The contrast with server-side code generation is stark.
This started as soon as they devised the MCP. “we have this new thing called ai you can talk to it naturally. Here’s a protocol to make it work better”
Some of these are a bit outdated for newer models.
I find the most consistent tells are often just excessive descriptive text and a lack of visual hierarchy. It makes sense given these are language models.
Also, I find models are really quite good once given some design context to work from. Slop UI is lazy at this point, not a reflection of model quality.
Added “bonus” points if it’s overused small caps. Related (not all need be in caps): header, “eyebrow”, h1, description, footer all saying the same thing.
We are entering a phase where ai creates clean, informative interfaces, so humans trying to differentiate make theirs “interesting” (unreadable), as in this case: “Mhat Js Glop”
People don't realize that you're allowed to tell LLMs/agents "no." In the real world, it's a professional faux pas to question the design of a creative coworker when you may not know design better, but LLMs/agents are not your coworkers.
Don't like abuse of serif fonts? "NEVER use serif fonts."
Don't like the gaudy color palettes? "Use this color palette with a white-dominant background"
Don't like the marketing fluff? "Remove all non-salient text from this app."
And there are a lot of designers who are good, but only in a different medium. Being able to make a good flyer, a good trade fair booth and a good website are completely different skills, but all too often the same designer is expected to do all of those, and more
I admit that those type of politics depend on workplace culture and I worked at two highly creative-oriented companies previously, and in both companies any attempt to point out issues in the design resulted in a "this is according to design spec; not fixing."
On the copywriting side, I added an instruction to always write the copy in a Markdown file and let me edit it before actually coding the UI. Miles better to edit 2-3 sentences at a time than look at an UI full of slop, dumbfounded on how to proceed.
But on the styling, there's just no good solution. I use things like https://katagami.ai to find inspiration and nudge it into a style direction but I still have to hand edit paddings and buttons and visual separation.
For example copying the Sumi prompt [0] and applying it onto my keyboard app landing page [1] ended up with something visually pleasant and informative. I would have spent way too many days doing animations and deciding on the theme.
But I still wish I could take an LLM and train it on my already human made websites and copy and get something that can follow a design language and writing style.
At least some of these are just for lack of caring. I vibe coded this landing page recently https://tui2web.com/ and fought off a lot of the defaults the LLM came up with after a few hours of iteration. Feel free to roast it, I'm not really attached, but I thought it did a reasonably good job.
Not bad but the section numbering gives it away now. Also something cloudflare has. I don’t know if I’d call that slop though. It’s really just the stuff people don’t care about and let whatever the llm comes up with ship.
I find this style of "heavy dark borders/shadows" one of the ugliest recent trends on the web. It's rarely done well.
But otherwise the website looks pretty great. Vibe coded websites usually transmit the feeling of: "nobody even bothered to look at this", and that's not the case with yours at all.
In your lists where elements are separated by horizontal lines, I would remove the horizontal line after the last element. That's quite easy in CSS.
This appears to be pretty close to the "brutalist" aesthetic mentioned in the article. Things like drop shadows on boxes are the opposite of the "fingernail" boxes and you very rarely saw them pre-AI. However I think your site looks fine and well crafted, nice work. (the article also said that this kind of design language is less grating)
It looks nice. I wouldn’t roast it as much as admit that I can tell from some of the content phrasing that an LLM was used. The h1 feels cliche, for example. That comma doesn’t really need to be there.
It doesn't mention the most annoying tell- content that fades in as you scroll down a page. I'm seeing this everywhere recently and it's so distracting
I have to disagree on the fingernail card accents (though I've just learned the name via this article). Slop or not, they're useful for subtly indicating state, type of attention required, etc. without cluttering a UI.
I have seen folks here complaining about design trends long before AI slop. Maybe those folks who work in tech long for originality but the reality is designers in all aspects of life follow trends and originality is rare.
The reality is that users enjoy familiarity and find familiar interfaces and design trends comfortable and easier to use.
IMO a single "Main Thing // Detail" is fun and fine and is where the trope came from. I see a ton of "Home // Our Work // Donate // About Us" which has beome cringy.
They do have answers in Firefox. Maybe your setup is bugging out. I clicked through them, and all of them had answers.
