Watching people get mad at MDN for including ChatGPT, and I’m mostly struck by how time-sensitive PR crisis management is.

It was a clear mistake, yes. Everyone would have forgotten about if it was promptly removed after that was pointed out, or even if the promise to remove it was made.

Instead, because they’ve let this sit for an eternity (4 hours), we’re already seeing reactions like

I am warning my team about this feature and letting them know not to trust it.

and

By implementing and deploying this “feature”, MDN has convinced me to stop contributing to MDN and cease donating to the Mozilla Foundation, because I am completely unwilling to participate in perpetuating the massive disinformation which this “feature” presents to users and the dramatic confusion and waste of people’s time which it will cause.

Obviously, I will also stop recommending MDN as a good source of documentation. I will also need to remove links to MDN from everything I’ve written which can be edited.

and

This was very disappointing as a now-former MDN contributor and subscriber. The whole point of MDN was authoritative content but until there are some fundamental improvements in LLMs I might as well be supporting W3 Schools.

These might seem like extreme reactions, but no one is defending MDN, because MDN has given them nothing to wield in MDNs defence. Instead these reactions are only receiving “upvotes” (thumbs ups) and more users piling on.

A not lightning fast response time is doing irreparable harm to MDN’s reputation, and is losing them revenue.

Context: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

Archived as of writing this comment: https://archive.is/MNjro