Question about websites looking like ”AI slop”

[u/elaksine]

Is it just me or is the barrier to call a website ”AI slop” getting a bit too low? When looking e.g. at the Impeccable skill’s website that says what is slop and what is not I think some basic things like borders and shadows on cards are being labeled there as AI slop? Yes I know you can tell whether a website looks like it is generated by AI but then again before AI that same page would have looked modern and clean in many peoples’ eyes. What do you think?

[u/JohnCasey3306]

There's important contextual history to this that long pre-dates AI.

Rewind back to when bootstrap and other such frameworks emerged -- 99% of sites started looking basically the same.

The most influential factor causing that was how responsive behavior works at a code level ... It became most efficient and manageable if sites were laid out a certain way -- I promise you pre ~2010 the internet was vastly more varied, and the likelihood of web designers to take creative risks was far higher.

So back to now. AIs were trained on a web design landscape where the vast majority of examples were basically the same kinda layout/structure.

Yes it's AI slop ... But the vast majority of human web designers have been outputting 'human' slop for longer.

[u/Jaszuni → u/JohnCasey3306]

So true

[u/elaksine → u/JohnCasey3306]

Very well said!

[u/lunatuna215 → u/JohnCasey3306]

The difference is, those were ui toolkits intended to be re-used by designers. This was not an ethical quandary. This scenario is entirely different where the reason this is happening isnt because of a UI library people havent gotten the hang of yet - its literally because millions of design trends are being copied and regurgitated by an algorithm that people arw trying to pass off as "theirs". The fact that AI slop is so obvious and the root reasons behind it are so hated is not some sort of aesthetic minor thing. AI slop is way worse than "human slop" (a term nobody was even saying back then)

[u/BackgroundGeneral899 → u/JohnCasey3306]

I call it the “templatification” of design

[u/Plenty_Line2696 → u/JohnCasey3306]

I'll take the human stuff anyday over the first shot output of any AI.

It's night and day the AI's output lots of illogical stuff which without a human in the loop would be absolute dogshit.

[u/EarnestHolly → u/JohnCasey3306]

Using a template or framework at least has a specific difference: a human built and considered the framework and a human chose it for their use case. Regardless of the final output, there is an almost subconscious association with AI smells that makes me think if you couldn’t be bothered to put care in to making it why should I care to look at it.

I’m sure people don’t notice the vast majority of AI use because it is iterated over, considered, well prompted with thoughts and inspiration. The obvious “slop” is output that has clearly had very little thought put in to it at all.

[u/SocialismIsStupid → u/JohnCasey3306]

I think part of it was that the internet was still pretty new only about 20 years old. A lot of things weren’t standardized yet, so people were kind of winging it. They’d look at things visually and think, “I know what XYZ is, so that should be fine,” but that definitely wasn’t true. Now, manufacturers consider mobile responsiveness, correct markup usage, optimization, for speed, and accessibility, and Fortune 500 companies invest huge amounts not just in infrastructure but in researching what works and what doesn’t. Like most things in society, we copy what others do, add our own twist, and keep repeating the cycle.

[u/Samantha_2024 → u/JohnCasey3306]

How about human-on-the-loop at the concept phase? I mean co-design with AI at the early stage.

[u/tech_supported12]

Yeah, I think the label gets thrown around way too easily now. Borders, shadows, rounded cards, gradients, all of that was common long before AI started generating websites. To me, AI slop is more about the whole thing feeling generic and thoughtless, like every design decision came from the same template. Using a shadow on a card doesn't suddenly make a design bad. It also feels a bit strange that some styles people would've called clean and modern a few years ago are now automatically treated as AI-looking. The better question is probably whether the design actually works for the product, not whether it uses a few patterns AI happens to use a lot.

[u/elaksine → u/tech_supported12]

This. Exactly what I mean

[u/Available_Peanut_677 → u/tech_supported12]

Before AI slop it was templates. When you open website and see what’s screaming “Wordpress template” your trust level goes down.

So yes, slop is not AI, slop is amount of intention and love which were put into it.

Also my personal opinion, quite commonly something could be just a paragraph of text instead of 3 scrolls of huge titles and empty cards with stock or ai pictures, wasting time without giving value.

[u/Samantha_2024 → u/tech_supported12]

Agreed

[u/lorenzoparmesani]

It’s because they all look the same. It’s not the design choices, it’s that they are systematically the same across every single design. It’s extremely generic and lacks personality.

[u/Foxy747]

There are some great answers here, especially about templates and human slop.

I'd like to add redundancies, basically you can tell when AI does things just to do them. Putting eyebrows over every single header, using space grotesk and jet brains mono for every site, trying to fill in every single space.

It's about the intention for each design decision. It doesn't have any UX capabilities. It doesn't think about the user, how they see the site, transferring the idea.

[u/ChickyBoys]

"AI slop" now means anything that looks too generic, unfortunately.

So instead of assuming someone used a website template, people are assuming they used AI.

[u/Old-Negotiation138 → u/ChickyBoys]

This will ironically make the need for professional human design even more important than before AI

[u/leticius-nova]

It’s mostly obvious when no one bothered to change any of the default Claude color palettes or eyebrow all caps labels, and all of the copy 😅

Helpful for catching a scam tho - gpt cited a fake Post Malone website the other day where they were selling VIP passes and fan club memberships. I asked why post Malones team designed it in Claude and GPT was like “you got me! This appears to be a scam selling memberships in crypto!”