Is Muse free?
Muse is available for free with a usage limit. If you reach your free limit and want more, you can upgrade to a paid subscription, or wait until your free usage limit refreshes.
That might just be from developers getting a Figma of a FAQ section without final copy, then Meta not doing adequate QA and shipping empty FAQ sections.
While not playing WoW Forever myself, I like reading the news and subreddit about it. In the last days, every day a new "self-made" UI mod gets showcased transforming the UI into AI slop.
Disregarding any design standards and letting the AI role with it. People that mention it, in the comments, get blasted by accusations of gate-keeping.
I see this so often. Nobody is gate-keeping anyone, you can just learn the skill, read about UI design and art.
Why is it so hard for people to just put in the time?
Why is it so hard for people to just put in the time?
All my life the older generations has been accusing my cohort of being the "instant gratification generation" and I hate how right they have turned out to be.
I'm really pissed off that my favorite web design style Brutalism is now an AI slop smell. They already took my em-dash! *shakes fist*.
Now that I think about it, Brutalist web design always reminds me of 80s and 90s video games. I wonder if the increased adoption of Brutalist webdesign has something to do with "nostalgia porn" instead of LLMs.
Stuff I'm missing in the list: "Claude beige" and "Claude anthracite grey".
I have an inkling that this will become cyclical, like fashion.
Just wait a couple of years and any currently overused LLM style might become more unique again.
I think soon, we will be adding “Skip Claude” in the same vein as “Skip Intro” to this list.
However, this is personal, but I stopped caring as long as the content is good, the animations can do justice in explanation and I get to learn or get what I want from them.
this slop UI thing is just peak LLMs learned it by watching us, but surely the solution to slop UI cannot be this site. The adventurous unifrakturCook cursive font they chose for headings is making me throw up a bit in my mouth. It's like getting sex tips from someone who is both a virgin and suffering from Tertiary Stage syphilis at the same time!
And despite it putting me in the slop side of things I have to say that Inter is, for me at any rate, a reasonable font, especially for online usage. Maybe that's why the slop uses it.
The most important thing I learned when graduating from "bad musician" to "passable musician" (passable enough to have listeners and fans, at least) was that there's no one single big trick that turns a song from bad to good: there's 100 tiny small tricks that add up. And you need to have experience to know what they are. A trained listener might be able to say "the midrange is too compressed", "there's too much high end", "the drum transients are't punching through", but a normal, casual listener is just going to say, "I dunno, it just doesn't sound right."
This UI slop is the same deal. A slightly misaligned dot off the timeline, color choices which don't really make sense given the website as a whole, using LLMism text. Nothing in here is an obviously major problem on its own. But when you add up 50 of these on a website, users get hit with that "this is slop" feeling.
The details matter. In isolation they seem irrelevant, but as a whole it's what elevates something from the AI slop garbage pile to something actually good.
I added a rule on my agents.md for the design part, I never like any UI element that styling have a bg and slightly dark version of same color used by the bg because it's really made me mad and seems get being used by Agent
This coincidently the first picture in this article by cloudflare
An "inactive" student is one who is enrolled but is not currently attending classes.
This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
This is similar to the rapid early adoption of the Bootstrap CSS framework. A lot of people were annoyed by the sudden spike of websites that looked and felt the same, but I think this was a tremendous step forward in usability and accessibility, and well worth the initial wave of cookie cutter websites.
A bunch of these patterns are things that real human designers have been using for a while (with the exception of emojis everywhere). This is like how some people assume an em dash automatically means AI generated text.
slop ui - jumps to site with unreadable font. ho hum
Wow. That is rough. Way too much of that font, especially the initial rendering above the fold.
Can we get some examples of what a good UI looks like then? I would like to see a UI design expert take a couple of these slop designs and show what each should look like according to their taste.
A half-joke answer is "not like this UI", which is surprisingly easy to prompt if you're already using agents for design.
Even better would be some UI expert come up with an application interface for 10 common use cases. Then, give that to a group of designers, say it’s AI generated, and ask them to point out AI tells.
this dudes blog: https://sha256.net/
Read Refactoring UI, originally written by the Tailwind devs. They also used to have a blog with some good articles: https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheat...
