By John Semley
Publication Date: 2026-06-05 09:00:00
As a public backlash As the apparent ubiquity of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to eradicate—and reject—telltale signs of its use continues.
To my dismay, one of the first casualties were hyphens – a great and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” which is supposed to seem rhythmic, but often comes across as predictable, hacky, and stale. And of course there are the clunky grammatical constructions of the “not X, but Y” variety.
Now, certain fonts and typefaces—particularly serifs—seem to define (and betray) AI, both in actual software and in Vibe-coded design boilerplates. Some call it “tasteslop,” the result of efforts to make generative AI designs appear superficially sophisticated or posh.
Moving away from sleeker, flashier computerized fonts is something that San Francisco Bay Area author, designer and type practitioner Keya Vadgama advocates…
