Appreciate the effort but these demos have really quickly become so boring. If you can design an entire website with the AI tools, it appears its almost certainly a website you don't need to create in the first place. Either it has already essentially been made by somebody who actually understood and cared about the code, or it's such a trivial mix of stuff you're better off making a squarespace site or whatever. At least that is hardened and tested as a product.
Like, we should maybe give pause to the fact that this is at least the 20th demo specifically about "making a website." If this technology is so powerful, saves so much time, democratizes the profession so much, etc why are the demos all the same? Either people are unimaginative, which they are not, or perhaps this is pretty much what we can get from this in general.
Coding involve care and inspiration, and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again, even if youre getting the AI to do the reinvention for you.
But beyond any principled thoughts, just not seeing the returns here that people are trying to get me to see. Lots of laymen have been making wonderful websites for 30 years. Its cool the computer knows what css people have been using for those decades, but it only makes brittle uninspired things that only incidentally work.
I'd really like to know, beyond the hype, if any serious engineers have actually used this stuff for an extended amount of time. Ive tried and tried to use it and convince myself its helping me, but it just leads to so much frustration with the hallucinations and misunderstandings and schizophrenic comprehension of its own context..
give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls.
Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data).
A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall.
>and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again
You are definitely right that most code is banal and glue, and that is indeed why the models, or this one at least, seems to be best suited to regurgitate it and change the names of your variables.
I guess I still don't see your main point though. There are plenty of tested and compliant style frameworks out there that have figured this stuff out, and they will do it better than whatever Stackoverflow example the AI gives you. If you dont have time to really think about and learn deep or even basic web design, such that you don't spend so much time on your padding, there are a wealth of frameworks and products and tools and templates that solve that problem with intentionality and some basic assurances. From the highest level of squarespace to free coding courses, there is an entire spectrum to meet you halfway.
It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others. Which is fine! And if this stuff helps you do your drudgery, that's fine too. But I would just say that you could work even smarter than this (presumably you are using it ).
I would wager using the right dumb tools will in the long run save you more time and enthusiasm than all this, and you will make better stuff, even its "boring" or bad to you. It's a wager I could see losing, at least with the time part, but I'd still make it.
I fully agree that something like this will help keep the bullshit glue we make for our bosses pumping, but is that really something to be so excited for as people are?
While I don't disagree with you largely. What a really nasty way to say it no? It's true a lot of what happens is boilerplate API calls and copy pasting of solved problems. AI is making that happen a lot faster, however the parent comment also has some good points. If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. It would be nice to see something more exciting because this is the Nth version of "AI made a thing" I have seen.
I love how every person on the VR website is wearing a completely different headset. It's just haphazardly throwing together vague associations of "VR." It doesn't understand anything.
It's an amazing achievement of AI research, but we're not anywhere close to AI replacing humans in any kind of engineering discipline.
A giant leap for AI but a step backward for man. We're gonna see code quality decline due to people thinking they can let the AI do it. Most importantly, we'll probably see an uptick in vulnerabilities.
He could've made it the same headset using one of the standard tools for defining a specific object to get consistency across images (Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, hypernetworks, LoRA etc etc). I'm sure Midjourney supports something for that purpose, he just didn't use it.
Here is my example. In the last two weeks I have rewritten, from scratch, one of my genomics pipelines which can analyse 1000 clinical exomes in a few hours to return candidate genetic causes of rare disease.
* 42 scripts/programs.
* 3694 lines of code.
* Several languages.
* Process raw fastq data up to germline variant calling.
* Using high-performance computing cluster.
* Process vcf data into clinical variant interpretation.
* Options for custom filtering strategies.
* Statistical analysis and logs.
* Replaced several mainstream tools that are difficult to manage.
Final results:
1. This work was ~6-10x times faster.
2. I probably would not have rewritten this better version as it would have taken too long.
3. Instead of getting stuck at any difficult impasse I can get context-specific alternatives and testable example code.
Because new-developer market is huge. There are more beginner/intermediate developers than seniors by a large margin. It gets the clicks.
As an anecdote our technical blogs covering vital industry techniques and news get like 10% of the readers of our introduction blogs do. I'd imagine the best selling progamming books are the ones aimed at beginners too.
While such examples are no doubt impressive, I haven't seen these AI tools do anything that couldn't otherwise be achieved by following a simple online tutorial. Bootstrap a fresh project, write hello world or fizzbuzz-equivalent code in a random programming language, generate a landing page...all of these tasks have long been commodified and aren't exactly worth big money. So I'm not scared for my job just yet.
"But one day they will..."
