> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.
> [...]
> 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.
Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate.
In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.
Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all.
They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM.
Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing.
This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts.
I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write.
Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT.
Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out.
LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.
Any style can cross the border into bad and get in the way of itself when it's turned up to 11, no matter who wrote it.
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.
I wonder how much marketing copy has poisoned the "default" writing style of LLMs, it surely has those undertones of pitching a sale in an uncanny valley way.
None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like
> 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.
“It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind”
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.
"Adopt or be left behind" and the quality of the thing you're adopting relies heavily on how much training it receives by the users who are scared of being left behind.
My partner works at a nonprofit and they paid some consultant for a chat bot. The next month they were surprised they got a $2000 bill for the API use and at first wondered if the bot was really popular. The analytics reveled that very few conversations were happening.
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.
The amount of consultants that are very known and have large presence on developer communities and give a lot of talks and have no idea how to approach real world problems is impressive.
These chatbot and google login are my most hated feature of current web.
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.
I stress over this with my own website-for-work. If I make the developer’s version of my site, who am I talking to? Other devs. If I make the version that appeals to agencies and casual users, there’s a constant voice in my head trying to drag me back to something simpler, lighter, judging me for that threejs hero section. As with all things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the right balance. Web development sure is in a very strange place and transitioning hard right now - off topic but I’m seeing more and more people looking for work and fewer and fewer job postings, especially for freelancers like myself. But maybe I’m not advertising AI bot integrations hard enough.
I think an important subtlety here is that clients/‘normies’ look at different websites to us, so the taste in websites that they cultivate is different to ours.
> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.
> [...]
> 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.
Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate.
In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.
Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all.
They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM.
Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing.
This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts.
I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write.
Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT.
Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out.
https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-wi...
https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md
LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.
Any style can cross the border into bad and get in the way of itself when it's turned up to 11, no matter who wrote it.
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.
So I will say that things I read were not written in this style.
And people I read had better ability to not put in unneceasary random completely made up facts or illogical implications.
Only to a limited extent, the fine tuning of these models uses a much smaller more curated set to generate tone and defaults.
The whole corpus is in there, but the standard style is tuned for.
I wonder how much marketing copy has poisoned the "default" writing style of LLMs, it surely has those undertones of pitching a sale in an uncanny valley way.
None of that feels like AI smell to me despite the "it's not X it's Y" framing. I can't really explain why though.
None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like
> 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.
“It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind”
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.
> right now
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.
Well, the marketing from the AI companies is working.
Thats the clever nature of the companies. They are playing on peoples fear to drive adoption. Its a bit sickening to me
"Adopt or be left behind" and the quality of the thing you're adopting relies heavily on how much training it receives by the users who are scared of being left behind.
It’s FOMO and it works every couple of years because the execs who buy in are different to the last lot of execs who got promoted/canned.
My partner works at a nonprofit and they paid some consultant for a chat bot. The next month they were surprised they got a $2000 bill for the API use and at first wondered if the bot was really popular. The analytics reveled that very few conversations were happening.
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.
The amount of consultants that are very known and have large presence on developer communities and give a lot of talks and have no idea how to approach real world problems is impressive.
"Bad consultants" you mean, that's the average consultant
These chatbot and google login are my most hated feature of current web.
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.
The obvious solution is to implement a mock chatbot that answers from a set of pregenerated wrong answers. Noone will know the difference.
Genius.
> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content
Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.
Come on, this is clearly human-written People have been writing like this for very damn long
It isn't "clearly human-written" at all, the entire blog looks like LLM output, right from the very first post.
I'm not witch-hunting, there are just a lot of witches.
I stress over this with my own website-for-work. If I make the developer’s version of my site, who am I talking to? Other devs. If I make the version that appeals to agencies and casual users, there’s a constant voice in my head trying to drag me back to something simpler, lighter, judging me for that threejs hero section. As with all things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the right balance. Web development sure is in a very strange place and transitioning hard right now - off topic but I’m seeing more and more people looking for work and fewer and fewer job postings, especially for freelancers like myself. But maybe I’m not advertising AI bot integrations hard enough.
Are casual users crying out for ai chat bots? From my experience the only stakeholder pushing for those is the business themselves.
By casual users, I mean non technical people who might reasonably be on my website because they’re looking to commission work
I think an important subtlety here is that clients/‘normies’ look at different websites to us, so the taste in websites that they cultivate is different to ours.
Bring back lightbox!