14 ms·

Chatbots are not the future

161 points by paulshen 3y ago

raggi 3y ago
one thing I can say for certain: scroll handlers definitely aren't the future
- dang 3y ago
  I agree, but: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - freediver 3y ago
    Comments like this confirm that you are indeed reading every comment on the website, which should be out of the realm of humanely possible.
    - slater 3y ago
      Or there's lots of people who click the flag link
    - dang 3y ago
      It's all an illusion.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    For once, that everyone agrees scroll handlers are godawful but yet after years they're still omnipresent is germane to the article's topic.
wilg 3y ago
Yeah, chat isn’t a universally great interface. But it’s a great default because it’s totally free form. It should be pretty easy (even with today’s APIs and technology) to have an LLM design a user interface for you for your current task. Simplest way: output a JSON of simple control definitions with every answer. Coolest way: Just have it generate a full-ass React front end or whatever on every message.
- fatherzine 3y ago
  Interesting. Futuristic idea: on-the-fly generate a front-end customized to the user learned preferences. Motivation: humans are poor learners, so save them the trouble to learn a new interface style. At the limit, real-time generate a whole world-in-the-world, fulfill Zuckerberg's dream -- an utterly lonely Matrix. Now that's a thinly sugar-coated version of the Hell described in e.g. Catholic doctrine. And we will chose it ourselves. Deeply sobering.
  - efields 3y ago
    We are very good learners. That’s how we got this far. Not all new interface is good and worth learning. Sometimes it feels best to stick with what works.
efields 3y ago
A contextualized chatbot is still a chatbot. I think they’re going to stick around for a while… we’ve effectively been trying this out on the web since the AskJeevs days, and that dream is mostly realized now.
itake 3y ago
> Good tools make it clear how they should be used. This is such a weird statement from someone in the tech space. Programming languages rarely have an opinion for how they are to be used (for example JS MUST only run the browser or which code style to use). When I chat with customer support, I wish they could meet me where I am instead of me needing to learn their tools. For example, I want to say "cancel my subscription" and my subscript get cancelled. I don't want to have to figure out which sub menu of the sub menu that has the magic "end subscription" button. I know how to use my tool (english). LLMs teach computers how to use that tool too.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  I think the problem in your example of cancelling the subscription is that service providers often make it difficult on purpose. I doubt they'll allow chatbots to make it any simpler.
  - itake 3y ago
    I get support emails for "how do I cancel my Apple App Store Subscription?" when Apple governs the cancellation process in a centralized and simple manner. I also get support emails for password resets, which I try to make as simple as possible. People don't want to learn new tools if their existing tools (language) work just fine.
- mxuribe 3y ago
  Actually, as i recall, that statement is somewhat foundational for human computer interaction...of course my recollection is from my HCI college course a couple of decades ago...But, yeah, whenever i make something - digital or otherwise - i hope to design it properly enough that the intended user intuitively understands how it should be used. (I do add documentation beyond the base design, but because i want to further help the person.)
- rurp 3y ago
  Subscription cancellation buttons are intentionally confusing and hard to find. It's easy to add a big red Cancel button in an obvious place that works immediately, but companies choose to avoid that route in order to extract more money from customers. Nothing about that dynamic will change with LLMs, those same companies will have the same priorities. The only difference will be that script-following customer service reps giving you the runaround will be replaced by indefatigable chatbots giving you the runaround, which honestly sounds pretty hellish to me.
paulddraper 3y ago
Quality quote: "There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption of shorter, mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at people putting on makeup on TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot takes on Twitter."
- BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  140 chars, he means. *280 chars, he means. *4000 chars, he means. *10000 chars, he means.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    *she
itsuka 3y ago
Someone said that using a chat-only interface is like using CLI tools. It's even worse, I would add, because there is no autocomplete or man command to help you out. Most of us here probably get it, but my dad had a hard time getting a good answer from GPT when he first tried it, even with GPT-4 model.
- twelve40 3y ago
