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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> [...]
> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.
> [...]
> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.
> [...]
> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.
It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.
And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.
In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.
There've been stylistic fads before LLMs where a thing, with results just as chalkboard-screech-inducing as the current one. That this one is just a button-push away does make it worse, though, because it proliferates so greedily.
Bad writing is bad writing, and writing like an LLM is writing like an LLM. We should be able to call this out. In fact, calling out the human responsibility in it is the very opposite of dehumanizing to me.
The whole corpus is in there, but the standard style is tuned for.
> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about novelty of talking to a machine
Which of course doesn't connect to the rest of the article contents, because the AI doesn't have any intention in its writing.
This sums up everything driving the tech sector right now. From execs at big tech to nobodies on X.
EDIT; if I think about the nature of it. The visibility fight is the decreasing attention with increasing channels and noise. Visibility tactics go to the extreme. And the fear of looking behind comes from the previous tech cycles and the thoughts around what if you had missed those? And maybe those with the most fear are the ones that did.
It's always been like this. I used to build websites in the 90s and it was exactly like that. It was also horrible. People who had no tech background whatsoever making decisions on which tech to use (PHP vs ASP vs ColdFusion, remember those?); overpaying agencies to make HTML "templates" that had to have round corners everywhere. Etc.
Not everything's great today, but it's a little less bad I think.
The consultants apparently had the bot load and fed it an immediate prompt which greeted the user. This was happening on every page load. Bad consultants, bad bot.
Obviously it just a script embedded in the page, so it has not actual place in the design. So the effect, especially on mobile, is this dance of starting to read a page, have it obscured by annoying popups, and trying (and failing) to close the popup with the hidden 12x12 pixels x button.
Just like the entire ads market, it’s all forgery to drive up clicks so owners can say to the clients that there is interaction.
Don’t get me started on the recent YouTube ads on iPad that place a banner that sits on top of the video, hiding subtitles, and closing it is behind a menu that requires you to be a brain surgeon specialist in order to interact with, instead of clicking the ad itself. I currently have 15 tabs in safari for ads that I inadvertently clicked.
Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.
I'm not witch-hunting, there are just a lot of witches.