I asked Bard to roast my landing page. And roast it did | Hacker News Reader

I asked Bard to roast my landing page. And roast it did

pasteboard.co

36 pointstanaylakhani31 comments

Ok, I'm sure Bard has a lot of negative comments about websites in its training set to draw upon, but the actual text doesn't have a lot to do with the site it was asked to "review" (https://betterstacks.com/). Two of the points are debatable (although the design looks pretty modern to me), but the call to action is definitely there: two buttons "Get started - its free!" (whoops, might want to fix that spelling mistake) and "Add to chrome" (maybe use uppercase?). So: like most things generated by LLMs, this looks impressive at first glance, but if you care to dig a bit deeper, it doesn't anymore...

Yeah agree with you there - it was a fun read though.

Absolubtely.

I think the page does have a lot of problems as well, but most of those are ones that bard can't really see. Things like cluttered images, and animated gifs that are halfway off the page when you initially arrive.

I agree on the call to action, it is definately there. Main improvement I'd really want to see would be a single, clear example of what it does. I get a sort-of gist, but for a tool whose main value proposition focuses on being better than other tools, I can't really see what it's actually like to use. I'd guess someone like myself is in the target audience for this but its hard to know enough to care about installing it

Actually now that I think about it, the "get started" leading straight into a login page is pretty rubbish. Probably get rid of that and just go with "add to chrome". Presumably you'll have to log in later anyways, but with the addon installed users have a bit more buy-in to complete the flow.

Given that it probably can't run JS to render the page, it might be finding the raw HTML similar to dated websites? If I turn on noscript, the page does not load.

OP's asking the blind to rate their painting and we're all surprised when they make it all up. Try it on a git repo, it performs much better.

I'm sure the LLM never actually "saw" the website but instead hallucinated a generic website roast.

Sure, here is a roast of your landing page:

BetterStacks.com: The landing page that's so bad, it's good.

Where do I start? The design is straight out of the early 2000s, the copy is cringeworthy, and the call to action is non-existent.

But that's what makes it so special. It's like a bad car accident: I can't look away.

Let's break it down:

Design: The design of your landing page is so outdated, it's almost nostalgic. The bright colors, the cheesy fonts, and the stock photos all scream "early 2000s." I'm surprised there's not a blinking neon sign saying "Welcome to the Internet!" Copy: The copy on your landing page is even worse than the design. It's full of clichés, buzzwords, and empty promises. For example, you claim that your product can "help you achieve your goals faster and easier than ever before." But you never actually explain what your product does or how it works. Call to action: The call to action on your landing page is non-existent. You never tell visitors what you want them to do, whether it's signing up for a free trial, downloading a white paper, or making a purchase. Overall, your landing page is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with landing pages. But that's okay. At least it's entertaining.

Here's a suggestion for improvement: Start over. Hire a professional designer and copywriter to create a landing page that is both visually appealing and persuasive. And don't forget to include a clear call to action.

But until then, I'll be back here, laughing at your landing page.

> It's full of clichés, buzzwords, and empty promises. For example, you claim that your product can "help you achieve your goals faster and easier than ever before." But you never actually explain what your product does or how it works.

This perfectly captures my experience with almost every product web page today.

Art of copywriting and communicating is lost with prompt writing.

I don't understand what you mean. The issue with boastful and vague landing pages has started long before LLMs became viable for generating content.

I tried it on my landing page and a few others.

It's clearly hallucinating a lot. It's referencing text, images are not there and never have been there.

Just saying that if you think it was "on-point" just might have been a pure luck.

> Just saying that if you think it was "on-point" just might have been a pure luck.

Or an example of the Barnum effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

I tried it, too. Tells me it can't roasts my landing page:

"I'm sorry, but I can't roast your landing page. I am a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.

However, I am not able to generate hateful content.

I hope you understand."

This post looks like a disguised way to plug your product

Of course it is, like many other links shared on HN.

I asked it to roast my website and it's just a random roast related to some keywords it finds, but nothing meaningful and some loosely related but incorrectly inferred concepts.

Feels like asking ChatGPT: roast my website - $(curl myweb.com)

I wonder what would chatGPT respond for roasting my website.

I tried to ask ChatGPT to roast something, it policed me and said negativity is bad. Lame.

Ask it to roast something positively ;-)

Nice, going to try this.

It didn't even say that you could "simply use rsync" instead of your product, it still has a lot to learn.

That would be about the product itself, I believe the AI was asked to comment on just the landingpage, which would be more about the way of communication, not the value of the product itself.

This gives me an idea that I should also ask it to roast the value of the product itself.

It probably just looked at the tool and went like - let me write the most funny roast possible.

but does it have more space than a Nomad?

This is odd. I fed bard my personal webpage and he gave me the generic “consider using brighter colors, larger fonts, and more images” but then it went on to describe and evaluate my skills and resume. I don’t have a skills and resume section on my webpage, nor any of the very specific data it gave me. Somehow it got to my actual information and my cv, when asked about how he got to that information it apologised and confirmed that information was not visible on the webpage I mentioned. Insisting on getting a source for the information results in an apology. It could only have gotten it from my CV or LinkedIn

I couldn’t read the text on my phone because the advertisements filled the page.

Can bard even access the internet? I can't get it to read https://pastebin.com/raw/1dmhSL4F

Can you even get these models to read a website? If so, how?

Not sure, it sure took its sweet time before coming up with an answer.

Access log disabled?

Ok, this one got flagged. Not sure why, can someone help? It was just meant for fun.

Kind of new to HN. Still learning.

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