  Hence the need for specially trained people who can do the back-and-forth with humans to understand exactly what is required, then enter it (into the brittle prompt in this case) in a way that the computer would understand.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Or more like a basic understanding of what the thing can do and what it can't do. It's not that complicated.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  isn't it ironic that there's no autocomplete on the tool that's literally autocomplete? haha where's the fine-tuned prompt helper model?
  - andrepd 3y ago
    We clearly need to ask chatgpt to write a model for the prompt helper model.
  - abe-101 3y ago
    Both Bard and Bing chat have auto-complition
born-jre 3y ago
Very very offtopic: He called ChatGPT oracle, nice but not enough. I want someone to name chatbot their `oracle of delphi` plz. thank you.
- hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
  She*
- born-jre 3y ago
  *their chatbot
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
TL;DR, more targeted tools could be more helpful for specific tasks than an unstructured text interface for everything.
rocketbop 3y ago
I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before now, that using ChatGPT is quite to similar to playing Zork and Infocom games from the 1980s, with less trial and error needed to get something out of it. The point and click adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts were a huge step forward in interaction, although you didn't have to use your imagination as much to solve the puzzles. And here we are again asking users to type their way to success.
- cout 3y ago
  Chatgpt or a successor dynamically generating in-game dialogue could be fun. Or maybe it won't be. I'm interested in seeing it done.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The other obvious UX comparison point is with sending instant messages to a person until they get it right.... Provided the responses aren't too brittle (and the LLM getting it wrong isn't too upsetting or find-out-too-late) lots of non power-users are going to prefer it, at least in cases where a menu or form input with about six options won't suffice.
autokad 3y ago
> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery on someone and botched it up. One day, not too far off, we are going to be able to tell a 'chat bot': make me a cartoon, it takes place in a steam punk fantasy. make it 2 seasons with 22 episodes each season. great, add a cliff hanger at the end of episode 11. add a love story component to it. reduce it back down to 1 season but 44 minute episodes. content creation is no longer going to be tied back to knowing how to draw cartoons, or have armies of writers. yes, we can get garbage out of the system. but its a tool, plenty of tools produce garbage results if you dont know how to use them. As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'.
- Baseballjodi 3y ago
  [flagged]
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content. If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.
sitkack 3y ago
> Text inputs have no affordances It has all the affordances. You can turn it into anything you want. Want it respond with json, check, it can do that. Turn a wall of text into a Python data structures, check, it can do that too. You can take your LLM text interface and put what ever api you want on top. You start with clay and mold it into anything you need. You construct a parser so that the way data is already constrained and validated. Same goes for the output.
- kmtrowbr 3y ago
  I thought this was a funny statement too. Text is the most powerful, original medium. It's difficult to overstate how powerful and valuable it is. Of course, text won't necessarily be the only UI exposed for interacting with these "Large Language Models." But that UI can be built on top of the text -- which wouldn't work in the other direction.
  - alanbernstein 3y ago
    I think the point is that a "chatbot" is, by (the author's) definition, a UI with only a bare text prompt. Once you start building more UI on top of that, you're ... doing what the article suggests.
    - kmtrowbr 3y ago
      I see -- my apologies I must not have read it closely enough! :blush:
      - sitkack 3y ago
        I re-read the post. The author is arguing against a statement that no one made and then uses the rest of the essay to outline their work. It is a bit of a setup. An LLM-Chatbot is an extremely flexible tool, but I haven't seen anyone argue that all of our UIs and applications should be replaced by chat. That is ridiculous.
- tdaltonc 3y ago
swyx 3y ago
Amelia presented a bit more on her demo at our meetup last week: https://www.latent.space/p/build-ai-ux https://www.latent.space/p/build-ai-ux full recording in the video at the bottom!
throwaway4837 3y ago
If you think the far future (100s of years) involves being able to talk to a synthetic humanoid using spoken language, then Chatbots are almost certainly a point on the curve.
morelisp 3y ago
> I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. I was already convinced of this. What I'm not convinced of, and the article has little to say about, is > Chatbots Are Not the Future... chatbots are not the future of interfaces. Chatbots are a terrible interface to LLMs, and yet they are absolutely going to be the future of every third godawful website I must visit.
