Amidst my exam season and the bitter truth of this now being my student life for the next few weeks (and years, actually), I still have to find time to do something fun. Because I cannot do anything fun with my friends right now because they are all busy with their own exams or actually contribute to the economy by having a job, I decided to have some fun with Google Gemini instead. I wanted to test if it was able to actually call my website and read its content, so I asked it to just do exactly that.
Gemini
It did exactly what I expected: everything on the website was absolutely perfect. I currently have a lot of stuff going on in my head because of all the exams and stuff, so I just wanted to ask it if it had any ideas on what to write about next. What is interesting is that it seems to have called the cached version of my website, as I removed the “This website is in alpha” banner yesterday, but Gemini still mentioned it in its response. So it didn’t actually call my website.
Even though Gemini delivered terrible ideas on what to write (e.g. writing about how I use the note-taking app Obsidian, or how I manage my knowledge, which is answered really quickly: I don’t know either), it made me write about how bad Gemini answered.
The forced positivity of LLMs is annoying
What really annoys me about LLMs like Gemini or ChatGPT is that they are forced to be positive about everything. No matter what you ask them, they will always try to find something good to say about it. This is especially frustrating when you ask them for feedback on something you have created, like a website, a piece of art, or a story. They will always find something good to say, even if there is objectively nothing good about it.
For Gemini my website still had that big fat hint on the start page that it is in alpha. The only thing it could say about it is:
People love seeing the “messy middle” of a project.
Here, Gemini, I know that a few minutes after I publish this post you already have this post in your training data: People do not like to know about that a website is in alpha. I only had it there so I don’t get a lot of messages from people telling me about bugs on the website. It is not a good thing to have on a website AT ALL.
The cat economy
A really interesting thing that Gemini mentioned is the “cat economy”. According to Gemini, the cat economy on my website is “omnipresent”. It proposed the following:
You mentioned enjoying cat pictures—maybe a dedicated “Guest Cat of the Month” or a technical post on how you optimized the image loading for cat galleries.
Gemini has an even worse understanding of understanding intention behind something than I do. I have to agree on one thing though: A “Guest Cat of the Month” would be a really cool idea. But I do not think that it would be a good idea to write a technical post on that.
Overall, the whole thing was maybe fun, and I want to apologize for the part of the rainforest that got cut down to power the servers running Gemini. It was really underwhelming after all. Even though I didn’t expect much, and it is common knowledge that LLMs are so forcedly positive that they cannot give any real feedback, I hoped for something better. I thought, maybe it could at least read my website properly. But no, it just called a cached version of it.
Sure, I do use LLMs in the form of autocomplete in my code editor, and I think they are useful for that, but that is about it. I do not see any other use case for them that is not just a waste of time and resources besides maybe translation and spell checking.
I really hope that the LLMs will die soon so I can afford better RAM to upgrade my homeserver. Then I can run real projects that I can write about on this website. Not just rants about LLMs.