Web development thrives on taking advantage of the most cutting-edge digital technologies. But sometimes the cutting edge is not as sharp as it appears at first glance. Large language models, or so-called A.I., have been touted as the next big thing and a quantum leap forward for web development and online capabilities for the past several months now. But cracks are beginning to show in that façade, and a growing number of skeptical consumers are forcing companies to contend with the question of whether they might have been oversold on the idea.

It is arguably vital for those companies to resolve that question ahead of any further tweaks to their web development, because some of them are clearly going all-in on AI tools. If the industry as a whole continues to trend in that direction, there is a very real danger that user experience could become worse across the board. On a more atomized scale, there’s also the risk of reputation damage and a downturn in public relations for individual brands, if consumers decide that those companies are pushing something down their throat without regard for its actual functionality.

We’re already seeing examples of this on social media, and from brands that are so large and well-established that they should have been bulletproof. Google recently integrated its own LLM into the search function on some systems, and the results have been mixed at best. Simple queries that might have once been answered effectively with a link to a relevant website are now yielding automatically-generated answers scraped from across the web without regard for accuracy, internal consistency, or basic sense.

This should come as little surprise, considering that LLMs are not conscious entities and do not understand the meaning of the words and phrases that they are pushing out to users. Yet some professionals and some casual fans within the tech sector appear to have bought in fully to those tools being branded as “AI”, and are only too happy to behave as if the latest web development might include the integration of an all-knowing divine being into search bars and other functionalities.

Those people would probably be better off disabusing themselves of that notion sooner rather than later. This is not to say that AI-centric web development cannot rise to their expectations under some circumstances or at some point in the future. But if they don’t temper those expectations, the technology will almost certainly let them down, and possibly in ways that are really damaging. That damage may be merely reputational, or it may be very real, considering that Google’s “A.I.” has been caught advising people to eat rocks and gaze at the sun.

There’s a broader lesson about web development in this, as well. Digital service providers should be wary of overpromising on anything that hasn’t been very thoroughly tested ahead of time, because as LLMs are showing us, once a website or company starts down a certain road, it can be very difficult to reverse course in the face of new information. Conversely, those who adopt a more cautious approach to something that is being very aggressively marketed may find themselves standing out from the crowd by virtue of continuing to provide something that others have abandoned, such as a simple, straightforward search function.