skybrian 3y ago
Learning how to use freeform text input can be pretty annoying when only a few things work. Some examples are playing a text adventure ("guess the verb") and using an unfamiliar command line interface. Good error messages can help. Web search changed that. Most queries work, at least somewhat. There's a point where freeform text input becomes better than structured input. A simple search box is what people mostly use instead of an advanced search form, let alone a web directory (like Yahoo! back in the day). For web search, there are very few error messages. If you enter a query that doesn't work very well, you get back results that aren't very good or what you wanted, so you try something else. With AI chatbots, expectations are sky-high, but there are times when they should refuse with a good error message, because they really can't do what you're hoping to do. An example is when you ask it to explain its reasoning. An LLM never knows why it wrote what it did, but it will try to invent a plausible explanation anyway. [1] Better error messages that help users understand what chatbots can actually do would help avoid misconceptions, but this won't happen unless the error messages are trained in. [1] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-they-did https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-th...
- JusticeJuice 3y ago
  Yeah, exactly. A freeform input promises it can do 'anything at all' but if it can't in reality, it's always a frustrating interface. Classic example, Siri. It's so easy to quickly find stuff you feel like it should be able to do, but it just can't. "When was my last message from Steve" etc.
c7b 3y ago
Not sure I'm convinced - natural language is one of the most intuitive interfaces we have, it's also how most instructions in professional contexts are delivered. What current ChatBots are missing right now isn't radiobuttons for different styles but context. No one who just reads my messages can know what kind of style I'm looking for until they either get laborious instructions, or, probably better, they see some examples. I'm guessing that training custom language models on a company's data must be one of the hottest things you can be working on right now if you're looking for VC money (if there's something out there that compares to how well StableDiffusion+Dreambooth works for images, I'd be thankful for any pointers).
tekni5 3y ago
Not a very convincing argument, your gizmo sliders and checkboxes or whatever aren't going to replace chatbots but only slightly extend them and really aren't needed if AI gets better over time. Some neural connection to the brain that will interpret your thoughts is the only logical thing that will supersede chat ai, but that won't happen for a while. Maybe a connection to all your data will happen first so the AI will better understand what type of person you are and what you want, that's already probably happening based on past responses.
pornel 3y ago
When it's about the future, limitations of current implementations aren't a strong argument. ChatGPT can be confidently stupid, but what if it gets better? You need explanations/affordances of what it can and can't do only when its capabilities are limited. If it really could do whatever you asked, you wouldn't need it. Just say what you want.
dahwolf 3y ago
A lot of people are projecting for ChatGPT to come for the search market, but I wonder how that will play out for lowly cognitive queries. Quite a few people use search by awkwardly typing on mobile one or two words, probably misspelled and/or auto-completed as they type it. The query isn't sophisticated, lacks a lot of context and parameters, which the search engine then tries to guess. When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able (education level) to give such rich input. The idea that it's better than search for this specific normy behavior, I openly question. And let's not forget about the economics. More expensive to run, vastly less ad space, and content owners (the whole web) are going to be pissed and will put up ever higher walls.
- bigyikes 3y ago
  Just wait until we have a model that automatically translates vague, awkward prompts into something more useful. Put differently: if Google’s search models already have the ability to return great results for poor queries, why couldn’t a large language model (or a plug-in for one) learn the same algorithm?
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able (education level) to give such rich input. Sidenote, i've found GPT useful enough to pay for (GPT Plus) by doing the opposite. Or rather, i find it very useful when i struggle to search for problems. ChatGPT helps guide me to new search or research terms, sometimes even providing the answer more directly. It feels like the olden days where Google was great at finding a movie based on some vague movie description. GPT does that for a ton of things for me, enough that i found it useful. It hasn't replaced online research but it has accelerated it for me.
- okasaki 3y ago
