Insights from Nebo

Hot take: there’s a good chance that AI’s writing abilities have already peaked, and they’re… just okay. 

Maybe not a surprising take, from a writer, but hear me out. My skin in the game aside, scientists, critics, and even Bill Gates have been questioning whether AI can get much better since at least 2025. AI lovers and haters alike claim that artificial intelligence’s abilities are exponentially growing. But, at least when it comes to LLMs, that may not be true. 

No matter who you are, the past couple of years have been… a lot. And if you’re in the queer community, it’s… even more a lot. It feels like legislators are dedicating all of their time to attacking our community (obsessed much?). Which means how we observe Pride season this year feels extra important.

The current climate brings to mind the words of activist Dan Savage, who said, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

Plenty of agencies say they’re human-centered (or if they don’t use that term exactly, say they care about people, or put them first). Most mean it aspirationally, at best. We mean it in practice. 

It’s how we decide which projects to pursue, who to hire and where we set the bar for ourselves. It was the founding principle of Nebo back in 2004, and it’s the lens we’re now holding up to the biggest shift our industry has faced since: the shift toward AI.

When Dante wrote Inferno, he described hell as an underworld with nine layers, each worse than the last. What he could never have predicted, way back in 1321, was that one day, there would be a tenth layer—and it’s the one we’re all living in, right now.

This is Notification Hell. 

If you’re a white-collar worker, you already know how much Notification Hell sucks. According to Gemini’s AI overview (which we all know can be wrong—see our forthcoming post about AI Hell), this level of hell is a world where…

Working in UX means I spend a lot of time interacting with digital experiences. Between work and everyday life, I’m constantly navigating websites, testing product flows, QA’ing forms, using dashboards and moving through apps — all day long. Most of these experiences work perfectly fine. But when I stop to think about the interactions that actually stay with me afterward, I realize how few individual moments truly stand out in my memory.

Something’s…off. You don’t remember exactly when it happened, but now you can’t unsee it. Every ad features an uncanny, poreless face. Every voiceover has the same eerie sing-song cadence. Every tagline reads as if it were written by a committee of aggressively average clones. You thought the future would be more like Blade Runner: Replicants running around trying to pass as humans and slick, dazzling holographic adverts. Instead, the robots are just boring us to death.