As part of this pointless push, an “AI explain” button appeared on MDN articles. This terrible idea actually got pushed to production (bypassing the usual deploy steps) where it lasted less than a day.
You can read the havoc it wreaked in the short term. We’ll find out how much long-term damage it has done to trust in Mozilla and MDN.
This may be the worst use of a large language model I’ve seen since synthentic users (if you click that link, no it’s not a joke: “user research without the users” is what they’re actually proposing).
AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.
It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!
Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience:
But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.
Fray was what made me want to make websites:
I distinctly remember sites like prehensile tales, 0sil8 and the inimitable Fray triggering something in my brain that made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life.
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
Wake me up when we get to the plateau of productivity.
Language matters.
A large language model is as neutral as an AK-47.
The best of the web is under continuous attack from the technology that powers your generative “AI” tools.
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# Shared by Marty McGuire on Saturday, July 1st, 2023 at 1:55pm