In this case they really are, and you can read the guidelines that helped create the site on the site itself in the skills: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/skills/site...

Scroll down to the "Establish the visual direction" section.

Because most AI generated websites are from people who don't know much and as such cannot even articulate the look they want

It can be enraging. Checkout https://tinkeri.ng/ - I just added a layout-switcher "Neubrutalism" at top right. The existing theme is standard fare. Both look alright. I told C3PO to follow the guidelines set at https://neubrutalism.com and lessen the shadows.

I have to say, having a background in doing detailed design work makes it much easier to write the right prompt. Also, having the ability to deliver a theme-switcher like this is very handy. There is a tradeoff. Adding this switching took about 1hr 10mins. Last 10% of the result always the most time-consuming.

Dark/light switching is also important.

If I had built this from the ground up manually, I could implement my own design and fiddle with things on a minute level but this type of granularity gets lost when building at speed.

I keep seeing comments like this, and having messed around and generated a few (non-public) websites myself they all looked completely different?

Mind you I don’t spend a lot of time on ai generated websites or the kinds of places you might find those. Well except for HN but you get my point.

I think these guideline are built into the llms. After all with llms, any decision you don't take will be taken for you. For a so called slop site (Simon's words, not mine :P) I don't think they specified a style so the llm just decided the default it knows. One day I will run experiments (when I can afford it) trying to identify the "taste" of different llms.