I’ve seen several of these “slop design” critiques lately. They don’t seem to be coming from people with strong design skills. (Presumably qualified designers have better things to do than critique AI designs. Also they probably know how to get what they want out of the AI instead of accepting what it creates.)
An authentic one, a one you create yourself regardless if it’s not perfect.
“Authentic” does not imply good. There were millions of poor interfaces coded up before AI.
And that’s ok, I am at the point where I would rather to see typos or grammar errors too than a very well written text, as I know a human put the efforts to write it
That is not how the real world works outside of anti-AI communities. Typos/grammar are seen as unprofessional and are more likely to cause negative sentiment/backlash than overused design.
Ironically, your portfolio website gave me some 'slop vibes'. Not saying in any way that it was made with AI, maybe seeing monospace fonts where none are necessary triggers me now.
https://pranavdesai.vercel.app/
It takes one to know one.
woof, that's pretty bad. Even looking at the repos I get the LLM README.md stank.
Monospace fonts are dead to me. If this trend continues, there's a 50/50 chance I'll be coding in Times New Roman this time next year.
Author unapologetically uses AI. They just want people to put effort into it beyond posting the first result of a generic prompt.
After all the post ends with "This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good"
But this looks really good. Great contrast, simple and quiet, background image does not take up the whole page, the only thing really wrong is the animations. It's proof that slop can be turned into gems by someone with an eye for it.
Love this blog mentioning the issue of implementation detail in prose. Likely my biggest irk of vibe coded apps.
Much of this is it's a simple problem to solve - just prompt agent of choice "Put all user visible text into a translation file for i10n" and then go through and edit said prose as a human.
OAI's models are notorious for it and always have been.
This sounds like more of a no true scotsman/elitist argument rather than an indictment of AI use in UI. The author doesn't seem to have a problem with AI UI, other than whatever they decided doesn't vibe with their somewhat contrarian taste.
There are styles which are timelessly bad and then there are styles which are only "bad" because they are overused. That's not the fault of the style, it was good style, that's why it became overused. The problem is us. We have a natural aversion to repetitive things, and I wouldn't call that contrarianism.
Can we please stop with the "AI = Slop" rhetoric? I'm fairly bearish about AI, and even I'm getting annoyed by it.
"Slop" just means something is low-quality and of poor craftsmanship, irrespective of who or what made it. If it's slop, you don't need to look for tells, you can just tell it's slop. Sure, AI is prone to specific types of mistakes, and humans are prone to other types of mistakes, and you can often tell whether a specific poorly-crafted UI is man-made or machine-made, but bad is bad is bad.
Did you even open TFA?
Those are paragraphs 3 and 4.
This blog post uses Slop correctly. In this case the specific slop type that results when you give AI a very generic prompt with no direction and then don't iterate over the result
The closing words of the post are "And it’s not even that I am against vibecoding. This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good."
A lot of these are examples of bad prompting (i.e. "build me a website for x y z"). Gradients can be prompted out, same as emoji slop. One line in the prompt / agents.md and you never see those. Color "rainbow" should be avoided by specifying a color palette. In case you don't have one, ask it for one "from literature / best practices" first. LLMs know the theory, but you have to have it in the context for it to be applied.
Misaligned stuff is the prompter's fault. Those should be caught by the human. they're the types of tasks that are fast/cheap to verify.
It’s the next evolution of applications where nobody actually cares about the users, as long as some checkbox can be ticked to mark it done and get paid.
The implementer is not paid by the end-user and they have no reason to care about the user’s opinion - the only thing that matters is to minimise cost and maximise profit.
The client doesn’t care as long as it’s cheap and technically works. The career prospects of the “project lead” on the client side are likely not affected in any way if the result is poor, so they won’t care much either.
There need to be consequences for negative feedback, which would make people strive for a better result. Otherwise people just don’t care.
Isn't the popular understanding of AI slop perfectly aligned with what you're saying? I.e., AI slop is the result of lazy and/or careless prompting.
