AI-built layouts have tells, and once you see them you can’t unsee them. The biggest one is the three-sentence-fragment headline, way too long for the type treatment it’s sitting in. Then the all-caps headlines: a headline should almost never be all caps, and never across two lines except in rare cases. Light italic eyebrows that fail accessibility before they fail taste. Buttons that are over-padded and chunky. Little star accents sprinkled everywhere. Put it together and you get a very specific look, Squarespace circa 2015, the live-laugh-love of web design.
None of it is broken. It’s serviceable. That’s exactly the problem, it lands at ‘competent default’ and stops, because the model is averaging toward what most sites already do. Taste is the thing that pushes past the average, and the average is precisely what these tells expose.
What’s the giveaway that tells you a design was made on autopilot?