  Have you tried it? I just typed "eli5 hn vs redit" (misspelled reddit), and it understands perfectly.
uxabhishek 3y ago
Contextually relevant suggested options (that can be acted upon with a single click), alongside the free form input box will emerge as the norm. Down the line people will expect applications to be chat ready. They will see an input box and expect the application to understand natural language and respond in the most helpful way. Which might be showing an error message or suggesting relevant next steps.
graiz 3y ago
Chatbots are the future but your points are valid. They don't provide affordances, however chatbots provide a form of progressive disclosure and direct interaction that was previously impossible. Toolbars and menus provide affordances but you still need to know what things are called and what order to use them. "I'd like to email this file as a PDF and I'd also like to print it." may be much easier in a chat UX than in a menu based UX. Often these things can co-exist but chatUX has access to much more nuanced UI that would otherwise be too complex to build or expose.
- xtiansimon 3y ago
  > “Chatbots are the future…” I’m distressed by the growing use of chatbots in online payments. You do know the ontology—get balance information, make a payment, customer service. I much prefer to not speak aloud to a robot on the phone, especially in the office, when there should only be three options. Conversations with a robot speaking in a mixed tone of obsequiousness and superciliousness make me bananas.
stephencoyner 3y ago
I think the future interface is a smart assistant for your life that gives you suggestions on what you should be doing (both for work and personal life). Sure, there may be a prompting text box, but the assistants will be so good at suggesting that you won't need it very often (besides searching for the occasional thing or giving feedback). Driving these suggestions is all of your data as well as your goals and values that you can give to the assistant in natural language. At work the goal might be: "I want to sell $100,000 worth of widgets this quarter" and it will break down step by step how that might be possible. For personal life it might be "I want to get involved in the kayaking community" and it will recommend activities, clubs, etc. Once these assistants are good enough, it will be reckless to not use one (especially at work). We will then live in a world where AI and human live together and make decisions together hand in hand. Buckle up.
- barking_biscuit 3y ago
  This is the main scenario I see that leads to "Oops, we didn't see that one coming, but in retrospect that was NOT a good idea".
  - stephencoyner 3y ago
    Can you expand on this?
aiisahik 3y ago
Google Search got to be a pretty successful business and probably still the single most popular information retrieval tool on earth - it was done using with a single input box.
davidthewatson 3y ago
No, they're not, but my reasons for reaching that conclusion are somewhat different: 1) I don't think chatting with anything, human or machine, is a learning experience, particularly since the machine veracity is poor, untrustworthy, and Hinton's resignation today tells you everything you need to know about the narrative inside big research orgs right now. 2) Recognition vs. recall. Given that it's the equivalent of an informal language CLI, which I prefer by the way; but there is no recognition (as in symbols) only recall. Long story short, I think the emergent need is for written communication, with a tip of the hat to Daniele Procida: https://ubuntu.com/blog/engineering-transformation-through-documentation https://ubuntu.com/blog/engineering-transformation-through-d... Except that what's missing is a human-computer collaboration, i.e. sensemaking with another tip of the hat to Peter Pirolli: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-conference/presentations/20-3_07_Pirolli.pdf https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-...
theage 3y ago
Why even write a book when every insight in them can be shaken out of an LLM? You know, shorter content doesn't have to mean mind-melting right? Strip away the self-marketing poison found in every social media post and lets see. Books were very simple machines to dress up our thoughts and the community reoriented itself well to the demands of the machine. But progress marches on the graves of obsolete machines as it did quills, book presses, typewriters, telegrams, libraries, word processors. Joe Reader has the same access to mind blowing dynamic text that creatives only wish to see as a finishing tool. He won't settle for the old glass window over static text just to please the artisan book writer.
jasfi 3y ago
I agree that prompts are mostly just context. Although you can get quite detail with that, to a degree that it doesn't feel that way. That's why I'm building InventAI, to help with that process: https://inventai.xyz https://inventai.xyz
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> The interface looks the same as a Google search box Indeed, and like any other text box, like whatsapp, like word — all tools that no one uses because they lack affordances.

