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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

No one needs to hear their screen reader say "yellow squiggle."

I wonder how much of the site was AI-generated. The images definitely are (kids with different numbers of fingers from each other in the same picture lol).

You could just have read the "about" page. Who cares if there's AI involved, this is a dad who made a thing for his own kids, and opened it up for everyone else. So what if they used AI if it does what they hoped it'd do and their kids like it?

> So what if they used AI

It matters because it's a very strong signal of quality.

I'd say it's a strong signal of (lack of) effort, which then correlates with quality

And, crucially, the quality _is_ low. At a bare minimum, the generated safety bulletpoints should be able to anticipate safety concerns with following the generated activities. The people publishing the posts should read them first and check for safety concerns.

The generated posts don't meet this bare minimum. For example, some posts have activities for toddlers involving string or rope, but do not mention the non-obvious strangulation risks. This website should not have been published in this state.

Fine for them, but why would I use it instead of using my own AI for my own kids?

It's like reading other people's chat gpt conversations, not very interesting or useful.

Because, if you AI generated the activities too, the site is useless. We can ChatGpt generate activities too and get the same result.

I feel while developers continue to spend their time and energy gatekeeping how people build things, AI is going to continue to enable those people to build what they want. You'd be surprised how little people care about how a product was built and just want it to do the things they need it to do.

The MySpace era internet where anyone can create a page is back and I'm here for it

Quality, security, and code that doesn't fall apart later matter. I don't want AI slop children books to be a thing. I hear you on AI making it easier for people to build stuff, but calling valid concerns "gatekeeping" is a bit off.

With that said, I really like this site and the approach!

If those things actually mattered they would be rewarded in the "free marketplace of ideas". But they aren't and never have been. The most wealthy companies in the world aren't wealthy because of the quality of their code. That's why literally zero Very Large Organizations prioritize code quality. Marketing matters far more than quality and the budgets demonstrate this. You're just holding it wrong.

You're missing the point. Some slice of the market ignoring quality doesn't make it unimportant. Those companies get burned by tech debt and security holes all the time. Brushing off quality and security as pointless is shortsighted.

The study linked in OP is already a clear counterexample to your point, though. It's clear from all the slop that quality control is low on the priority list of so-called "builders" using AI. They do the first 20% to get a mockup and then decide it's done.

"You'll eat shit and like it" as a marketing strategy? I thought they fixed that in ChatGPT.

I really want the "Note from the Founder" to be fully AI generated too, image and everything. Our fully unauthentic web of the future has finally arrived!

It's not like before AI we got a lot of genuine founder stories either ;)

is that true? I thought communicating what a full-sight person would see is important. Accessibility isn't just about text. Closed-captions vs Subtitles.

Close your eyes. Imagine you are using your computer or phone, but that for tedious reasons you may only do so via the extremely lossy KVM that is me. Do you need to hear me say "yellow squiggle?"

The point of accessibility isn't an equivalent experience, which is trivially impossible in any case. The point is to make the material as useful, wherein possible. Especially when everything in the UI costs its user the time of its verbal description, "as useful" very often means ensuring the irrelevant is left out.

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