Every time someone puts precise language to what makes ai slop sloppy it feels like frontier labs get an ever clearer RL target. Not to say people shouldn’t publish these types of posts. I enjoy reading them and I hope they continue to be published.
lol, the vast majority of the public does not care that it is "slop ai" or your carefully crafted UI is "hand-crafted". those days are long gone and were already dying when bootstrap was a thing (curious to know if people even remember it now). people who are quick to demonize slop ai ui are missing the point. do u think shadcn is any better? for 99% of us it's long as people can navigate your UI and your copy isn't a big ball of shit.
The people (that count, i.e. that has disposable income) has started to notice when it comes to AI images, I'm pretty sure the same will start happening when it comes to web design. It just reeks of cheapness, of not caring, i.e. of slop.
I agree. I know these things makes designers anyone who values UX, aesthetic, craftsmanship eyes bleed. But for a lot of websites that are utilitarian in nature much of the AI generated design is simply good enough. We’ve had plenty of human web design fouls since the beginning. For pages that are a means to an end I think it’s a great because energy can be directed towards the product itself. In a word where agents summarize sites and return the content design matters even less outside the actual product experience. Much of that will become per experience UI which will relinquish designer control further. One thing that’s helped me is telling an LLM to focus on information architecture then it stops overloading the view with page chrome and noise presenting instead the information for the use case at hand.
Not just emoji, icons in general, in both website generation and image generation.
I find some models don't use icons enough. They will have links and buttons with text only labels when an icon and tooltip will do. I'm talking for links like "Files" with already well known associations with icons.
These are all accurate and bad, but I have to wonder how many of these issues are just our current “ai can’t do hands” that will eventually be solved.
I think it's from laziness and not having skill at design. Everything is fixable already,ai cant read your mind.
AI use seems to mostly show what people care about. If something matters, you'll work carefully on it. If it doesn't have chatgpt do it.
All the alignment issues seem likely to be solved as soon as LLMs can actually do vision well IMO.
All modern multimodal models can do vision sufficiently well for web design, with the exception of respecting negative space and seeing poor padding/margins on text. The issue is that prompts are often egregiously underspecified so the design -> vision loop doesn't know how to refine.
They can be solved now with a follow-up prompt to remove the bad things, or preemptive rules to not do the bad things in the first place. That's different from "AI can't do hands" which was an intrinsic issue with the model and its robustness (there were tricks to mitigate it such as negative prompting, but far less comparatively successful than the web design analogy).
LLMs will always have a bias towards a specific style unless the model provider is injecting the entropy themselves and due to how human taste works that style will quickly become out of favor because it will be associated with lazy work.
Part of it is also lack of care, taste or vision from the slop-pilot. Sure the clanker designed and built the UI, but someone looked at it and went "Hell yeah! Ship it!".
Developing good UI/UX is hard, like really hard. Very few people are good at it and if you're not good at it, what makes you think you're able to recognize a good UI when you see it? So much thought and and foresight goes into a good UI that it requires a serious amount of prompting. When I've worked with actual UX/UI designers, my job has been that of the LLM. The designer spends ages on planning and understanding, then prompts the developer to create the actual UI and iterated endlessly.
Industry most hasn't cared about UI/UX since the 1990s and even if it started to cared now, employment is fairly safe, because it was always mostly research, labs and prompting. It's just that now we can iterate faster because prompting the LLM is faster than prompting your five .Net developers hidden away on the second floor, in the office behind customer service.
This is a separate thing. It's not about imperfections: most of these websites work just fine. It's that everyone gets the same LLM, and if you just ask "hey LLM, make me a website", you get a very similar product. Eventually, people learn to recognize and hate that aesthetic because it's overused.
The exact same thing happens with LLM writing. There's nothing wrong with "it's not X, it's Y", but I not do my best to avoid that phrasing because it's tainted by AI slop. I did use it in this reply and part of me is bracing for the accusation...
You can overcome that by exercising more control, but most people don't know they can, and if you start micromanaging an agent, it slows you down and negates much of the speed advantage.
The alignment thing is just plain bad but a lot of these are like the em dash issue. It's simply overused.
It's super easy to generate content with AI and everybody's doing it but most content frankly doesn't really deserve to be generated or at the very least shown to the masses. There's nothing wrong with em-dashes but when people associate it with spam it directly devalues them.
