AI tools let anyone build a website in minutes, but without a human editor, they produce a sea of purple gradients, pointless animations, and forgettable brands.
The New Homogeneity
Raphael Shod, a visiting partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of the calendar tool Cron (acquired by Notion), recently tweeted about a pattern he noticed: startup landing pages are starting to look eerily similar. Purple gradients everywhere. Sections that fade in as you scroll. Hover effects that do nothing useful. This isn't a coincidence—it's a direct consequence of how AI design tools work.
LLMs are trained on the most-linked, most-praised examples on the web. When a clever design trend emerges—say, a purple gradient hero section—it gets copied into the model's latent space. Within weeks, every new startup site built with AI tools inherits that same look. What was once a distinctive choice becomes a default. The problem isn't that purple gradients are bad; it's that they've lost all meaning. A visitor who sees the same visual language on five different landing pages in one day won't remember any of them.
When Animations Backfire
The most common AI-generated animations are also the most counterproductive. Take the line that follows your cursor down the page, as seen on new.ai. It's technically impressive—an SVG path that tracks scroll position—but it distracts from the content. The visitor's attention is pulled toward the line instead of the product's value proposition. Similarly, many sites now feature buttons that chase the cursor around the screen. Get Crux's "Talk to Founders" button moves as you scroll, making it harder to click. The effect is memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Scroll-jacking is another hallmark of AI-assisted design. Sites like Zarna AI lock the scroll to a fixed speed, forcing visitors through a slow, choreographed animation before they can see the next section. This feels like wading through molasses. Users already know how to scroll; they don't need a forced reveal. Worse, fade-in animations on a timer often cause content to appear after the visitor has already scrolled past it, leaving them with blank space and confusion.
Hover effects are particularly revealing. On new.ai, hovering over a navigation link makes it fade out instead of pop. That's the opposite of what a hover should do—it should invite a click, not hide the option. Shod notes that the browser already provides a free hover indicator: the cursor turns into a hand. Adding a CSS effect should amplify that affordance, not undermine it. Revealing critical functionality only on hover is an anti-pattern, especially since hover doesn't exist on mobile.
The Hallucination of Interaction
Some AI-generated interfaces feel like visual hallucinations. On Sphinx's site, a carousel of product screenshots uses three different button styles that morph and reposition with every click. One moment it's a star-shaped button, the next it's a circle, then a rounded rectangle. The entire section is a click target, but the buttons suggest discrete actions that don't exist. It's confusing—a user can't tell what's interactive or what the animation is trying to communicate.
Another common pattern: multiple visual styles within a single page. Build Zero's dashboard mockup uses the classic red-yellow-green-blue palette that every fake dashboard seems to have. The icons are darker versions of the background color, making them hard to read. These are the defaults that LLMs fall back on because they lack original visual thinking. The result is a site that feels generic and untrustworthy. As Shod puts it, "If your landing page looks like it was built by AI, customers might wonder if the product was too."
The Cost of Convenience
The ease of AI design comes with a hidden cost: loss of brand identity. When every startup uses the same tools, their sites converge on a narrow set of patterns. The purple gradient, the bento-box grid of features, the fade-in scroll animation—these are now the visual equivalent of lorem ipsum. They signal that the founder didn't invest time in thinking about what makes their company unique.
This homogenization also affects credibility. A visitor who sees a site that looks like ten others might assume the product is equally derivative. The site is often the first impression a potential customer or investor has of a company. If it screams "AI slop," the product's perceived quality drops. Founders who spend weeks perfecting their core offering should not undermine it with a generic landing page.
How to Use AI Without Losing Your Soul
The solution isn't to abandon AI tools—they're too powerful for that. Instead, founders must become editors. Shod recommends treating the AI's output as a first draft, not a final product. QA every interaction. Check for bugs like menus that disappear between scroll positions or buttons that don't work. Test on mobile. Ensure the value proposition is clear above the fold: who is it for, what does it do, and why should they care?
Start with your brand, not with the AI. Choose a color palette and typography that reflect your company's personality before you generate anything. Feed those constraints into the tool. Use AI to implement your vision, not to invent one. The most impressive sites in the review—like Noo-Noo's card hover animations—used AI to execute a creative idea that reinforced the brand. The animation wasn't there for its own sake; it made the product's multiplayer value tangible.
Finally, remember that a landing page is a customer acquisition channel, not an art project. Every element should serve conversion. If a hover effect, animation, or gradient doesn't help a visitor understand the product faster or trust it more, remove it. The goal is to dazzle customers with your product, not with your ability to generate SVG transforms.
The Bottom Line
AI design tools are a superpower, but they require a responsible user. The founders who will win are those who use AI to accelerate their own thinking, not replace it. They will QA like maniacs, reject generic patterns, and insist on originality. They will understand that a website that looks like everyone else's is a website that no one remembers.
As Shod says, "You are now the editor." The AI can generate a hundred variations in seconds. Your job is to choose the one that tells your story. That's the difference between a site that converts and one that just fades in.