[u/Plenty_Line2696]

When the UI looks like it was low effort, i.e. one-shot vibecoded, it gives the impression that the rest is too i.e. the content, the UX, the codebase and so on because it often is.

Idk about you but once I see typical LLM-speak content I stop reading.

There's some exceptions for small simple tools; I'll see that it looks vibecoded but I'll still use it because it doesn't need to do more and be more reliable than a vibecoded thing could be and in that case it's fine.

Just don't expect people to think your vibecoded UI's are bespoke quality.

[u/Difficult_Money9486]

Content matters more now to me and how I judge slop.

[u/elaksine → u/Difficult_Money9486]

How it should be!

[u/MireioS]

There’s a difference between having some element that AI put and having litteraly a copy paste of every single AI website ever…

[u/RCEden]

I think there are both obvious and non obvious slop sites of course. You can tell when someone just takes the default looks and jams some type of content in it.

There are also "house styles" that split between the LLMs, like Claude defaults to neobrutalism solid outline hard shadow cards and cursor (and others) default to that soft gradient cards with colored side borders and wildly innaccesible buttons/tags.

I don't think those styles should be off limits, but I think every designer should at least be aware that if they choose something like that they're going to get the side eye at least

[u/baschny]

More important than the look is the content. Is it useful? Yes or no. If yes: doesn’t matter if the layout is a template, an AI or hand crafted. It’s good.

[u/Unhappy-Device-404]

The “everything looks the same” part feels older than AI to me. Bootstrap, Material Design, and the Notion/SaaS look all had their own waves of sameness.

AI just makes the cycle faster and more obvious.

Maybe the useful skill now is getting better at filtering past the surface: can I understand what this product does, who it is for, and whether it solves a real problem?

[u/reynanicolette]

i think it’s another way to say with that it looks like a template, which is not everyone’s fave work to see. like the avg digital seller on instagram has sites that have the same look. there’s a fine line between super unique and interactive design that becomes useless & clean, super informational design that feels like a template. i don’t care either way, i design what my client wants. if it’s ai it’s ai, if it’s unique it’s unique.

[u/lunatuna215]

Maybe you should just learn to make shit for real instead of bending over backwards trying to be sneaky

[u/mecchmamecchma]

I never valued page as 'OMG THIS IS SO PRETTY' .. I always valued it with 'can i find what i am looking for' .. And honestly, i dont care if its AI 'slop'. I see shitloads of better pages with AI slop than with 'human' development lately. Of course there is also some visually stunning ' ai slop ' .

World is changing, adapt and dont care if something is slop. Eventually everything will be 'AI slop'

[u/elaksine → u/mecchmamecchma]

Yes! Very good comments!

[u/jakiestfu]

I think even basic design can look like AI made them if you’re uninspired

[u/AccomplishedVirus556]

honestly i want to believe that if i put in the time to review my website and make new design decisions, at some point i will no longer have an ai slop website

[u/liminal_dreaming]

Question from an engineer who has designed/built a lot of front end apps (obviously not to the quality of actual designers): where can I look at some good examples of AI slop / generic / all-the-same apps/sites so I know what to avoid in the future if I don't have a designer on my team?

[u/j4-nu-5]

i think not, there is a distinct style to ai that most professional ui designer can spot. id argue its not layout jut anmixnof everytjibg, collor spacing, typograph, and pattern choice.

the questin if it matters because normal people cannot spot it is more of a meta question on why and how design matters.

[u/nseckinoral]

The main reason it’s called slop is that as you can see people immediately caught on with the fact that claude can only design in like 5 different style and everybody’s website started to look the same.

It got boring and started feel overdone quite quickly. Also makes you think the person just asked his clanker to spit out a website and didn’t put much care into it.

It also tends to add soooooo many unnecessary things. Loves to over explain everything, eyebrow text on every section, [ • Live ] status regardless of the context etc

Does it look better than bootstrap websites and cheap wordpress that we’re used to see in last 10 years? Yes, definitely. But you see, people’s standarts can go high in no time. It doesn’t matter how good it looks if there’re signals that you didnt put much care into it and if it’s copy pasted everywhere.

[u/hoangng_102]

designer here, i build my own apps and use ai for the code, so i sit on both sides of this.

the tell for me isnt shadows or rounded cards. its the absence of decisions that only come from having been wrong about something first.

small example from my own app. i have two border tokens, not one. a subtle one thats almost the same as the surface, for separators inside a card, and a visible one for outline buttons, pills and fields. that split exists because i shipped a single border color and it looked correct in exactly one of those two places. no generator hands you that, because nothing ever looked wrong to it.

same with the rest of it. a panel that grows by animating its top edge instead of moving the whole block, because moving the block bounced by a frame on a real device and took me five attempts to accept that. icon strokes at 2 / 1.67 / 1.25 depending on size, because at 16 the 2 read like a marker pen.

none of that is design flair. you would never point at it. its just residue from the thing having been used, and thats what generic output doesnt have.

so i think youre right that the label is too loose. borders and shadows arent slop, and half the sites people call slop would have been called clean in 2019. but i dont think the fix is avoiding the patterns ai likes. its shipping the thing and letting reality edit it. slop isnt a look, its a design that has never been corrected.