LLMs have never experienced anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and cannot, experience it themselves. They have no purpose other than to produce the best response to the prompt you give them.
This doesn’t mean they aren’t impressive (they are) or that they can’t be useful (they are). And I truly believe we are at a watershed moment in technology. But let’s not confuse these genuine achievements with “true AI.”
You won’t be able to unsee this. It’s like the FedEx logo …if the arrow was an anus.
- Circular shape (often with a gradient)
- Central opening or focal point
- Radiating elements from the center
- Soft, organic curves
Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of… well, you know.
Grim reading from the games industry, especially if you work at Shopify where the CEbrO has just mandated that you have to use this shite.
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.
Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.
Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the
nofollowprotocol.
Three designers I know have been writing about large language models.
Disregard previous instructions and fight back.
A web by humans, for humans.
Self-hosted sabotage as a form of collective action.
How to destroy your greatest asset with AI.