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.
Of course, I quickly reverted this change as purple elephants started cropping up in comments and other prose :)
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.
Ymmv, I also hate it when people dont read their own PR first though. But I know I've previously identified comments as LLM written which the dev... On further discussion definitely wrote themselves. So you gotta keep the false positives in mind.
"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!
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.
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.
Not to mention that all caps text is also generally associated with shouting and just feels rude to some readers.
[0] Or more accurately trained on all the bad examples before experts started catching them and has stuck to the mistake.
I’m reading max 2 sentences on any landing page. Most people probably less. Having to scroll and scroll through walls of text is a clear sign of AI.
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
LLMs aren't starting from sensible defaults and don't have to meet WCAG scores unless you tell them to (and even then might hallucinate checks they didn't actually make).
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.
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.
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.
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 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
what really matters the most is the dashboard.
Now they explicitly train people to use the clipboard. Clownflare.
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).
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.
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.
The site is just fine.
Stop already with the AI doomerism.
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.
This page looks like some junior cobbled it together based on a hastily written ticket by some overworked product guy.
Yuck.
Their UI being bad is the least of their problems.
People are also weirdly defensive about their use of all-caps.
The font kerning also usually tends to be way off, making the all-caps even more difficult to read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shoot. I use those in my portfolio and didn't know they were using them everywhere.
I'm vibe-coding an app to practice german, I want the most bare-bones possible, just something for myself. In the sign-in page, the clanker added SEVEN slogans and catch-phrases:
- A more human way to learn - Find your words. Then make them yours. - Good conversations make a language stick. Start where you are, and build from there. - One conversation at a time - Thoughtful practice. Your pace. Your progress. - YOUR LANGUAGE SPACE - A quiet space to learn, made just for you. - Sign in to pick up where you left off.
I've done this before, in what I would argue was tasteful at the time.
- cards in cards in cards. everything is a card
- parchment background
- pointless dashboards
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.
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.
Don't forget carousels! And scroll hijacking!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Here's an experimental crack at it, giving your article attribution: https://github.com/who/skills/blob/main/.claude/skills/detec...
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 ?
And only mostly. For all people say "AI can do hands", I still see a lot of six-fingered hands in social media propaganda slop.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Something missing from the list of tells is overuse (or even any use at all) of the middle dot (·).
The reality is that users enjoy familiarity and find familiar interfaces and design trends comfortable and easier to use.
This coincidently the first picture in this article by cloudflare
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.
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.
There are good examples out there for minimal, straightforward blog design. This ain’t it.
I'll admit that the blog I linked doesn't handle code blocks gracefully specifically on mobile, it's fine on the desktop.
Very true, I’ve procrastinated on fixing that for too long.
Not just emoji, icons in general, in both website generation and image generation.
[Genuine shoutout to that jQuery accordion, that thing is a web cockroach. I think it will probably outlive us all]
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"
As long as it doesn't degrade the site's usability, does the general public care about fingernail cards or gradients?
Looks good enough.
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
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.
The problem, really, is assuming that the alternative to a slop website is a non-slop website. But the alternative is often 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?
> 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.
"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.
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."
> 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.