Why All AI Generated Designs Look The Same

Key Takeaways

Every AI generated design looks the same, and you already know what I mean. Blue and purple gradients, that colored bar that's on the left side of every card, and cramming 10 emojis into each section. There's a reason for this, and it's not that AI is bad at design. Once you understand why AI defaults to the same look every single time, you can decide when to embrace it and when to break out of it and design something that actually has a soul. In this video, we're going to cover the specific patterns that give away an AI generated design, why it happens and what's going on under the hood, when you should just embrace the generic look, how to break out of it when you need something original, and why being the tasteful human in the loop is possibly the most valuable design skill you can have right now. My name's Julian. I've been designing and building on the web since 2015. Right now, I'm building Ship Studio, a tool that helps designers and non-technical builders use AI like developers. I use AI every single day, and I've learned when to fight the default and when to let it ride. First things first, what does an AI generated design look like? You've seen it before. You might not be able to describe it, but you can just feel it. So, let's name it. First of all, blue and purple gradients. They're on every button, every background, and every section. If you took every single AI generated landing page and averaged them out, you'd basically just end up with a big blue blob. Then we have the emojis. Rockets, sparkles, fire, check marks. Whatever it is, AI seems to think emojis are a valid replacement for actual design. Then we have those left side colored borders on every single card. I don't know what started this, but AI seems to think it's mandatory. Then we have the fonts. Nine times out of 10, AI is either going to use Inter or a System font. Don't get me wrong, Inter is a beautiful font, but when everything uses the same font, design loses its voice. And the big one is possibly just that everything looks clean. Nothing's broken, and you can't really point to anything being specifically bad, but you also can't point to a single memorable thing. It's polished, it's safe, and it's completely forgettable. So, that's what an AI generated design looks like, but why does it even do that? Here's how LLMs work in 10 seconds. They're trained on billions of examples from the internet, and they learn to predict what is most likely to come next, whether it's a word, a line of code, or a design. LLMs don't think, and they don't design. They just predict, and the most likely prediction is always the average of what it was trained on. So, what was it trained on? When it comes to everything being blue and purple, LLMs were trained on millions of projects using Tailwind CSS. And for years, the default color of Tailwind was indigo. Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind, actually publicly apologized for making this the case. So, one default color choice rippled through millions of projects, got scraped into training data, and now AI thinks that indigo is the color of the internet. The key point here is that AI isn't choosing these patterns, it's averaging them. When you tell Claude Code to design you a landing page, you're not just getting a design, you're getting the statistical average of everything on the internet. There's actually a recent study where researchers had AI generate thousands of images with no human input, and the output was basically stock photos every single time. Everything was just bland and generic. And the takeaway from this study is that when left alone, AI will create something average every single time. But AI is rarely left alone, and that's where the opportunity lies. So, is it actually a bad thing that AI constantly produces average design? No, not always, and pretending otherwise is honestly just a waste of time. Sometimes generic is totally fine. For internal tools, admin dashboards, and MVPs, nobody really cares what they look like. AI makes generic designs, which means they are fast, functional, and familiar. Users already know how to use it because it's so much like everything else they're used to using. That is not inherently a bad thing, but it becomes a real problem when you're designing your homepage, your branding, and your product's first impression. A visitor will show up, and they'll decide within 3 seconds whether you're just like everyone else or you're something unique. And this is where generic design kills you, not because it's ugly, just because it's invisible. If you want to stand out, you should never be using the averages. So, my tip for you here is don't just automatically assume AI generated design is bad. If something doesn't need to stand out, don't waste your time making it stand out. But as a designer, you're well aware that very often things need to look unique. And here's how you can use AI to build real, beautiful, unique designs. The easiest and probably most important thing that you can do is feed it your design system, your colors, your fonts, your spacing, your border radius, your shadows. Without giving these things to AI, it is just going to use the averages that we discussed. Giving your AI brand-related constraints is the simplest, easiest, and most effective form of creative direction. Now, you know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and that is completely true as well with AI. If you say something like give me a minimal and bold hero design, that could describe millions and millions of different websites, and AI is just going to pick the average once again. But when you send it screenshots, links, and references to sites with the right vibe, you are able to communicate to AI exactly what you want. The gap between what's in your head and what AI interprets from your words is massive, but visual references close the gap. Next up, you need to expect iteration, not magic. You're probably used to designing in Figma, and I'm sure you're well aware that a good page takes hours of back and forth. If you expect to put in a prompt and get a beautiful, perfect, polished, creative design on the first go, then the problem isn't AI, it's your expectations. Just like in Figma, you're going to make something on the first go, and you're probably not going to like it all that much. So, you're going to try something else, and again, and again, and again. And this process can go on for hours until finally you see a direction that resonates with you and feels like the design that you want. And from there, you're going to iterate. Mess around with the spacing, with the fonts, with the layouts. This feedback loop is your chance to breathe a real personality into everything that you make. And whether we're talking about designing with AI or just designing by hand in Figma, this is equally true. Especially with important designs like your homepage, you should expect to spend many hours or even days making it perfect. To sum all of this up, you need to understand what role AI plays in your workflow. AI is just a tool for execution, and you are the creative director. It's your job to tell AI what looks good and what looks bad. Once you start treating yourself like the creative director and AI like your execution team, you're going to start getting real, professional work out of AI every time you use it. And that is why being the creative human in the loop is probably the most valuable skill you can have right now as a designer. Execution has become a commodity. If you send your parents a link to Lovable, they could probably build a website in just a few hours. And if you asked them how they think that website would look, they would probably tell you they think it looks great. But you as a designer would immediately be able to tell and recognize that the design is generic, that it lacks soul, and that it's following nothing but statistical averages. You as the designer possess the power not just to build anything, but to build something with real personality. Only humans know what humans want, and no robot can ever replace that. Maybe anyone can build anything, but not everyone has taste. Thanks to AI, the value of your taste as a designer has just gone up. Two types of people are emerging, one of which tells AI to do something, gets the output, and calls it okay. And then you have people who direct their AI with real creative vision. Your job isn't to make AI a good designer. Your job is to know what good design looks like and refuse to accept anything less. You as the human are the differentiator, and that's the whole point.