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.

Wow. That is rough. Way too much of that font, especially the initial rendering above the fold.

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.)

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.

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.

OAI's models are notorious for it and always have been.

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.

Did you even open TFA?

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.

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."

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.

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.

yup; I AI slopped new design of some some site/portal I still maintain and got nothing but positive feedback - old version used "handcrafted" bootstrap 2 code so maybe the bar was just very low :p

I think engineers have very different bar for slop than most of the people - which could explain obnoxious amount of ai generated menus/banners in the actual physical space nowadays

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.

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 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.

Huge issue in slop comments.

And btw, if you have slop comments in your PR, you'll get a review from an agent (my company pay for it). I won't bother to read if you didn't bother either.

It's partly a "Don't think of a Pink Elephant" problem. I've worked on several projects where I had to keep telling prompt writers to stop writing negative examples because the more you include the more its "attention" to them is all it has. Like telling a toddler not to do something and being surprised that is now all they can think about and they want to keep doing it. These prompt writers kept getting surprised that I'd delete all their negative examples and harshly worded "Don't do X" and "Never Y" and "NO: Z" sections they spend so much time on and got better results with smaller more focused positive example only prompts.

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.

CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT AN INACTIVE STUDENT LOOKS LIKE??

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.

This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho.

I'm not sure using a Fraktur-esque font for headers could ever be described as cute.

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 (·).

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 ?

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.

Random things added constantly. TBH a bit distressing.

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.

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.

Negative response to low-effort AI-involved work is not what “AI doomerism” means.

A college student who is also very clearly (fron the links beyond the blog) a very active and enthusiastic AI user that thinks common (if correctly identified as less than ideal) UI trends from before vibecoding was common are indicators of “AI slop” and not just design being the done by people who aren’t very good at it (which, to be fair, includes but is not limited to AI slop) is unsurprising and nothing like doomerism.

You can disagree with the factual interpretations ans subjective interpretation in the piece without trying to tie it into a completely unrelated social phenomenon.

I'm actually loving it more and more, but the disconnect in docs is disconcerting. Try connecting a jurisdiction-bound bucket to their AI Search and can't read from it - and their docs suggest in some places it should be fine and in others it is not. Go to submit a bug report and it's extremely high cost load to get information, even a basic writeup, shared, requiring github account / public repo and more.

I've seen a couple companies already change their design standards to "best in class Tailwind designs from Claude, use this prompt file/Agent file/skill file combo for all UX work".

Looking at automated emails I get from Microsoft and GitHub it certainly feels like they are one weird layoff from doing it company-wide.

The worst part is these glassification Tailwind heavy slop almost universally fail WCAG guidelines (and personally, seem hard to read to me because of taking the whispy sans serif thing to its foregone conclusion by almost exclusively using what to me are unreadably thin weights of the already too thin Inter font). The slop is going so quickly backwards for companies that invested in accessibility and these companies need to be taken to task for forgetting design isn't just aesthetics but readability and accessibility.

that "nifty menubar app" still had insane bugs such as randomly wiping its entire configuration on OS reboot

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.

My sister's boss fired her (small education) company's web designer.

When you do things like that, you can't escape the slope even when you realize your mistake. (Since it's an education company, people notice illiterate garbage).

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.

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.

I was going to add this, had I not found a comment already mentioning it =)

The font kerning also usually tends to be way off, making the all-caps even more difficult to read.

"You're absolutely correct! It's not slop, it's technology in action"

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”

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

Totally fair.

Not a designer but the worst feedback you can get from your coworkers is nothing.

We are now on the Roko's Basilisk list

Ha, on Android that wouldn't help you, already tried hahahah

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.

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.

You could be right, I haven't seen too many like this yet, but it did some out with this staggeringly fast. The style I've seen the most are the gradients + font changes mentioned in the article.

Drop shadows on boxes were a common TUI element in the Norton Commander days.

It's been a trend for years before AI... I remember the Balenciaga website being one of the first big names doing it in like... 2018?

Yeah brutalist is exactly right, that is basically what I prompted for. I didn't realize a bunch of other people were doing this. Actually the only inspiration I had for this was watching the movie (Brutalist) a few years back.

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.

design is supposed to be invisible

I don't know who told you that but that's a terrible take. Design can have personality. Design can convey emotions. Design can give you emotions and reactions by itself.

Not everything needs to be bland like a user manual

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

precisely, good things take TIME and EFFORT!

i personally don’t have an issue with the UI most LLMs generate, but in my opinion it’s ALWAYS a starting point to refine, resolve, and remove what shouldn’t be there.

there are no shortcuts to good UI (or anything else). u gotta put in the reps and have an open mind (not an empty head).

thanks

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"

But it does actually decrease usability? Useless badges with non-sensical labels or colors without meaning are just confusing. Or the other example from the website: Aligning content is not just to please a designer's eye, it helps users understand which parts of the UI belong together.

The one thing that vexxes me up so much is the model bring up internal decisions in consumer facing views.

Yeah it's problem of sensibility. Like people do not realize that developing a sensibility and good taste here is an actual still that takes time, and is highly undervalued in tech circles with the exception of a handle of truly design driven companies.

So spot on. These slop UIs are popping up everywhere and are an absolute plague. People keep building these experiences that are practically unusable from a UI/UX perspective.

Problem: This Cloudflare Quick Tunnel thing appears to be exactly what I need right now, so thanks for letting me know about it. Now, do I care how the website looks like? Not one bit.

The problem, really, is assuming that the alternative to a slop website is a non-slop website. But the alternative is no website at all.

Having said that,

And my profile has an “active student” badge.

Ahh, and the icon is vertically misaligned with the text... what is it with AI and zero ability to keep things aligned and consistent?

So what is the best way of stopping this to happen?

I am doing some experiments in forcing the LLM to use a process.

Start with a brand guidelines, followed by building wireframes, followed by merging the two together.

Think of it like chain of thought but for something visual.

As someone who didn't like the UI trends pre-LLM either, I simply shrug. Trading one crap for another.

Sure, a good designer could whip up a great UI. 95% of sites[1] didn't have a great (or even good) designer. I'm not sure the AI UIs are worse than the median that was out there.

[1] Including mine.

It's a symptom of the long standing ghettoization of design and front end engineering. FE has always been cast as frivolous and unserious by conceited developers.

That's how you get slop that feels uncanny. There's no one in the room with the taste to call it out and no one in the room who cares enough to put in the time to fix it.

An active student means you're enrolled. It has implications, student discounts for example.

the entire web already looked like this before llms became a thing, how do we know when its ai slop vs web devs being bad at web dev as usual

It adds these // whenever anything close to tech is mentioned.

I've done this before, in what I would argue was tasteful at the time.

So what? Do author thinks those people have skills or resources to do better?

If you can deterministically show and name these UI slop tropes so well, you can build a skill to help you detect and potentially avoid them.

Here's an experimental crack at it, giving your article attribution: https://github.com/who/skills/blob/main/.claude/skills/detec...

I think that these things I've seen that are tells of a slop UI are when people without discernment (not as an insult!) don't do a pass over a UI. I'm working on a dumb little app to help me sequence photos for a book[0], and I'm building it with Claude (Opus 5.5, medium effort). The first pass was really sloppy, but I was surprised at how far I could get with some directed iterating.

This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.

The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.

[0]: https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/ (very much a work in progress, feedback welcome)

I always assumed the fingernail edge thing had to come from a popular library or something.