Maybe, maybe not. AI could take over the world, or it could easily be that we are seeing the very peak of what generative models can do. It is impossible to extrapolate the current state of the tech 5/10/20 years into the future and make predictions based on where you think it will be. Look at self driving tech for a close comparison. Research has been plateauing for 5+ years and the tech is even going backward now due to safety concerns.
That's not true about self driving research plateauing. Tesla, Waymo and Cruise have all made significant progress in the last five years.
What other categories of high tech reached their absolute peak right when everyone started to notice them? We can extrapolate because there are clear trends. And a long history of inventing new things when we hit a bottleneck.
It's like someone looking at a car in the early 1900s and saying "this may be the peak of automotive technology, who knows".
> What other categories of high tech reached their absolute peak right when everyone started to notice them?
Just in the last decade – crypto/blockchain/web3, VR/AR, metaverse, smart glasses, 3D TVs, foldable phones, modular phones, chatbots, hyperloop, package delivery robots/drones.
Every single one of these areas had all the top tech talent behind it, billions in VC funding, flashy demos and outsized public hype, but ultimately they all fizzled out due to technology barriers or lack of demand or a real use case.
Actual world-changing innovations may seem obvious in hindsight, but every grand prediction and bet about the future of tech is a lot more likely to fail than succeed.
> It's like someone looking at a car in the early 1900s and saying "this may be the peak of automotive technology, who knows".
And that may have been a fair assessment for the time without the benefit of a crystal ball. Someone else who said the same thing when looking at blimps was 100% correct. In fact if you asked people of that time where the future of transportation would go, a large majority would have said "flying cars", because that was the obvious technological evolution at the time just as self driving tech is for us right now.
OK somehow I've become blasé with text and image generation. (I shouldn't be, but hey)
What impressed me was the possibility you used AI to produce a responsive HTML structure and somehow assembled all the assets..... but from what I can tell this was still done manually, even if using a template.
It's funny how I am no longer amazed by these generated images. They are amazing. Yet I am still skeptical AI can assemble assets and html from scratch :)
> you're talking to a computer in English ffs and it not only understands you, it goes away and does useful work.
Google has “understood” English queries for a while now in the sense that you can type a question in English into the search bar and it goes off and does “useful work”.
The problem with these AI implementations is that it goes off and does work, but not always useful work. In many cases it’s wrong. In many cases the result is below entry-level.
In those times where it can pass a structured test like a bar exam, then absolutely praise it and get curious about how it can add value to people’s lives.
But in this instance, it couldn’t pass a CS 101 or Design 101 class. It’s on its way, but these claims of being able to use AI to create websites are premature.
At this pace we might be there in a few years or even months, but right now the quality is lacking from any demo I’ve seen and in my own attempts as a designer to use it in the design process.
> the skepticism and the general dismissive tone on HN baffles me.
I think that it comes from having high expectations. It took me four or five questions until Open AI chat started to write lies, and half trues. When talking with it I feel like a teacher trying to get the correct answer from a student that does not get it. I give it cues, tips, bound the answer and yet it manages to get things wrong.
So, the worst part of Open AI chat is that it gets very boring to work with after the first awe.
It is a great piece of technology, it is impressive. But as a product it is dull. And I need to double check its answer with Google each time, so why bother?
Using Chat AI for Bing is like using blockchain for cryptocurrencies. It is a solution looking for a problem. Bing is the wrong answer, people should accept that and look for better uses for it. They are out there for sure.
If it's remarkable you're easily impressed or you don't know about its shortcomings.
Likely it'll remain an engine for parlor tricks and infinite "demos" for foreseeable future, the many critical mistakes it makes make it impractical (you can't trust any information it outputs without verifying yourself it's not a hallucination again). After all the more text you autocomplete, the more text you need to check.
You're making it sound as if it's something comparable to the development of the Internet in its impact.
It can do it, the challenge is the amount of markup. I have a system that can do it given a template. Which you can generate or manipulate the JSON with the content using the AI, but the template doesn't really fit in memory. Although something like pug.js would fit for a lot of templates but is a security issue.
I'm still baffled how so many people are willing to gloss over all the heavy lifting the user has to do to glue all this together. Organizing a project is still and always has been the majority of the work!
It'd probably take them a lot longer to learn to make the images than to organize a project (which is something they already know how to do). Doubly so for the video clip.
Plus this was mostly copy/paste - that's not heavy lifting!
That "heavy lifting" of stitching, isn't usually where most of the time is spent.
Most projects involve vast time sucks related to many of the parts. All the subtasks that become mini projects of their own. Like creating even one original piece of artwork that you really like.
In this case, the mini projects got automated, transforming the main project into a mini project.
The quality/time improvement here is significant, even for a little project like this.