Same thing with the badges, emojis, gradients etc. Your brain will simply start associating these tells as an indicator of cheapness just because the large majority of websites using it are just someone's side project that you probably shouldn't waste too much time engaging with.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that is happening when the robot writes stuff like “3 campuses, one app” example, I’m glad the author was able to identify it as chat context leaking through.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.
LLMs love https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpec... . You tell them not to do a thing, they make a point of saying they didn't do the thing.
I think lots of AI tells these days are leaks from the ai/writer connection into text for the reader. It partly feels like the inevitable result of RLHF with the wrong human's feedback ("I did it! Pick me!") and partly feels like thinking tokens leaking into the main text.
"Here's the argument, in plain terms", "It's not just X, it's Y", "It's worth stating precisely", "The sharper distinction here"... They're things that gesture toward the relationship between the text and the prompt, making it clear where it matched the author's expectations and where it deviated.
Not that humans are immune from coding/writing for their boss instead of their user/reader!
The thing is, that kind of screen has existed long before vibe coding was a thing. Discord, for example, has had it for years. And the purpose is to reassure the use that the app is still doing something (since users have cottoned on that spinners are meaningless).
Some of the other examples there are equally error prone. The glass example, is something pioneered by Apple too. And was added to CSS before vibe coding. It’s also an effect I mirrored years ago in a UI I built in SDL.
The coloured box example struck me as good UX too. The stuff that needed more urgent attention had a more reddish tone. That makes complete sense. And having those fields a different colour makes it easier for users to pick out specific elements quickly (like how icons are used too).
The problem with AI slop is that it’s trained on good code as well as bad. This is like the arguments against the Oxford comma and em dash all over again.
Formally, it's a student who's in the system, but isn't currently enrolled in classes.
Informally, it's pretty much every undergrad who ever lived.
I'm not sure using a Fraktur-esque font for headers could ever be described as cute.
To be fair we have had UI slop way before AI in the sense of lazily coded react slop.
and before that we had Bootstrap slop, and before that we had jQuery UI slop, and before that...
[Genuine shoutout to that jQuery accordion, that thing is a web cockroach. I think it will probably outlive us all]
I'm not particularly keen on the font selection observation. Boring is ideal for the vast majority of interfaces. Far worse is the vulgar font selections guided by design skill documents which disallow common font selections.
Something missing from the list of tells is overuse (or even any use at all) of the middle dot (·).
AI is just another tool and I have actually found it really fun to dive into design as a non-designer. It still takes a lot of time and effort but I can now create designs that I'm quite happy with that I'd have never been able to do before.
Wrote a bit about my process in a blog post [1]. Obviously my designs are far from perfect but I'm really happy with my company's website.
[1] https://railcode.dev/blog/vibe-coded-website
The rollercoaster on your landing page could use some better logic for when to restart. Or not do it at all. I kept restarting it automatically by moving a little bit.
the jump up arrow is not centered :D
the font is hard to read my fav is "unap-pealing".
the theme toggle is only on top.
the images are set to 0.85 opacity ?
I just can't fathom how a multi-billion dollar company like Cloudflare could forego their design standards. They seem to have updated their landing page [0], but it's still very sloppy.
[0] https://try.cloudflare.com
Immediately reminded me of https://fingerprint.com/, which is funny, but not really.
They can probably get away with it at this point. Cloudflare already has the name and reputation, so I doubt a sloppy landing page costs them much business.
I would think it's a phishing site with that word mark.
Are they not just dogfooding here?
Cloudflare is a truly bizarre company. First scammers predictably imitated their "turnstile" and phished using the clipboard.
Now they explicitly train people to use the clipboard. Clownflare.
Cloudflare is slopped out these days. Tons of people uncoordinated, all flailing around. Vibe flailing, I suppose.
How deep is it? Did they start pouring barrels worth of AI code into all their products, or just the new/AI-centric stuff and their webpages?
This hurts my eyes. There's no contrast.
tbh, they don't really need the website, it could just be a simple pure text website with a simple tagline explaining what they do, a sign in and sign up button, that's it.
what really matters the most is the dashboard.
We're down this now? Come on. A landing page doesn't need a ton of design for a company as well known as Cloudflare.
