I think the content and arguments in the possessed machines are not very good, the prose is ok but it would read as too self important and AI slop on a less distinguished webpage. I think that many people were charmed by how respectable and nice the website looked and so were willing to give the writing and arguments much more leeway when sharing the page (if they read it at all).
Edit: I believe this because I notice it is popular, and I noticed this dynamic in myself, I felt I wanted the article to be deep and interesting, but also that if I thought about telling the arguments to a skeptical observer very few of them would stand up to scrutiny.
Yeah I think that good web-design is a costly signal that you’re invested in the quality of the writing, like in the past when someone published a book. However it is fake-able.
It has the classic signals: Garamond font, use of smallcaps… I’m reminded of Situational Awareness (not to mention my own website or Read The Sequences).
The HTML source is a little curious—unusually regular and minimalist, but also possibly buggy? I was struck by some apparent bugs; for example, there are two Garamond fonts (why?), the first two subtitles are weirdly misaligned with everything else (at least in my Firefox), and I notice by reading the HTML source that the author goes to the trouble of writing div.character-intro class wrappers around each new character introduced, but the only use seems to be to tweak the margin, and it barely does anything (it adds a tiny bit of vertical space).
It doesn’t come off as designed by hand, really, but also not generated by a standard SSG or tool like Hugo or Pandoc, so I wonder if a LLM played a hand in that too.
Yeah, on reflection I’d be willing to bet that the designer had an LLM look at some of the sites you mentioned and then asked it to imitate the style closely, as a core part of the web design.
This is the affect heuristic at work in design. I think it actually applies in two ways:
It makes the site look serious, thoughtful, academic, and not disposable by resembling a book with effort put into the typesetting.
It evokes websites with relevant takes on AI: LW, Gwern.net, Situational Awareness (as Gwern mentions in a comment), AI 2027, Anthropic’s research pages.
Yeah, the possessed machines is a very good example of how important good web design is.
What do you mean by this? I didn’t see a mention of web design in the OP, it seems largely about the content and the epistemic status of the content.
I think the content and arguments in the possessed machines are not very good, the prose is ok but it would read as too self important and AI slop on a less distinguished webpage. I think that many people were charmed by how respectable and nice the website looked and so were willing to give the writing and arguments much more leeway when sharing the page (if they read it at all).
Edit: I believe this because I notice it is popular, and I noticed this dynamic in myself, I felt I wanted the article to be deep and interesting, but also that if I thought about telling the arguments to a skeptical observer very few of them would stand up to scrutiny.
Yeah I think that good web-design is a costly signal that you’re invested in the quality of the writing, like in the past when someone published a book. However it is fake-able.
It has the classic signals: Garamond font, use of smallcaps… I’m reminded of Situational Awareness (not to mention my own website or Read The Sequences).
The HTML source is a little curious—unusually regular and minimalist, but also possibly buggy? I was struck by some apparent bugs; for example, there are two Garamond fonts (why?), the first two subtitles are weirdly misaligned with everything else (at least in my Firefox), and I notice by reading the HTML source that the author goes to the trouble of writing
div.character-introclass wrappers around each new character introduced, but the only use seems to be to tweak the margin, and it barely does anything (it adds a tiny bit of vertical space).It doesn’t come off as designed by hand, really, but also not generated by a standard SSG or tool like Hugo or Pandoc, so I wonder if a LLM played a hand in that too.
Yeah, on reflection I’d be willing to bet that the designer had an LLM look at some of the sites you mentioned and then asked it to imitate the style closely, as a core part of the web design.
This is the affect heuristic at work in design. I think it actually applies in two ways:
It makes the site look serious, thoughtful, academic, and not disposable by resembling a book with effort put into the typesetting.
It evokes websites with relevant takes on AI: LW, Gwern.net, Situational Awareness (as Gwern mentions in a comment), AI 2027, Anthropic’s research pages.