Our New AI Website Builder

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem.

I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add.

Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Maybe I'm seeing this the wrong way, and I'm forgetting truly non-technical folks exist, and this is for the people who would otherwise be forcing their nephew to help them make a basic website, and that's the role the LLM is playing here, as a conversational interface. I think the marketing copy for this announcement is total bullshit, then (plastering "AI" all over the announcement is more for marketers than customers), but I can at least see that use case.

Going from a basic template to all the little changes you need to make to build the basic shell you need for a new site is still a lot of work. Think of all the best practices cruft required for the pages typically linked to from the footer. A sporting good site is different than a directory blog is different than a single serving social media aggregation site.

I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.

An AI website will look about as unique as a Facebook profile in 2004. Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer "make it look like this other website that I like". An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer.

> An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web

We've given the AI the ability to scrape websites, so I'm not sure that holds.