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A lot of the styling looks very similar to some default choices popular llm's make; a default which I had never seen prior to their existence.

Also the ai-generated textures make it all the more likely that the rest of site is vibe-coded.

I'm not anti-ai per se, but using the defaults does affect my (and presumably others) impression of the quality of the site

2 comments

Ex. of unvetted output : https://shaderacademy.com/challenge/ranked_1

Another example : https://shaderacademy.com/challenge/height_map_1

What am i looking at there?

The expected output to the quiz does not seem like something someone would intentionally choose

You didn't present some context on how you reached this content on the website. It looks as if it was an exercise to produce a shader detecting edges based on derivative functions or just sampling neighboring texture pixels.

The title is "Vector of Change" and the description is "Your challenge is to make something as close as the expected shader." and that's all the context you get. It doesn't seem like a very well-designed exercise.

Hey, thanks for sharing this feedback. I am one of the creators of shader academy and I created this challenge. This is ranked challenge, so we do not provide answer and the score of it is used in our ranking https://shaderacademy.com/ranking For now we do not have other ranked challenges, but we will add more in future.

How would you improve description of this challenge? As you can notice, we provide a lot of hints, description etc. for other challenges, but this one is vague on purpose.

Thank you

Personally I know it's about edge detection at the first glance. But I think you should have two things:

1) Make it clear that the lack of instructions is intentional

2) Have a "pixel inspection" tool so we can check the exact RGB values in the expected and diff images more easily.

I'd rather the author spend time on what they want to make (shader quiz) instead of CSS.

As someone who has always despised front-end programming, I would be more than satisfied if LLMs turned out to only be particularly good at that. Given the number of pages we've all seen where the content as well as the front-end are obviously 90% AI-generated, I understand the knee-jerk reaction against sites clearly designed by AI, but it's unfortunate that leads to a negative reaction against (or even just a difficulty distinguishing) sites where people share a tool/knowledge of their own that they never would have shared if it would have taken even just a few days of futzing around with CSS/figuring out the latest JS framework...

I think people under-estimate how much of an effect the unreasonable complexity of modern front-end programming has had, especially outside of tech. My wife works in the non-profit world and I have been completely blown away by how much "designers" barely able to tweak a wordpress plugin get away with charging... She's an "AI skeptic" herself, but almost cried with joy when I showed her V0 [0].

[0] Not as good at coding as others, but probably the single most impressive AI product I've played with from a UX perspective.

I've found it ridiculous that people can see this insanely useful, free resource and their first reactions are "meh the buttons are default AI style."

In cases like this, where it's used to "automate the boring stuff", I just see it as outsourcing. You don't want to spend time building the frustrating CSS/HTML or whatever that isn't your skill set, and the LLM is quite great at doing it.

thank you for your comment! I hope you enjoy our platform!

I don't think they made most of the quizzes either (see link in my other reply)

No? The quiz is clearly some kind of edge detection filter. The light blue "grid" is the background to let you know there are transparent pixels in the expected output. It looks like something designed with intention to me. They just forgot to put the text description.

Click on where it says DIFF; its not edge detection

More likely to be some kind of color space thresholding

Never mind, you were right that it is edge detection (a terrible one though lol):

https://shaderacademy.com/shaders/glsl/ranked_1/fragmentExpe...

But I still stand by the ai-gen'd aspect

Hey, so I responded about it in other thread, but let me respond here.

Most challenges were created by us, but we use LLM for example to generate comments in the code or generate some simple boiler plate.

Sometimes, it is also useful to create similar challenge to already existing one.