It's so close to being decent but if you lack the design sensibilities to see it through and guide the process, it's kind of a mess.
People think AI is going to bridge some talent disparity between designers and developers vs non-technical types (and it probably will someday). But currently, AI is just acting like an infinity gauntlet with the designers and developers still holding all the stones.
As per the article the AI tools did not design or create the website. The website was created using a visual building tool (webflow).
Various AI tools were used for the website copy, stock images, picking of fonts, 80s color scheme, intro video and the JavaScript required to embed the video.
"I haven’t found a workaround for this yet but I can imagine this would be a game changer if future improvements allow precise blending placement from one image to another."
ControlNet allows you to sketch or use a pre-existing sketch to then use as the basis for image generation. Allows for very, ahem, /stable/ variations between different sub-prompts.
It's entertaining to have an AI create a fantasy web page for a fantasy product that's clearly not serious. Entertaining but I see it sooooo much now that it's kind of wearing off.
However I'd like to see AI create a web page for an product that's appealing and plausible. This would be closer to seeing if the AI as a human replacement or not.
I used to run a design agency catering to tech startups. I’ve tried dozens of times to produce something that looks better than a free template for a personal site or a tech startup and came up well short every time.
Readit News
Like, we should maybe give pause to the fact that this is at least the 20th demo specifically about "making a website." If this technology is so powerful, saves so much time, democratizes the profession so much, etc why are the demos all the same? Either people are unimaginative, which they are not, or perhaps this is pretty much what we can get from this in general.
Coding involve care and inspiration, and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again, even if youre getting the AI to do the reinvention for you.
But beyond any principled thoughts, just not seeing the returns here that people are trying to get me to see. Lots of laymen have been making wonderful websites for 30 years. Its cool the computer knows what css people have been using for those decades, but it only makes brittle uninspired things that only incidentally work.
I'd really like to know, beyond the hype, if any serious engineers have actually used this stuff for an extended amount of time. Ive tried and tried to use it and convince myself its helping me, but it just leads to so much frustration with the hallucinations and misunderstandings and schizophrenic comprehension of its own context..
give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls.
Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data).
A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall.
>and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again
you must be new to the job.
I guess I still don't see your main point though. There are plenty of tested and compliant style frameworks out there that have figured this stuff out, and they will do it better than whatever Stackoverflow example the AI gives you. If you dont have time to really think about and learn deep or even basic web design, such that you don't spend so much time on your padding, there are a wealth of frameworks and products and tools and templates that solve that problem with intentionality and some basic assurances. From the highest level of squarespace to free coding courses, there is an entire spectrum to meet you halfway.
It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others. Which is fine! And if this stuff helps you do your drudgery, that's fine too. But I would just say that you could work even smarter than this (presumably you are using it ).
I would wager using the right dumb tools will in the long run save you more time and enthusiasm than all this, and you will make better stuff, even its "boring" or bad to you. It's a wager I could see losing, at least with the time part, but I'd still make it.
I fully agree that something like this will help keep the bullshit glue we make for our bosses pumping, but is that really something to be so excited for as people are?
I think that says a lot more about the code you perceive than it does about what coding happens in the world.
It's an amazing achievement of AI research, but we're not anywhere close to AI replacing humans in any kind of engineering discipline.
A giant leap for AI but a step backward for man. We're gonna see code quality decline due to people thinking they can let the AI do it. Most importantly, we'll probably see an uptick in vulnerabilities.
* 42 scripts/programs.
* 3694 lines of code.
* Several languages.
* Process raw fastq data up to germline variant calling.
* Using high-performance computing cluster.
* Process vcf data into clinical variant interpretation.
* Options for custom filtering strategies.
* Statistical analysis and logs.
* Replaced several mainstream tools that are difficult to manage.
Final results:
1. This work was ~6-10x times faster.
2. I probably would not have rewritten this better version as it would have taken too long.
3. Instead of getting stuck at any difficult impasse I can get context-specific alternatives and testable example code.
As an anecdote our technical blogs covering vital industry techniques and news get like 10% of the readers of our introduction blogs do. I'd imagine the best selling progamming books are the ones aimed at beginners too.
"But one day they will..."
Maybe, maybe not. AI could take over the world, or it could easily be that we are seeing the very peak of what generative models can do. It is impossible to extrapolate the current state of the tech 5/10/20 years into the future and make predictions based on where you think it will be. Look at self driving tech for a close comparison. Research has been plateauing for 5+ years and the tech is even going backward now due to safety concerns.
What other categories of high tech reached their absolute peak right when everyone started to notice them? We can extrapolate because there are clear trends. And a long history of inventing new things when we hit a bottleneck.
It's like someone looking at a car in the early 1900s and saying "this may be the peak of automotive technology, who knows".
