Travel back in time with the inspiring and quirky Web98 app, created by New York City-based web designer Nate Parrott. It uses ChatGPT to generate a 1996-style website based on any URL, real or imaginary. If you type in an URL for “The Ultimate Fruit Connection,” for instance, Web98 will provide you with a friendly, alternate-reality version of 1996 filled with weird fonts and horizontally scrolling text. Other templated features include retro GIFs from the Internet Archive and mentions of the notorious “Information Superhighway.”
The app’s designer Nate Parrott is a Palo Alto native and a veteran of the dot-com boom, having experienced the technological revolution firsthand. Consequently, the pages that Web98 produces resembles the internet of his teenage years. For example, entering the URL “Worstpoemgenerator.com” will yield an empty text field prompting you to enter the subject of your poem, followed by a pink text-on-a-pink-background poem about the subject.
The app works using ChatGPT by sending the URL along with a predefined prompt written by Parrott to the chatbot. The prompt instructs ChatGPT to pretend to be an old-school web server from the 1990s, and to generate HTML to suit the requested URL and provide a friendly, “alternate-reality version of 1996.”
Web98 reveals and takes advantage of ChatGPT’s limitations. For example, users have the capability to modify the friendly-internet-of-1996 prompt that Parrott included, which can create whimsical outcomes. For instance, typing the URL “www.international-lice-appreciation-society.com” reveals a cheerful community of lice enthusiasts. Meanwhile, a tweak to the prompt can produce sarcastic, mean webpages like “IRS.gov,” which boasts the sassy title “IRS: It’s Not Like You Have a Choice” in red font.
At the moment, this interesting and slightly eccentric app isn’t available over the App Store and Google Play. To try it, you must download the testing-version of TestFlight and follow the instructions to get your OpenAI API key which cost money. As the app developer Parrott is wary to take on that cost, therefore he prefers the asking users to do so themselves.
Additionally, the app was featured in the headlines of news agencies that talked about its clever use for the world’s largest intelligence leak in decades. Infosys, a media agency from China, is also planning to use generative AI models to replace its external copywriters and graphic designers. Lastly, Twitter has made it easier for users to charge for content from long form text to hours long video according to their owner Elon Musk.
All in all, the Web98 is an extremely fun and thought-provoking app that will take you back in time to a nostalgia-filled fantasy version of the internet. It’s a must-try for anyone who had seen the rise of the internet in the ‘90s and wants to experience the retroness of it all. Plus, you can also join the Live Event “Design + Make” by Bloomberg on April 25th to hopefully gain some knowledge on how the most creative minds are responding to the ever-changing world.