The site is just fine.
Stop already with the AI doomerism.
The site is utter shit. Total amateur hour. Terrible contrast, barely anything guiding the eyes, the padding to the sides is inconsistent. So is the entire design language from leading with some numbering that never goes beyond 01, round buttons, round input elements, interrupted by somewhat decorated layered elements which then leads to some kind of terminal window that doesn't resemble any terminal UI I've ever seen or used. It's all filled by various sloppy mentions of keywords that barely form some coherent narrative.
This page looks like some junior cobbled it together based on a hastily written ticket by some overworked product guy.
Yuck.
Cloudflare is a complete disaster these days, its quite an embarrassing fall from grace. I feel for the few engineers that still remotely care about their craft that work there.
Really? I'm more surprised when I see a large company still have design standards. It seems it's all the rage to fire all your UX people and have your devs wipe up a UI because "UI is so easy."
Follow design standards? Fuck no, we need to STAND OUT instead. If you find the design hard to use as a result of not following standards your just an old curmuddgen.
Cloudflare WARP suffered a similar downgrade recently when it went from a nifty menubar app on macOS to a vibecoded window built with flutter
lol what are you talking about? Cloudflare fucking sucks. If this is cause or consequence of being a multi-billion dollar company, I cannot tell.
Their UI being bad is the least of their problems.
More guidance is needed on how to efficiently prompt an LLM to generate a correct UI. Describing the appearance, placement and behavior of UI elements for this is quite time-consuming. The contrast with server-side code generation is stark.
I'm curious when the music will stop and people realize that programming languages are more optimal at describing certain behaviors than english.
This started as soon as they devised the MCP. “we have this new thing called ai you can talk to it naturally. Here’s a protocol to make it work better”
Some of these are a bit outdated for newer models.
I find the most consistent tells are often just excessive descriptive text and a lack of visual hierarchy. It makes sense given these are language models.
Also, I find models are really quite good once given some design context to work from. Slop UI is lazy at this point, not a reflection of model quality.
Your list is missing all caps. I think overuse of all-caps is one of the biggest tells that a ui was vibe coded.
People are also weirdly defensive about their use of all-caps.
Yup, matches my experience.
Added “bonus” points if it’s overused small caps. Related (not all need be in caps): header, “eyebrow”, h1, description, footer all saying the same thing.
"You're absolutely correct! It's not slop, it's technology in action"
the prose is what kills me. It's so bad and is always the same predictable grandiose sentences.
For it's the length, as easily seen by a scrollbar. You can tell noone wrote something that needs 10 pages to print.
All this kind of ugliness long pre-dates AI. My guess is the training data set is full of this kind of crap.
Don't forget carousels! And scroll hijacking!
We are entering a phase where ai creates clean, informative interfaces, so humans trying to differentiate make theirs “interesting” (unreadable), as in this case: “Mhat Js Glop”
People don't realize that you're allowed to tell LLMs/agents "no." In the real world, it's a professional faux pas to question the design of a creative coworker when you may not know design better, but LLMs/agents are not your coworkers.
Don't like abuse of serif fonts? "NEVER use serif fonts."
Don't like the gaudy color palettes? "Use this color palette with a white-dominant background"
Don't like the marketing fluff? "Remove all non-salient text from this app."
You're encouraged to be picky.
Huh. I've been committing this professional faux pas for years without consequences. There are simply a lot of bad designers out there.
I'm not sure I agree with this particular point, but, the rest of your comment I wholeheartedly agree with.
And there are a lot of designers who are good, but only in a different medium. Being able to make a good flyer, a good trade fair booth and a good website are completely different skills, but all too often the same designer is expected to do all of those, and more
I admit that those type of politics depend on workplace culture and I worked at two highly creative-oriented companies previously, and in both companies any attempt to point out issues in the design resulted in a "this is according to design spec; not fixing."
Totally fair.
Not a designer but the worst feedback you can get from your coworkers is nothing.
my agents.md says “If I see ‘indigo-500’ anywhere in your code I will fucking kill you.”
We are now on the Roko's Basilisk list
On the copywriting side, I added an instruction to always write the copy in a Markdown file and let me edit it before actually coding the UI. Miles better to edit 2-3 sentences at a time than look at an UI full of slop, dumbfounded on how to proceed.
