How to make AI designs look less like AI

The biggest problem I have with AI tools is that everything they make has that look.

You know the one. AI slop. It’s hard to explain if you’re not a designer. The thing works, it’s not broken, it just feels generic. Something’s off and you can’t point at what. Making AI designs look less like AI starts with being able to name what’s actually wrong.

Claude does one of the best jobs at avoiding this. Especially Fable 5.1 which just came out. Still not perfect though. And even if it was, every brand has its own style. You probably have your own style. Getting AI to match that is hard when you don’t have design skills yourself.

So I’ve built my own system for it. Three steps.

1. Let the AI build whatever it wants

Don’t think about design at the start. Just describe what you want and let it go. Let it figure out how things should work and how they should look. You need something on screen before you can improve anything.

2. Run design prompts over the top

Then use prompts or skills to modify what it made. There are loads of these online, free and paid.

3. Refine it

This is the part people skip because it takes the longest. It’s also the part that does the most.

AI gets you from zero to 80% incredibly fast. You’ll have something working in minutes. Then like anything in life it’s the last 20% that drags. The finer details. That’s the bit that makes something look designed instead of generated.

A real example

I had Claude build me a design directory. Tools, apps, fonts, icons, that sort of thing. It did a decent job. I used Fable 5.1 and I think if I’d used an older model it would have come out even more generic.

But it still had those tells. The ones you wouldn’t notice unless you’ve been staring at interfaces for years.

A good friend of mine put together UI Design Course. He’s an amazing designer and he’s put decades of experience into it. I wish this existed when I started. I’ve been doing UI design for well over 10 years now and when I was learning there was nowhere to just go and learn this stuff properly.

What I like is that it’s all reference, not rules. Design is subjective. You can make it look how you like. It just gives you the guidelines and the reasoning behind why things look the way they do.

The really powerful part is the AI prompts included in it. I probably shouldn’t be showing this because I paid for it. Go into the modules, last lesson of each one, and there’s a prompt you can copy straight into your agent.

So I grabbed the typography one and pasted it into Claude. I told it to keep the original design and build a second version next to it so I could compare them back to back.

Version two didn’t look that different at first. Fonts a bit larger, more consistent, more legible. The clearest change was the search bar. Version one had plain text sitting in it, version two was greyer and more unified. Very minor. Typography is something AI is thankfully getting much better at, so a prompt like that just adds finesse.

Then I ran the spacing and layout prompt over version two. Again, minor. Version one was compact, version two had more room, bigger fonts, more space between things.

What I changed to make it look less like AI

And this is completely okay by the way. If a prompt does something and you want to change it, change it. The prompt is a starting point, not the finish.

I actually preferred the smaller fonts from version one. It’s a directory. I want it compact so people can scan it. So I scaled the whole UI back down.

Then the emojis. AI loves emojis. They were all over the design and I think it’s one of the quickest ways to make a UI look cheap. I’m not sure where this style came from or why people think it looks good. Removed all of them.

Borders next. I genuinely don’t understand this one. Why does every button have a border. Why do the cards have borders. Why is there a border there. It looks horrendous. Gone.

Then the purple. AI cannot leave purple alone. No idea why. Gone.

After that it was small stuff. The icons on each link were centred against the whole link, so I aligned them with the name instead. Made them smaller, then smaller again. Took the uppercase off the link text. Tightened the gap between the nav and the list. There was a diamond sitting there for no reason, so that went too. Made the lists wider, gave them more padding, pulled them closer together.

Last change was a masonry layout so the lists fill the gaps instead of each one starting on its own line. Some people like the gaps. That’s fine, this is where it comes down to personal preference.

15 minutes, give or take.

The biggest issue with AI agents is that the foundation they start from is random. AI works off an average. It’s giving you the average of everything it found online, so every design comes out average and everything ends up looking the same. Spend a bit of time on the details and you can pull it well out of that.

The other thing I’d say is go and look at stuff you like. I use an app called Eagle to save inspiration. Website elements, videos, images, anything I come across that looks good. Look at what’s out there, use it as reference, apply it to your own work. Over time that becomes your own style.

Version one looked cheap and generic to me. Version two looks cleaner and classier. Same content, 15 minutes apart.

There’s no colour in mine. That’s just me, I like blacks and greys. You could put an accent colour in easily. For a directory I’d rather the content did the talking anyway. It needs to be legible with the information condensed so you can go through the lists quickly.

If you care about how your stuff looks there’s a huge amount of good information out there and most of it is free. And if you’re running a business and don’t have time for any of it, me and my team can help with that.