May 15 2025 - J.Esther
As I work through setting up my first web page, it's there. Sitting innocuously in the corner, "Ask a Question (AI)" joins "Settings", "Preview" and "Publish" as another helpful set of options core to building your website. It's the first topic of conversation when you create a website with NameCheap, a domain registrar I've interacted with as part of my day job as a Systems Administrator at several Managed Service Providers. NameCheap cheerfully asked me to describe the type of website and industry "I" wanted to "design". I entered "Personal Website" and was provided a generic-looking template for Photography.
(I'd later find this "generic-looking template" as an actual template when creating a new page. Maybe they're only calling it AI? Ethically lying to losers who want slop web design??)
Going to edit the home page, I was first greated with the "Ask A Question" button. From NameCheap's AI website creation best practices I was urged to "[k]now the limitations" of the tool, because it "will generally be behind in terms of human inventiveness, creativity, contextual understanding, and emotional intelligence." Never fear though, because it can still "produce all the content you need in just seconds and provide you with data-driven insights that can help to advance your business." It cautions users that it'll take several attempts, but that "we have almost infinite possibilities in content generated, which means we need to be careful about how we refine our prompts and searches to deliver results that meet our specific requirements." So keep trying, until all those creatively-bankrupted, contextless monkeys finally produce Hafmlwett. What's the harm? It only takes seconds to produce the output, so in 5 or so minutes you can try it dozens of times! Each Croenenberg knock-off can be discarded quickly in the hopes that the next one will have a little less horror and a little more engagement.
While you're pulling the slots, praying that each moment you spend doesn't add up to a developer's time anyways, you're not thinking of the real, tangible harms. NameCheap website designer, Google's AI summaries, and OpenAI's ChatGPT really don't want you to either, as evidenced by their lack of acknowledgement (scientists at Google and UC Berkeley had to estimate the 2021 energy cost of training OpenAI's GPT-3), lawsuits (Google), and outright . And there's a lot to acknowledge. It's not just that countries are contributing 1/5th of their energy output to datacenters due to the monstrous demands that these models place on grids. It's also not just that the cards themselves are contributing to geopolitical instability and economic devastation at home and abroad. It's that companies and countries are flouting their emissions targets in the hopes that this tech bubble will pop slower than crypto or the "metaverse". They're already aware that AI is a lame duck, with Microsoft pulling back funding on datacenters to the tune of 2 Gigawatts of compute capacity. They're pushing and pushing to gain acceptance only to slow that realization so they have time to find another hype cycle mega-scaling innovative SaaS platform to sell you because innovation in tech is dead under the current Silicon Valley regime. They're doing this while countries turn on coal power plants to have their own