But on the styling, there's just no good solution. I use things like https://katagami.ai to find inspiration and nudge it into a style direction but I still have to hand edit paddings and buttons and visual separation.
For example copying the Sumi prompt [0] and applying it onto my keyboard app landing page [1] ended up with something visually pleasant and informative. I would have spent way too many days doing animations and deciding on the theme.
But I still wish I could take an LLM and train it on my already human made websites and copy and get something that can follow a design language and writing style.
[0] https://katagami.ai/art-styles/en-019efd5c-2d50-7162-b204-31...
[1] https://dev.lowtechguys.com/redink/
You forgot the small caps headings or tags added randomly everywhere.
Cloudflare has definitely gone all-in on slop.
At least some of these are just for lack of caring. I vibe coded this landing page recently https://tui2web.com/ and fought off a lot of the defaults the LLM came up with after a few hours of iteration. Feel free to roast it, I'm not really attached, but I thought it did a reasonably good job.
it's perfectly fine
Not bad but the section numbering gives it away now. Also something cloudflare has. I don’t know if I’d call that slop though. It’s really just the stuff people don’t care about and let whatever the llm comes up with ship.
It's fine, but if you spent hours telling it what not to do, at that point you are the one doing the designing.
I find this style of "heavy dark borders/shadows" one of the ugliest recent trends on the web. It's rarely done well.
But otherwise the website looks pretty great. Vibe coded websites usually transmit the feeling of: "nobody even bothered to look at this", and that's not the case with yours at all.
In your lists where elements are separated by horizontal lines, I would remove the horizontal line after the last element. That's quite easy in CSS.
This appears to be pretty close to the "brutalist" aesthetic mentioned in the article. Things like drop shadows on boxes are the opposite of the "fingernail" boxes and you very rarely saw them pre-AI. However I think your site looks fine and well crafted, nice work. (the article also said that this kind of design language is less grating)
It looks nice. I wouldn’t roast it as much as admit that I can tell from some of the content phrasing that an LLM was used. The h1 feels cliche, for example. That comma doesn’t really need to be there.
It doesn't mention the most annoying tell- content that fades in as you scroll down a page. I'm seeing this everywhere recently and it's so distracting
Sad thing is that was a trope of bad web design way before AI. Fade in and parallax scrolling.
I have to disagree on the fingernail card accents (though I've just learned the name via this article). Slop or not, they're useful for subtly indicating state, type of attention required, etc. without cluttering a UI.
I have seen folks here complaining about design trends long before AI slop. Maybe those folks who work in tech long for originality but the reality is designers in all aspects of life follow trends and originality is rare.
The reality is that users enjoy familiarity and find familiar interfaces and design trends comfortable and easier to use.
Shoot. I use those in my portfolio and didn't know they were using them everywhere.
IMO a single "Main Thing // Detail" is fun and fine and is where the trope came from. I see a ton of "Home // Our Work // Donate // About Us" which has beome cringy.
This is highly accurate.
Also, incomplete sections. This site below has an FAQ section without answers.
https://ai.meta.com/muse
I see answers.
I see them in mobile, but not in desktop:
https://x.com/efortis/status/2103319003754275262
Each of those FAQ headers is clickable and expands to show the answer.
They do have answers in Firefox. Maybe your setup is bugging out. I clicked through them, and all of them had answers.
Is Muse free?
Muse is available for free with a usage limit. If you reach your free limit and want more, you can upgrade to a paid subscription, or wait until your free usage limit refreshes.
That might just be from developers getting a Figma of a FAQ section without final copy, then Meta not doing adequate QA and shipping empty FAQ sections.
This website has a terrible taste in font. There's a reason you don't see a lot of serifs on the Internet.
While not playing WoW Forever myself, I like reading the news and subreddit about it. In the last days, every day a new "self-made" UI mod gets showcased transforming the UI into AI slop.
Disregarding any design standards and letting the AI role with it. People that mention it, in the comments, get blasted by accusations of gate-keeping.
I see this so often. Nobody is gate-keeping anyone, you can just learn the skill, read about UI design and art.
