The Slop Isn't the Models

Everyone’s tired of AI slop in design. I get it. The flat illustrations all look the same. The landing pages read like nobody wrote them. The component libraries feel like a Tailwind starter someone forgot to edit. And no, Stitch doesn’t fix it. But the slop didn’t come from the models. It came from the gap between people who design and people who build. That’s the training data in a nutshell. AI just made the gap obvious. This is the bit I want to sit with for a minute, because most of the discourse skips past it. The complaint is always pointed at the tool. The tool is generating bad work. The tool has bad taste. The tool is killing craft. And I think that’s wrong, or at least it’s the easy version of a harder thing to say. The harder thing is that a lot of design work was already mediocre. A lot of components were already copied without understanding. A lot of layouts were already pulled from the same six dribbble shots. We just didn’t notice because the cost of producing mediocre…