161 points by paulshen 3y ago

raggi 3y ago

one thing I can say for certain: scroll handlers definitely aren't the future

dang 3y ago
I agree, but: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- freediver 3y ago
  Comments like this confirm that you are indeed reading every comment on the website, which should be out of the realm of humanely possible.
  - slater 3y ago
    Or there's lots of people who click the flag link
  - dang 3y ago
    It's all an illusion.
- morelisp 3y ago
  For once, that everyone agrees scroll handlers are godawful but yet after years they're still omnipresent is germane to the article's topic.

wilg 3y ago

Yeah, chat isn’t a universally great interface. But it’s a great default because it’s totally free form. It should be pretty easy (even with today’s APIs and technology) to have an LLM design a user interface for you for your current task. Simplest way: output a JSON of simple control definitions with every answer. Coolest way: Just have it generate a full-ass React front end or whatever on every message.

fatherzine 3y ago
Interesting. Futuristic idea: on-the-fly generate a front-end customized to the user learned preferences. Motivation: humans are poor learners, so save them the trouble to learn a new interface style. At the limit, real-time generate a whole world-in-the-world, fulfill Zuckerberg's dream -- an utterly lonely Matrix. Now that's a thinly sugar-coated version of the Hell described in e.g. Catholic doctrine. And we will chose it ourselves. Deeply sobering.
- efields 3y ago
  We are very good learners. That’s how we got this far. Not all new interface is good and worth learning. Sometimes it feels best to stick with what works.

efields 3y ago

A contextualized chatbot is still a chatbot. I think they’re going to stick around for a while… we’ve effectively been trying this out on the web since the AskJeevs days, and that dream is mostly realized now.

itake 3y ago

> Good tools make it clear how they should be used. This is such a weird statement from someone in the tech space. Programming languages rarely have an opinion for how they are to be used (for example JS MUST only run the browser or which code style to use). When I chat with customer support, I wish they could meet me where I am instead of me needing to learn their tools. For example, I want to say "cancel my subscription" and my subscript get cancelled. I don't want to have to figure out which sub menu of the sub menu that has the magic "end subscription" button. I know how to use my tool (english). LLMs teach computers how to use that tool too.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
I think the problem in your example of cancelling the subscription is that service providers often make it difficult on purpose. I doubt they'll allow chatbots to make it any simpler.
- itake 3y ago
  I get support emails for "how do I cancel my Apple App Store Subscription?" when Apple governs the cancellation process in a centralized and simple manner. I also get support emails for password resets, which I try to make as simple as possible. People don't want to learn new tools if their existing tools (language) work just fine.
mxuribe 3y ago
Actually, as i recall, that statement is somewhat foundational for human computer interaction...of course my recollection is from my HCI college course a couple of decades ago...But, yeah, whenever i make something - digital or otherwise - i hope to design it properly enough that the intended user intuitively understands how it should be used. (I do add documentation beyond the base design, but because i want to further help the person.)
rurp 3y ago
Subscription cancellation buttons are intentionally confusing and hard to find. It's easy to add a big red Cancel button in an obvious place that works immediately, but companies choose to avoid that route in order to extract more money from customers. Nothing about that dynamic will change with LLMs, those same companies will have the same priorities. The only difference will be that script-following customer service reps giving you the runaround will be replaced by indefatigable chatbots giving you the runaround, which honestly sounds pretty hellish to me.

paulddraper 3y ago

Quality quote: "There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption of shorter, mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at people putting on makeup on TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot takes on Twitter."

BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
140 chars, he means. *280 chars, he means. *4000 chars, he means. *10000 chars, he means.
- skybrian 3y ago
  *she

itsuka 3y ago

Someone said that using a chat-only interface is like using CLI tools. It's even worse, I would add, because there is no autocomplete or man command to help you out. Most of us here probably get it, but my dad had a hard time getting a good answer from GPT when he first tried it, even with GPT-4 model.

twelve40 3y ago
Hence the need for specially trained people who can do the back-and-forth with humans to understand exactly what is required, then enter it (into the brittle prompt in this case) in a way that the computer would understand.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Or more like a basic understanding of what the thing can do and what it can't do. It's not that complicated.
LesZedCB 3y ago
isn't it ironic that there's no autocomplete on the tool that's literally autocomplete? haha where's the fine-tuned prompt helper model?
- andrepd 3y ago
  We clearly need to ask chatgpt to write a model for the prompt helper model.
- abe-101 3y ago
  Both Bard and Bing chat have auto-complition

born-jre 3y ago

Very very offtopic: He called ChatGPT oracle, nice but not enough. I want someone to name chatbot their `oracle of delphi` plz. thank you.

hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
She*
born-jre 3y ago
*their chatbot

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

TL;DR, more targeted tools could be more helpful for specific tasks than an unstructured text interface for everything.

rocketbop 3y ago

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before now, that using ChatGPT is quite to similar to playing Zork and Infocom games from the 1980s, with less trial and error needed to get something out of it. The point and click adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts were a huge step forward in interaction, although you didn't have to use your imagination as much to solve the puzzles. And here we are again asking users to type their way to success.

cout 3y ago
Chatgpt or a successor dynamically generating in-game dialogue could be fun. Or maybe it won't be. I'm interested in seeing it done.
notahacker 3y ago
The other obvious UX comparison point is with sending instant messages to a person until they get it right.... Provided the responses aren't too brittle (and the LLM getting it wrong isn't too upsetting or find-out-too-late) lots of non power-users are going to prefer it, at least in cases where a menu or form input with about six options won't suffice.

autokad 3y ago

> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery on someone and botched it up. One day, not too far off, we are going to be able to tell a 'chat bot': make me a cartoon, it takes place in a steam punk fantasy. make it 2 seasons with 22 episodes each season. great, add a cliff hanger at the end of episode 11. add a love story component to it. reduce it back down to 1 season but 44 minute episodes. content creation is no longer going to be tied back to knowing how to draw cartoons, or have armies of writers. yes, we can get garbage out of the system. but its a tool, plenty of tools produce garbage results if you dont know how to use them. As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'.

Baseballjodi 3y ago
[flagged]
hammyhavoc 3y ago
Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content. If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.

sitkack 3y ago

> Text inputs have no affordances It has all the affordances. You can turn it into anything you want. Want it respond with json, check, it can do that. Turn a wall of text into a Python data structures, check, it can do that too. You can take your LLM text interface and put what ever api you want on top. You start with clay and mold it into anything you need. You construct a parser so that the way data is already constrained and validated. Same goes for the output.

kmtrowbr 3y ago
I thought this was a funny statement too. Text is the most powerful, original medium. It's difficult to overstate how powerful and valuable it is. Of course, text won't necessarily be the only UI exposed for interacting with these "Large Language Models." But that UI can be built on top of the text -- which wouldn't work in the other direction.
- alanbernstein 3y ago
  I think the point is that a "chatbot" is, by (the author's) definition, a UI with only a bare text prompt. Once you start building more UI on top of that, you're ... doing what the article suggests.
  - kmtrowbr 3y ago
    I see -- my apologies I must not have read it closely enough! :blush:
    - sitkack 3y ago
      I re-read the post. The author is arguing against a statement that no one made and then uses the rest of the essay to outline their work. It is a bit of a setup. An LLM-Chatbot is an extremely flexible tool, but I haven't seen anyone argue that all of our UIs and applications should be replaced by chat. That is ridiculous.
tdaltonc 3y ago

swyx 3y ago

Amelia presented a bit more on her demo at our meetup last week: https://www.latent.space/p/build-ai-ux https://www.latent.space/p/build-ai-ux full recording in the video at the bottom!

throwaway4837 3y ago

If you think the far future (100s of years) involves being able to talk to a synthetic humanoid using spoken language, then Chatbots are almost certainly a point on the curve.