Why is it so hard for people to just put in the time?
All my life the older generations has been accusing my cohort of being the "instant gratification generation" and I hate how right they have turned out to be.
I'm really pissed off that my favorite web design style Brutalism is now an AI slop smell. They already took my em-dash! *shakes fist*.
Now that I think about it, Brutalist web design always reminds me of 80s and 90s video games. I wonder if the increased adoption of Brutalist webdesign has something to do with "nostalgia porn" instead of LLMs.
Stuff I'm missing in the list: "Claude beige" and "Claude anthracite grey".
I have an inkling that this will become cyclical, like fashion. Just wait a couple of years and any currently overused LLM style might become more unique again.
Waiter, there are fingernails in my hamburger menu!
You can tell by looking at a UI whether it was purely generated by AI or not. Just like you can tell by looking at an AI-generated video.
I think soon, we will be adding “Skip Claude” in the same vein as “Skip Intro” to this list.
However, this is personal, but I stopped caring as long as the content is good, the animations can do justice in explanation and I get to learn or get what I want from them.
this slop UI thing is just peak LLMs learned it by watching us, but surely the solution to slop UI cannot be this site. The adventurous unifrakturCook cursive font they chose for headings is making me throw up a bit in my mouth. It's like getting sex tips from someone who is both a virgin and suffering from Tertiary Stage syphilis at the same time!
And despite it putting me in the slop side of things I have to say that Inter is, for me at any rate, a reasonable font, especially for online usage. Maybe that's why the slop uses it.
watch this turn into a skill and become a popular meme on X...
The most obvious tell is the "No this. No that." copy which you find everywhere.
The most important thing I learned when graduating from "bad musician" to "passable musician" (passable enough to have listeners and fans, at least) was that there's no one single big trick that turns a song from bad to good: there's 100 tiny small tricks that add up. And you need to have experience to know what they are. A trained listener might be able to say "the midrange is too compressed", "there's too much high end", "the drum transients are't punching through", but a normal, casual listener is just going to say, "I dunno, it just doesn't sound right."
This UI slop is the same deal. A slightly misaligned dot off the timeline, color choices which don't really make sense given the website as a whole, using LLMism text. Nothing in here is an obviously major problem on its own. But when you add up 50 of these on a website, users get hit with that "this is slop" feeling.
The details matter. In isolation they seem irrelevant, but as a whole it's what elevates something from the AI slop garbage pile to something actually good.
The biggest tell of slop UI is the intersection of fancy styling and disfunctional UX. AI absolutely cannot do UX by itself.
I added a rule on my agents.md for the design part, I never like any UI element that styling have a bg and slightly dark version of same color used by the bg because it's really made me mad and seems get being used by Agent
This coincidently the first picture in this article by cloudflare
An "inactive" student is one who is enrolled but is not currently attending classes.
This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
I start with these rules, then adjust as I want...
EMPHASIZE:
- *Summary.* First paragraph like newspaper (who, what, where, when, how, why).
- *Benefits.* Focus on the benefits for the reader.
- *Why this matters* Focus on what it adds to the reader.
NO:
- *No tech stack.* Do not say the tech implementation; covered elsewhere.
- *No counts.* Do not say page counts, part counts, chapter counts, etc.
- *No special formatting.* Do not bold, not italic, not bullet lists.
- *No "if".* Do not say "If you do X then Y"; instead use positive.
- *No run-on sentences.* Do not use many clauses nor too many words.
- *No passive voice.* Do not use passive, or non-subject, sentences.
Another blog post for which I had a better reading experience using Firefox reader view. Thank you Firefox.
For some reason slop UI labels always refer to the user in second person. Solid tell when something says "Needs You" instead of "Requires Attention"
Apart from misalignment and slop text, does the rest really matter?
As long as it doesn't degrade the site's usability, does the general public care about fingernail cards or gradients?
Looks good enough.
The one thing that vexxes me up so much is the model bring up internal decisions in consumer facing views.
This is similar to the rapid early adoption of the Bootstrap CSS framework. A lot of people were annoyed by the sudden spike of websites that looked and felt the same, but I think this was a tremendous step forward in usability and accessibility, and well worth the initial wave of cookie cutter websites.