alt Hacker NewsTells of a Slop UI
Comments
Some of these are a bit outdated for newer models.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.
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.
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.
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"
Waiter, there are fingernails in my hamburger menu!
This is highly accurate.
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.
The biggest tell of slop UI is the intersection of fancy styling and disfunctional UX. AI absolutely cannot do UX by itself.
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”
Another blog post for which I had a better reading experience using Firefox reader view. Thank you Firefox.
This website has a terrible taste in font. There's a reason you don't see a lot of serifs on the Internet.
"You're absolutely correct! It's not slop, it's technology in action"
> Emoji Slop
Not just emoji, icons in general, in both website generation and image generation.
To be fair we have had UI slop way before AI in the sense of lazily coded react slop.
Apart from misalignment and slop text, does the rest really matter?
As long as it doesn't degrade the site's usability, does the general public care about fingernail cards or gradients?
Looks good enough.
So what? Do author thinks those people have skills or resources to do better?
Cloudflare has definitely gone all-in on 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 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
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 for this very useful product 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 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?
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.
> 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 they don't like.
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.
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.