today Mozilla published a blog post about the AI Help and AI Explain features it deployed to its famously accurate MDN web documentation reference a few days ago. here’s how it’s going according to that post:

We’re only a handful of days into the journey, but the data so far seems to indicate a sense of skepticism towards AI and LLMs in general, while those who have tried the features to find answers tend to be happy with the results.

got that? cool. now let’s check out the developer response on github soon after the AI features were deployed:

it seems like this feature was conceived, developed, and deployed without even considering that an LLM might generate convincing gibberish, even though that’s precisely what they’re designed to do.

oh dear

That is demonstrably wrong. There is no demo of that code showing it in action. A developer who uses this code and expects the outcome the AI said to expect would be disappointed (at best).

That was from the very first page I hit that had an accessibility note. Which means I am wary of what genuine user-harming advice this tool will offer on more complex concepts than simple stricken text.

So the “solution” is adding a disclaimer and a survey instead of removing the false information? 🙃 🙃 🙃

This response is clearly wrong in its statement that there is no closing tag, but also incorrect in its statement that all HTML must have a closing tag; while this is correct for XHTML, HTML5 allows for void elements that do not require a closing tag

that doesn’t sound very good! but at least someone vetted the LLM’s answers, right?

MDN core reviewer/maintainer here.

Until @stevefaulkner pinged me about this (thanks, Steve), I myself wasn’t aware that this “AI Explain” thing was added. Nor, as far as I know, were any of the other core reviewers/maintainers aware it’d been added. Nor, as far as I know, did anybody get an OK for this from the MDN Steering Committee (the group of people responsible for governance of MDN) — nor even just inform the Steering Committee about it at all.

The change seems to have landed in the sources two days ago, in e342081 — without any associated issue, instead only a PR at #9188 that includes absolutely not discussion or background info of any kind.

At this point, it looks to me to be something that Mozilla decided to do on their own without giving any heads-up of any kind to any other MDN stakeholders. (I could be wrong; I’ve been away a bit — a lot of my time over the last month has been spent elsewhere, unfortunately, and that’s prevented me from being able to be doing MDN work I’d have otherwise normally been doing.)

Anyway, this “AI Explain” thing is a monumentally bad idea, clearly — for obvious reasons (but also for the specific reasons that others have taken time to add comments to this issue to help make clear).

(note: the above reply was hidden in the GitHub thread by Mozilla, usually something you only do for off topic replies)

so this thing was pushed into MDN behind the backs of Mozilla’s experts and given only 15 minutes of review (ie, none)? who could have done such a thing?

…so anyway, some kind of space alien comes in and locks the thread:

Hi there, 👋

Thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback about our AI features, AI Explain and AI Help, and to participate in this discussion, which has probably been the most active one in some time. Congratulations to be a part of it! 👏

congratulations to be a part of it indeed