Hacker News Reader

Comment by adithyassekhar | Hacker News Reader

The fonts the layouts it all screams claude at me.

I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.

Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)

The sepia-tinted color scheme and the way LLMs overuse rounded corner tiles to the absolute death is part of it. Really what it comes down to, is that these LLMs have a design vocabulary of like 15 traits. None of the websites they generate have every single trait, but they are composed of some subset of 10 such traits, so it's still overwhelmingly obvious the moment you open the page, even though each one is slightly different. Humans might use 1~5 of those traits, but they'll also be mixed in with a much wider set of traits with more individuality to them.

I tried to list all the traits I could think of:

- Orange/beige-ish colors - Rounded corners - Cards with a thin border - A thicker colored border on the left of cards - Serif font for headings - Monospace fonts for small text - Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading - Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left - Obviously LLM-generated text / language

I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!

That left side border is a plague…

The copy is usually a bit of a giveaway too, ”explore your future path to greatness and experience the defining divider between those who can and those who can’t” or as most humans would write the header ”plans”.

It's a set of properties/attributes commonly referred to as "style" (generic, not the CSS one). Or call it look & feel.

So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".

Most AI-generated sites have coopted the Inter font, and usually they go for a dark colour scheme, the rounded tiles, a container representing a macOS-styled terminal with code, and, the thing that annoys me the most, divs that fade is as you scroll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com