Chartjunk

Chartjunk names the category of visual elements that consume display space, attention, and cognitive processing without delivering data. Tufte coined the term in 1983 to describe the gridlines, hatching patterns, decorative borders, three-dimensional effects, drop shadows, and pictorial embellishments that had become standard features of statistical graphics in newspapers, corporate reports, and government publications. His argument was not that these elements were merely unattractive — though they usually were — but that they actively degraded the viewer's capacity to extract evidence from the display. The human perceptual system cannot distinguish data from decoration automatically; it processes all visual elements with roughly equal initial attention. When the decoration dominates, the signal is drowned. Applied to AI, chartjunk describes any element of generated output whose function is to perform fluency rather than transmit information.