I spent an evening on a fictitious web (opens in new tab)

That's a fair point. I chose more so to document the experience and how I felt.... I can update the article if that helps.

Well, if you review a movie you try not to spoil by explaining its plot?

Websim utilizes LLM to generate a fictional website based on a domain name you provide, and displays the result in their virtual browser.

LLM generations are quite costly so it is difficult to provide them without some kind of anti abuse strategies in place, so I think that's fair.

Yeah, the requirement to create a Google account was a show-stopper for me.

They're just using Google for an easy user onboarding, nothing to get all up in arms about. Websim is trying to sell plans for more than 30 generations a day.

> Chrome will instead hallucinate what that website should have looked like

I find the term 'bullshits' to be more apt than 'hallucinate'.

As something of an aside; that the purveyors of AI use the latter, whereas those who interact with it use the former, speaks volumes.

It's not Chrome hallucinating, it's the websim that is generating the content.

Thought experiment: think of a potential usecase (perhaps offline) where some smart-aleck product manager thinks this might be useful.

I just watched a Youtube video of it and I DEFINITELY need to check this out. They seem to have captured the feel of the old web perfectly.

I struggle with the idea of monetization. In one sense, I think its great people can get paid for doing what they like to do and it can encourage more content creation. On the other hand, everything becomes disingenuous, people become perversely incentivized, you got people gluing things to turtles to make videos of them rescuing turtles with 'lichens' on their shells.

So I don't know, I am really torn on how I should feel about it