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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.
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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/
Really not a fan. Like, fairly significantly bad. Text sizing is poorly chosen, the only affordance for navigation or understanding what content is contained within what sections is at the bottom, sections are concentrated together in an overwhelming way (god help me if I’m a frequent visitor primarily interested in “external writings and presentations”), headings and font sizing is variously too close together and too far apart, code blocks are always in a huge font compared to prose, and code blocks blow out the horizontal scroll, meaning that vertical scrolling on mobile is a massive pain in the ass.

There are good examples out there for minimal, straightforward blog design. This ain’t it.

To be fair, you're blog has the opposite issue, with the sidenotes forcing me to zoom in to read the text on mobile. I'll admit that the blog I linked doesn't handle code blocks gracefully specifically on mobile, it's fine on the desktop.
> To be fair, your blog has the opposite issue, with the sidenotes forcing me to zoom in to read the text on mobile.

Very true, I’ve procrastinated on fixing that for too long.

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
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/

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.
> 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.
I don't know, I recall in music repetition actually being enjoyed by the listeners (although not always so much the craftsmen and critics). Same seems to go for verbal communication, while some claim that great authors wouldn't repeat themselves, poetry is also generally rated prettier/better/more enjoyable wording despite often incorporating repetition. Why would visual design/style be any different in regards to human preference for symmetry and repetition/recognizability (even though the ones who create it tire of doing samey stuff all day, every day)?
1. We're not talking about the same kinds of repetition. Repetition as a tool within a single artwork is not the same thing as widespread imitation across artworks.

2. Audial preferences are not the same thing as visual preferences, they're different parts of the brain.

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.

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.
That only means these very specific things get removed.

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.

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.
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

> Emoji Slop

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.
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 overdone.

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.

I’d disagree with your analogy honestly, LLM writing is bad for reasons other than overuse: too verbose, unnecessary metaphors, etc
I'm not arguing that it's good. But the average person doesn't write well either. Similarly, the average web app doesn't have good accessibility, probably doesn't render right on some phones, etc. We're not comparing to some Platonic ideal. AI content stands out mostly because of sameness.
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.

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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.
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.

Eh, I'd prefer a opus5.5 review with consequent approval over one by a human which I have to wait 5 days for.

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.

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.
Hah! I also thought about it this way and ended up added a "purple elephant rule" to my pi prompt to discourage the behaviour, since I figured LLMs lean on metaphors so much.

Of course, I quickly reverted this change as purple elephants started cropping up in comments and other prose :)

You tried to discourage it from fixating on negatives by telling it not to fixate on negatives? And it didn't work?
The funny thing is, models are pretty good at following negative instructions now.

They just also really love to tell you about it.

Early versions of stable diffusion supported negative prompts and they never leaked because it would just down weight that stuff.

I don't understand why negative prompts never made it into the LLM world. If "no foo" and "dont do bat" don't work then just give me a separate textbox where i can put all my negatives!

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.

The point wasn't the loader. It was the phrase the loading screen uses. It leaks the context. The context being that they were merging apps together.
You do realise that’s really common marketing speak when merging apps even before LLMs?
I just used Opus 5.5 for something other than coding, and after about a dozen chat messages (some of which were genuinely amazing), it got LLM brainrot, and started suggesting dumb, irrelevant stuff, ignoring previously established facts, and talking in PR doublespeak.
Another example (not from this app, just in general) that I don’t see people talking about is: “Your files never leave your browser/device”.

Any vibe coded site that deals with files and works client-side feels an INCESSANT need to inform you of this fact.

Definitely seems like the same kind of context leakage. “I don’t want to spin up a server, can you make it work in the browser?”

> 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.

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 visual is very on brand with the company name. Great works!
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

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?
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.

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.

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.

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.
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. 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.
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.

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.

I feel you, especially on the WCAG stuff. It's so damn basic and yet, they refuse to do it. The regressions on usability and consistency across the design space is just so maddening.

And honestly, I'm not even that mad at AI. The way these companies are going I'll take an AI that is taught to follow the most basic design guidelines over what most companies shovel out these days.

Like fine, you want to stand out? Use different colour schemes or unique fonts (but like one or at most two fonts). Change your corner radius from time to time to freshen up. There are so many ways to make your UI "different" but still consistent and following basic best practices.

Some of the stuff throw out now a days would fail UI 101 assignments.

Cloudflare WARP suffered a similar downgrade recently when it went from a nifty menubar app on macOS to a vibecoded window built with flutter
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).

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”
UI design (not implementation) is an area where “describe it with a programming language” has historically not worked. So much of what makes a UI good or bad is determined reactively after seeing the initial prototype. Those refinements are rarely based on an encoded set of principles that found their way into a training set, and the code used to implement such refinements was varied enough that models and humans both struggle to infer its intentions after the fact.
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.

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.

Material design suggested using uppercase on buttons in Google I/O 2014.
all caps with letter-spacing ALWAYS and usually with a monospace font
"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!