morelisp 3y ago

> I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. I was already convinced of this. What I'm not convinced of, and the article has little to say about, is > Chatbots Are Not the Future... chatbots are not the future of interfaces. Chatbots are a terrible interface to LLMs, and yet they are absolutely going to be the future of every third godawful website I must visit.

skybrian 3y ago

Learning how to use freeform text input can be pretty annoying when only a few things work. Some examples are playing a text adventure ("guess the verb") and using an unfamiliar command line interface. Good error messages can help. Web search changed that. Most queries work, at least somewhat. There's a point where freeform text input becomes better than structured input. A simple search box is what people mostly use instead of an advanced search form, let alone a web directory (like Yahoo! back in the day). For web search, there are very few error messages. If you enter a query that doesn't work very well, you get back results that aren't very good or what you wanted, so you try something else. With AI chatbots, expectations are sky-high, but there are times when they should refuse with a good error message, because they really can't do what you're hoping to do. An example is when you ask it to explain its reasoning. An LLM never knows why it wrote what it did, but it will try to invent a plausible explanation anyway. [1] Better error messages that help users understand what chatbots can actually do would help avoid misconceptions, but this won't happen unless the error messages are trained in. [1] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-they-did https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-th...

JusticeJuice 3y ago
Yeah, exactly. A freeform input promises it can do 'anything at all' but if it can't in reality, it's always a frustrating interface. Classic example, Siri. It's so easy to quickly find stuff you feel like it should be able to do, but it just can't. "When was my last message from Steve" etc.

c7b 3y ago

Not sure I'm convinced - natural language is one of the most intuitive interfaces we have, it's also how most instructions in professional contexts are delivered. What current ChatBots are missing right now isn't radiobuttons for different styles but context. No one who just reads my messages can know what kind of style I'm looking for until they either get laborious instructions, or, probably better, they see some examples. I'm guessing that training custom language models on a company's data must be one of the hottest things you can be working on right now if you're looking for VC money (if there's something out there that compares to how well StableDiffusion+Dreambooth works for images, I'd be thankful for any pointers).

tekni5 3y ago

Not a very convincing argument, your gizmo sliders and checkboxes or whatever aren't going to replace chatbots but only slightly extend them and really aren't needed if AI gets better over time. Some neural connection to the brain that will interpret your thoughts is the only logical thing that will supersede chat ai, but that won't happen for a while. Maybe a connection to all your data will happen first so the AI will better understand what type of person you are and what you want, that's already probably happening based on past responses.

pornel 3y ago

When it's about the future, limitations of current implementations aren't a strong argument. ChatGPT can be confidently stupid, but what if it gets better? You need explanations/affordances of what it can and can't do only when its capabilities are limited. If it really could do whatever you asked, you wouldn't need it. Just say what you want.

dahwolf 3y ago

A lot of people are projecting for ChatGPT to come for the search market, but I wonder how that will play out for lowly cognitive queries. Quite a few people use search by awkwardly typing on mobile one or two words, probably misspelled and/or auto-completed as they type it. The query isn't sophisticated, lacks a lot of context and parameters, which the search engine then tries to guess. When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able (education level) to give such rich input. The idea that it's better than search for this specific normy behavior, I openly question. And let's not forget about the economics. More expensive to run, vastly less ad space, and content owners (the whole web) are going to be pissed and will put up ever higher walls.

bigyikes 3y ago
Just wait until we have a model that automatically translates vague, awkward prompts into something more useful. Put differently: if Google’s search models already have the ability to return great results for poor queries, why couldn’t a large language model (or a plug-in for one) learn the same algorithm?
unshavedyak 3y ago
> When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able (education level) to give such rich input. Sidenote, i've found GPT useful enough to pay for (GPT Plus) by doing the opposite. Or rather, i find it very useful when i struggle to search for problems. ChatGPT helps guide me to new search or research terms, sometimes even providing the answer more directly. It feels like the olden days where Google was great at finding a movie based on some vague movie description. GPT does that for a ton of things for me, enough that i found it useful. It hasn't replaced online research but it has accelerated it for me.
okasaki 3y ago
Have you tried it? I just typed "eli5 hn vs redit" (misspelled reddit), and it understands perfectly.

