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).
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.
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.
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
Three designers I know have been writing about large language models.
Please read Miriam’s latest blog post.
I’m trying to be open to changing my mind when presented with new evidence.
Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.
I listened to a day of talks on AI at UX Brighton, and I came away disappointed by what wasn’t mentioned.
1 Share
# Shared by Marty McGuire on Saturday, July 1st, 2023 at 1:55pm