Just in the last decade – crypto/blockchain/web3, VR/AR, metaverse, smart glasses, 3D TVs, foldable phones, modular phones, chatbots, hyperloop, package delivery robots/drones.
Every single one of these areas had all the top tech talent behind it, billions in VC funding, flashy demos and outsized public hype, but ultimately they all fizzled out due to technology barriers or lack of demand or a real use case.
Actual world-changing innovations may seem obvious in hindsight, but every grand prediction and bet about the future of tech is a lot more likely to fail than succeed.
> It's like someone looking at a car in the early 1900s and saying "this may be the peak of automotive technology, who knows".
And that may have been a fair assessment for the time without the benefit of a crystal ball. Someone else who said the same thing when looking at blimps was 100% correct. In fact if you asked people of that time where the future of transportation would go, a large majority would have said "flying cars", because that was the obvious technological evolution at the time just as self driving tech is for us right now.
Sure we're now (100 years later) moving to computer steering and rare-earth elements batteries but the 4 wheels remain!
We have peaks in technology, then tend to profit before the innovation restarts - when profits sink.
Would love to see you produce photo-realistic art by "following a simple online tutorial"
What impressed me was the possibility you used AI to produce a responsive HTML structure and somehow assembled all the assets..... but from what I can tell this was still done manually, even if using a template.
It's funny how I am no longer amazed by these generated images. They are amazing. Yet I am still skeptical AI can assemble assets and html from scratch :)
the skepticism and the general dismissive tone on HN baffles me.
you're talking to a computer in English ffs and it not only understands you, it goes away and does useful work.
literal science fiction 5 years ago, and now it's somehow: yawn <insert random nitpick>????
talk about hard to impress!
Google has “understood” English queries for a while now in the sense that you can type a question in English into the search bar and it goes off and does “useful work”.
The problem with these AI implementations is that it goes off and does work, but not always useful work. In many cases it’s wrong. In many cases the result is below entry-level.
In those times where it can pass a structured test like a bar exam, then absolutely praise it and get curious about how it can add value to people’s lives.
But in this instance, it couldn’t pass a CS 101 or Design 101 class. It’s on its way, but these claims of being able to use AI to create websites are premature.
At this pace we might be there in a few years or even months, but right now the quality is lacking from any demo I’ve seen and in my own attempts as a designer to use it in the design process.
I think that it comes from having high expectations. It took me four or five questions until Open AI chat started to write lies, and half trues. When talking with it I feel like a teacher trying to get the correct answer from a student that does not get it. I give it cues, tips, bound the answer and yet it manages to get things wrong.
So, the worst part of Open AI chat is that it gets very boring to work with after the first awe.
It is a great piece of technology, it is impressive. But as a product it is dull. And I need to double check its answer with Google each time, so why bother?
Using Chat AI for Bing is like using blockchain for cryptocurrencies. It is a solution looking for a problem. Bing is the wrong answer, people should accept that and look for better uses for it. They are out there for sure.
Likely it'll remain an engine for parlor tricks and infinite "demos" for foreseeable future, the many critical mistakes it makes make it impractical (you can't trust any information it outputs without verifying yourself it's not a hallucination again). After all the more text you autocomplete, the more text you need to check.
You're making it sound as if it's something comparable to the development of the Internet in its impact.
Less about any dismissive tone I may have, and more about your terse jumping-in defending computerz.
Plus this was mostly copy/paste - that's not heavy lifting!
Most projects involve vast time sucks related to many of the parts. All the subtasks that become mini projects of their own. Like creating even one original piece of artwork that you really like.
In this case, the mini projects got automated, transforming the main project into a mini project.
The quality/time improvement here is significant, even for a little project like this.
People think AI is going to bridge some talent disparity between designers and developers vs non-technical types (and it probably will someday). But currently, AI is just acting like an infinity gauntlet with the designers and developers still holding all the stones.
Various AI tools were used for the website copy, stock images, picking of fonts, 80s color scheme, intro video and the JavaScript required to embed the video.
ControlNet allows you to sketch or use a pre-existing sketch to then use as the basis for image generation. Allows for very, ahem, /stable/ variations between different sub-prompts.
However I'd like to see AI create a web page for an product that's appealing and plausible. This would be closer to seeing if the AI as a human replacement or not.
The high quality designs I have seen were for:
* Nike shoes
* Jetskis
* A donut shop
AI web design is not ready for prime time yet.
Perhaps this is already happening but the dogs aren't blogging about it.
/s
> take this saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're an AI" and draw an AI at a desktop with a computer on the desk
And it gave me this https://pasteboard.co/iMULQjodCxtY.png
Not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...