uxabhishek 3y ago

Contextually relevant suggested options (that can be acted upon with a single click), alongside the free form input box will emerge as the norm. Down the line people will expect applications to be chat ready. They will see an input box and expect the application to understand natural language and respond in the most helpful way. Which might be showing an error message or suggesting relevant next steps.

graiz 3y ago

Chatbots are the future but your points are valid. They don't provide affordances, however chatbots provide a form of progressive disclosure and direct interaction that was previously impossible. Toolbars and menus provide affordances but you still need to know what things are called and what order to use them. "I'd like to email this file as a PDF and I'd also like to print it." may be much easier in a chat UX than in a menu based UX. Often these things can co-exist but chatUX has access to much more nuanced UI that would otherwise be too complex to build or expose.

xtiansimon 3y ago
> “Chatbots are the future…” I’m distressed by the growing use of chatbots in online payments. You do know the ontology—get balance information, make a payment, customer service. I much prefer to not speak aloud to a robot on the phone, especially in the office, when there should only be three options. Conversations with a robot speaking in a mixed tone of obsequiousness and superciliousness make me bananas.

stephencoyner 3y ago

I think the future interface is a smart assistant for your life that gives you suggestions on what you should be doing (both for work and personal life). Sure, there may be a prompting text box, but the assistants will be so good at suggesting that you won't need it very often (besides searching for the occasional thing or giving feedback). Driving these suggestions is all of your data as well as your goals and values that you can give to the assistant in natural language. At work the goal might be: "I want to sell $100,000 worth of widgets this quarter" and it will break down step by step how that might be possible. For personal life it might be "I want to get involved in the kayaking community" and it will recommend activities, clubs, etc. Once these assistants are good enough, it will be reckless to not use one (especially at work). We will then live in a world where AI and human live together and make decisions together hand in hand. Buckle up.

barking_biscuit 3y ago
This is the main scenario I see that leads to "Oops, we didn't see that one coming, but in retrospect that was NOT a good idea".
- stephencoyner 3y ago
  Can you expand on this?

aiisahik 3y ago

Google Search got to be a pretty successful business and probably still the single most popular information retrieval tool on earth - it was done using with a single input box.

davidthewatson 3y ago

No, they're not, but my reasons for reaching that conclusion are somewhat different: 1) I don't think chatting with anything, human or machine, is a learning experience, particularly since the machine veracity is poor, untrustworthy, and Hinton's resignation today tells you everything you need to know about the narrative inside big research orgs right now. 2) Recognition vs. recall. Given that it's the equivalent of an informal language CLI, which I prefer by the way; but there is no recognition (as in symbols) only recall. Long story short, I think the emergent need is for written communication, with a tip of the hat to Daniele Procida: https://ubuntu.com/blog/engineering-transformation-through-documentation https://ubuntu.com/blog/engineering-transformation-through-d... Except that what's missing is a human-computer collaboration, i.e. sensemaking with another tip of the hat to Peter Pirolli: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-conference/presentations/20-3_07_Pirolli.pdf https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-...

theage 3y ago

Why even write a book when every insight in them can be shaken out of an LLM? You know, shorter content doesn't have to mean mind-melting right? Strip away the self-marketing poison found in every social media post and lets see. Books were very simple machines to dress up our thoughts and the community reoriented itself well to the demands of the machine. But progress marches on the graves of obsolete machines as it did quills, book presses, typewriters, telegrams, libraries, word processors. Joe Reader has the same access to mind blowing dynamic text that creatives only wish to see as a finishing tool. He won't settle for the old glass window over static text just to please the artisan book writer.

jasfi 3y ago

I agree that prompts are mostly just context. Although you can get quite detail with that, to a degree that it doesn't feel that way. That's why I'm building InventAI, to help with that process: https://inventai.xyz https://inventai.xyz

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> The interface looks the same as a Google search box Indeed, and like any other text box, like whatsapp, like word — all tools that no one uses because they lack affordances.