You can spot an AI-generated landing page in under 2 seconds. You can spot an AI-generated product photo in about the same. The tells are consistent, predictable, and fixable. We documented 20 of them across UI, photos, and logos, and built explicit rules to counter each one.
Part 1: UI tells
Tell #1: Centered paragraph text. AI centers everything. A human designer centers headings and CTAs. Body copy gets left-aligned. Centered paragraphs longer than two lines are unreadable.
Tell #2: Symmetrical layouts. AI defaults to 50/50 splits. Real editorial layouts use 60/40 or 70/30 grids. If you have 4 cards, make one of them 2x wide. Symmetry is a choice, not a default.
Tell #3: Full-width everything. AI stretches sections to fill the viewport. Real sites constrain content to 1200-1400px.
Tell #4: Equal spacing everywhere. Every section has the same 40px padding. A hero section needs 120px below it. A testimonial block might need 80px above and 60px below. Spacing creates grouping, and grouping creates meaning.
Tell #5: Gradient backgrounds. AI loves gradients. Real products use solid colors. A gradient background tells users "this was generated" faster than any other single signal.
Tell #6: Blue-to-purple gradient CTAs. The #1 AI design tell. Every AI-generated landing page has this button. Solid-fill CTA in your brand's accent color. One color. No gradient.
Tell #7: Neon accents on dark backgrounds. AI has a cyberpunk bias. Unless your product is a hacking tool, use moderate saturation.
Tell #8: More than one accent color. AI uses 3-4 accent colors. One accent color plus grays is harder to make look bad than four colors is to make look good.
Tell #9: Uniform font weight. AI uses 400 for everything. Use at least 3 weights: 300 for display headings, 400 for body, 600 for labels with uppercase + letter-spacing.
Tell #10: Rounded-3xl on everything. AI rounds every corner to the maximum. Pick one radius: 0px (editorial), 6px (product), or 12px (consumer).
Tell #11: Drop shadows on every card. When every card has a shadow, nothing has depth. Use borders instead. One shadow per page for the element that needs to float.
Tell #12: Floating orbs, particles, aurora backgrounds. Delete them. A solid background with good typography and spacing looks better than any animated decoration.
Part 2: Photo tells
We generate 5+ images per brand through FLUX 2 Pro. These rules are baked into our prompt builders.
Tell #13: "Centered composition." AI centers subjects by default. Say "off-centre" in every image prompt.
Tell #14: "Beautiful," "stunning," "professional photography." Noise tokens. Name a photographer instead. "Rich Stapleton (Cereal)" produces warmer, more editorial results than "professional photography." Named references beat generic quality descriptors because they point to a specific distribution of images in the training data.
Tell #15: "4K, 8K, ultra-detailed." Resolution tokens that do nothing in FLUX 2 Pro. Specify camera and film stock instead: "Hasselblad 500CM, Kodak Portra 160."
Tell #16: Generic mood descriptions. "Warm and inviting atmosphere" describes a vibe, not a scene. Write scene descriptions as novelistic fragments: "Late afternoon in a raw concrete room. Bare factory windows casting long shadows across the floor."
Part 3: Logo tells
The Cormorant Garamond default. When you ask any AI for a "premium" font, Cormorant Garamond is the #1 result. Fix: per-archetype font pools. 59 Google Fonts mapped across 6 pools.
The serif bias. AI defaults to serif for anything "premium." In 2026, the modern default is sans-serif. Use serif when the archetype calls for it, not as a universal quality signal.
The luxury house reference. "Hermès, Bottega Veneta, Cartier" in a prompt produces one serif aesthetic for every brand. Fix: describe letterform characteristics instead. "Geometric sans-serif with uniform stroke weight, precise circular curves."
The font name trap. AI models can't reliably render named fonts. Fix: use fonts as soft hints. "Letterforms inspired by Inter, matching its proportions and rhythm."
The anti-slop defaults
When in doubt:
Background: solid color (not gradient)
Border radius: 0px (editorial) or 6px (product)
Shadows: none (use borders instead)
Spacing: more than you think (1.5x your first instinct)
Font weight: lighter than you think (300 display, 400 body)
Color palette: 2 colors (bg + accent) + grays
CTA: solid fill, not gradient, not outlined
Max width: 1400px
Body font size: 16px minimumThe spacing rule
If you take one thing from this post: AI under-spaces everything. Section padding should be 80-120px, not 40px. Heading margin should be 48-64px above, not 24px.
The #1 differentiator between AI-generated and human-designed UI is spacing. Not color. Not typography. Not components. Spacing. A page with mediocre typography and generous spacing reads as designed. A page with perfect typography and tight spacing reads as generated.
When you think you have enough whitespace, add 50% more.
Using the system
The anti-slop-design skill is available on GitHub. It loads as a Claude Code skill and applies these rules automatically when working on UI, image prompts, or logo generation. The rules work with any AI image model and any UI framework.