What Is AI Slop? Building a Website That Doesn’t Look AI-Generated

I can recognize most of the artificial intelligence sites that I've studied in the last few months, in the first three seconds, from the same graph, the same three cards, the same font, the same title pattern. This is called "AI slop**. In this article, I'm talking about symptoms, why, and how you're going to break it in four separate layers, from design references to text writing.

What's an AI slop, how is it known?

AI slop, which came out of the default settings of the prolific models, is very indistinguishable.

• It's almost a signature.
• Not two, not four, always three.
• "Ice glass effect " and the same corner roundness in each element.
• The same font. The font is the most decisive element in the design, but it's the least spoken.
• The "Build the Future From Today" way, the words that say nothing.
• "Unchanged text. " Most people edit visuals, but they never touch the text written by the model.

This list is useful as a checklist: If you mark three items on your website, it also notices visitors.

Why do they all look the same?

The reason is simple: "Everyone gives the same prompt.** The model makes the same consistent output to the same input. There's no lack of talent, there's a very consistent behavior.

Here's the thing: the model doesn't know what good design is by itself. If you don't give it a measurement, it generates the average of the distribution it's trained for, and the average is exactly what you see.

And that's where the solution comes from: "Stop giving prompts and give them systems. "

Layer 1: Select the reference correctly

The first step is to find sites that look really good on your own, and that's what award-winning website collections, design galleries, and sector collections are for. If it's hard to choose from hundreds of sites, get the model to do it: "Look at this list, find the three closest examples to my job."

After giving the reference, it becomes clear that the model now works in a concrete measure, not in an uncertain goal like "a beautiful educational site."

A warning: "Do not work with a single reference.** If you reference a single site, it becomes a pale copy of the site. Combining elements from several different sources creates a language that is yours.

Layer 2: Original visual language

The second layer is to break up the stock visual sense, when you have your own characters, your own illustration style, your own animations, the site immediately separates.

I want to make one principle very clear: "The job of artificial intelligence is not to take over creativity, but to take over the creative process.** You decide what the character is going to be, what the brand is going to look like; it's the machine's job to produce its 30 variations; and the moment you lose that distinction, you get to the average again.

The practical running flow is this: determine the idea of a character or visual motif yourself, create variations on the model, choose what you like and make an inventory of existence. After inventory, you can reproduce the same character over and over again in different scenes.

Layer 3: Typeography

The font is the most important item to improve quality with a single change, although it's the most neglected place.

A few practical notes:

• Get out of the default system fonts, free of charge, and there's a lot of really good font options.
• See the font in real use. See how it looks on real sites, not in sample pages. The font displays are ideal for this.
• Many fonts are free of charge, not commercial use. This is a serious problem in customer business.
• Giving money in a good fund is a reasonable investment, changing the perception of design in one piece.

Select according to what your brand means: A trust-giving institutional product and a fun educational application cannot use the same font.

Layer 4: Text ▪ Where the real giveaway is

Make the best design, produce the most beautiful images; if the text is bad, no one buys it. The text tells the most about a site as an artificial intelligence product.

Five principles in my own work:

1. "Don't make me think. " The visitor shouldn't use mental effort to understand the page. You lose when the sentence gets complicated.
2. "Name pain first. " Say in the first sentence which problem your product solves, not what it does.
3. "One request per person. " One screen, one idea, one call for action. When you put a button on two equal weights, neither clicks.
4. "Fast and easy" doesn't say anything. "Fire four minutes" says something.
5. "Keep a list of forbidden words. " Make your own list; the model always returns to those words.

I'll give you a concrete example. In an educational product, these transformations work directly:

• Instead of "Get started right away," I said, "Start your first lesson."
• Instead of "five minutes wherever you are," "five minutes in service counts."
• Instead of "the easy way to learn artificial intelligence," "everyone uses artificial intelligence, very few use it well."

The same thing that changed in all three: the abstract promise went away, and a concrete scene came that the reader could play in his own life.

If you're printing the text into the model, run the output through a second round and specifically ask for: clean the stereotypes, embody each sentence, specificize the call for action.

Top part: the most fucked up part:

Most of the visitor's decision is being made on the first screen, and AI Slop is piling up in the densest place. Four repeated problems in the upper section:

• ** He's competing with a visual message.** It's a big, moving visual attention, but it's suppressing the title. It should support the visual message, not compete with it.
• ** The button with two equal weights.** "Try free" and "Ask demo" are the same visual weight, the visitor has to choose and most of the time he doesn't choose any of them. One of them has to be the primary.
• "The head product, it's not the problem. " New generation project management platform" is a definition: "If the crew doesn't know who has what job," it's a hook.
• "Substructure of information.** Three lines of explanation tucked under the title work less than a one-line clear sentence.

A simple test: open and close the page for three seconds, then write what you understand in a sentence. If you can't write it, the top part doesn't work. If you make someone else do this test, you already know your own page.

Text check check list

Here's the list I made before I released the text that the model wrote:

1. Does the first sentence say the reader's problem?
2. Is there one idea in every department?
3. Do you have solid numbers, time or example, or are they all adjectives?
4. Is the call for action specific (start your first lesson") or is it credited (start)?
5. How many of your forbidden words have passed through your list?
6. Do you stumble when you read out loud?

The sixth article sounds simple, but it's the one that catches the most, when the artificial intelligence text appears in writing and reads out loud, it's artificial; you only notice it by reading it.

The line between being inspired and copying

There's a place where this method can easily deteriorate, and it's one thing to use a brand's site as a reference, but it's another to recreate its visual identity.

My measurement is: "What you take from the referendum must be the principle, not the entity.** You can take the rhythm of space, the contrast approach, the feeling of motion. When you take the character, the palette and the typography together, you don't build your own brand anymore, you dilute someone else's. In addition to the legal risk, no one remembers the second version.

Questions that are often asked

AI slop is just a visual problem?

No, the most visible part is visual, but the most expensive part is text. The design can be sold by an average site with good text; its design is perfect; it can't model text and make a site.

Would designing the system solve AI Slop by itself?

It solves a lot, because the system replaces the defaults with your decisions, but if you make the system out of a generic output, you make the credit permanent, get a printout that you like before you set up the system.

How do I choose the font?

Start with the color of the brand, not the font. Describe your product in three adjectives, then look at the fonts that match those three adjectives, and make sure you try with your actual text, the font that looks good in the sample sentence might look bad in your title.

Can free fonts be used in business?

Some of it's yes, some of it's no, so don't put any font into the customer business until you read the license text, and that's one of the most expensive mistakes to correct later.

In a nutshell

AI slop is not a problem of ability, it's an input problem. It produces the model average because you give it an average request. When you overhaul all four layers of reference, visual language, typography and text, it doesn't look like artificial intelligence production anymore; it looks like your job.