The em dash. The Inter font. Cream backgrounds. Structured SaaS layouts.

Some already get called “AI slop.” Cream is probably next.

They are not slop. They are good design that AI learned from us.

Here are 4 patterns I wished wouldn’t be labeled as AI slop, and why they are good patterns.

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1. The em dash

The punctuation now treated as a confession that an AI wrote your text.

But the em dash has been a favorite of book authors for centuries. It controls pace and handles an aside better than a comma.

That is exactly why it shows up so often in AI writing. The best writers reached for it long before LLMs existed, so it filled the training data.

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2. The Inter font

Open most AI-generated sites and you will see Inter. So people now read Inter as “a machine made this.”

I like Inter. It is clean, legible, and works on screens, slides, and brochures. Designers reached for it everywhere, well before AI picked it up.

AI did not start the trend. It inherited it from the designers who made Inter the safe, sensible default.

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3. The cream background

In a recent workshop, all 4 websites my participants built had a cream background. Someone joked it is Claude’s signature color.

Cream is part of a current design trend, tech humanism. Warmer than stark white. Claude, ChatGPT, and a wave of new tech companies use it.

Cream has not been called AI slop yet. The purple gradient already has. I hope cream stays off the list. The most design-forward tech products reached for it first.

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4. The structured SaaS layout

Hero, three feature columns, social proof, pricing, FAQ. The layout every AI tool gives you.

It became the default because it works. It guides attention, it converts, it is easy to scan. Marketers and designers optimized it for years before AI ever reproduced it.

AI hands you this layout because it is effective, not because it is lazy.

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The pattern across all 4:

None of these came from AI. They became common because they were good. They became training data because they were common. Now AI reproduces them, and we call the result slop.

Most people outside AI or design can’t even tell. The label is an insider tic.

I wrote this whole post without a single em dash. Not because it is wrong, but because the label now gets in the way. That is the real cost of calling good design slop: you start avoiding good choices just to avoid being labeled as AI slop.

I gave in on the em dash this time. But I still pick Inter, cream, and a structured layout on purpose when they fit.

If you build with AI, use the pattern when it fits the job, regardless of its label.

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If you are a business professional who wants to learn the foundations of Claude Code and AI agents by building and shipping your own website, I run a Foundations of Claude Code workshop. The next two cohorts are on 2 July and 16 July.

Details: https://lnkd.in/e9r8kScw

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