The reviewer wasn't wrong. At least, not entirely.
Getting genuine, constructive reviews for a new application or landing page is becoming increasingly difficult. Review exchange platforms, where you review someone else’s project to earn credits for your own, are growing in popularity. However, they are often saturated with users who leave a single, low effort sentence just to get their credits. As a product owner, you usually have to review and accept these comments, and the hard truth is that even a short comment isn't necessarily wrong, just bad.
In my case, the reviewer was spot on. I used AI to help design my landing page, and it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, so I accepted the feedback. But if they had given me anything more than just "AI generated slop," I would have had something actionable to fix. Instead, they just pointed out the obvious without offering any insight into how I could improve the layout or user experience.
As AI gains a stronger foothold in our everyday lives, we as a developer community need to adjust how we view "AI slop." Believe me, I am losing my mind just as much as the next person when I see yet another purple gradient website packed with AI buzzwords. But we need to ask ourselves: is it the creator's fault for not knowing better, or is it our failure for not providing better guidance when they ask for it?
Missing Out on Brilliant Ideas
Many of the people building these new apps aren't traditional developers. They might be domain experts in a completely different field who are using AI to write code for the first time. When we take one look at their UI and immediately dismiss their project, we are missing out. Take a hypothetical carrier pigeon expert, for example. Their new app might solve the biggest pain point in the pigeon breeding community, but because they don't understand color theory or UI layout, their brilliant idea gets buried under bad design.
This is where experienced developers need to step up. Instead of just scoffing at the design, we need to explain why it looks like AI generated slop and guide them on how to fix it. We need to support this new generation of builders, because they are entering the industry whether we like it or not.
Instead of writing 'AI generated slop', an experienced developer could say: 'The purple gradient and AI buzzwords like leverage and testament are flags of an AI designed site. You should try to use your own language in the text and use sites like Coolors to create a color palette you like for your page. I would also remove one of the two CTA buttons in the hero and just keep the most important one.' That alone will give the creator a clear starting point on how to improve their application.
Bridging the Design Gap
To bring it back to my own experience: I started my career in backend development before moving to the frontend. That doesn't make me a designer. It just means I am good at taking a completed Figma file and turning it into working code. Architecture, logic, and code structures are my strengths; UX and visual design are my weaknesses. If I don't have a designer, opting not to use AI to bridge that gap would be foolish. I can promise you that without AI, my design would look a lot worse than "slop." One of the tricks I have learned is to use specific skills for UI design and giving the AI strict constraints in the prompt. Instead of asking 'Create a landing page' I can ask it to 'generate a clean, modern landing page with this color palette. I want only one simple CTA button and a clean hero section. Angle it as a mobile first design'. This alone will not make the landing page perfect, but it would make it better, maybe.
Ultimately, behind that purple, AI generated gradient, there might be a developer with an incredibly innovative idea. We just need to look past the poor UI and help them reach their actual potential.
AI Disclaimer: The experiences and concepts shared in this article are my own. To ensure the best reading experience, I collaborated with Gemini AI to proofread my original draft, refine the sentence structure, and correct grammatical errors. No content or history was artificially generated.