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Chat based AI, such as ChatGPT, is Skeuomorphic. It's the presentation of a new technology under the veneer of a familiar interface, human conversation. The unf

Chat based AI, such as ChatGPT, is Skeuomorphic. It's the presentation of a new technology under the veneer of a familiar interface, human conversation. The unfortunate side effect is the suggestion there is human intelligence, or any sort of "thought process" in the system. I'm not convinced that the conversational style of AI will stay as people become familiar with it. Clearly the neutral language processing will stay, but it's the "humanity" of the interface and voice it presents that I think will fade out. Just as we had skeuomorphic UI design when touch screens went mainstream, but then fell out of use as people understood the interactions. The same will happen with chat based AI. It's going to be interesting what the UI/UX of these interfaces morphs into.

zamnos 3y ago
I agree the evolution will be interesting (especially since chat isn't the original interface for textual GPT, eg GPT-2). But skeuomorphisms are about "ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original", and text chat is far from ornamental. I use it on a daily basis with my friends, though they're knowledge about me and them and our interactions, especially since 2021, is unmatched. (Until GPT4's image analysis is released and someone trains a model against Instagram stories, maybe.) A drawing of spiral binding in a digital notebook is ornamental but text chat is not because it will be a long time before human conversation becomes obsolete. Still, a look at GPTforwork.com and their spreadsheet add-on says that there are better interfaces for certain kinds of lookup and analysis.
- samwillis 3y ago
  But having the system trained to respond with a human like conversational voice very much is ornamental to the underlying function of a generative system. The "ornamental design cues" of skeuomorphism are ornamental when applied to the new system, they are not ornamental on the old you are borrowing from. To take your example of a "spiral binding in a digital notebook", the spiral binding is a necessary and deeply functional aspect of the old system, but entirely ornamental on the new. It's the same with ChatGPT, it doesn't need to present a human like conversational voice when interacting with the user, the developers have added that to aid in our understanding of it. Literally calling it "Chat" is skeuomorphic, it's just a REPL (read even print loop).
  - zamnos 3y ago
    The word chat isn't skeuomorphic just because we as developers have our own jargon for interacting with computers. It's not ornamental, it helps non-technical users understand what to do with the system. Is naming the calculator app "Calculator" a skeuomorphism? They tried completion mode, and it's there with text-davinci-003 in the OpenAI Playground *. Give it a shot. It's the same grade of model as powers ChatGPT, but it's pretty hard to get the same sort of mileage out of it. Well, maybe you can, but I couldn't. That suggests to me, well for me at least, that the chat interface isn't ornamental and is fundamental for users getting use out of an LLM. I'm not ruling out future improvements to the technology leading to a different interface, but for now, the chat interface to a GPT model seems as fundamental and necessary as folders are on computers. * https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=complete https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=complete
rwmj 3y ago
People have deep and meaningful conversations with their cats, so I'm not hopeful that people will change their attitudes to chatbots.
gumballindie 3y ago
What puzzles me is why by and large these models rely on text as input and output. A reliable voice input ai could convert queries to text internally and send them over to gpt, the convert the output. Optionally we can have tie it into system commands. Like siri or alexa, but actually useful.

zamnos 3y ago

I agree the evolution will be interesting (especially since chat isn't the original interface for textual GPT, eg GPT-2). But skeuomorphisms are about "ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original", and text chat is far from ornamental. I use it on a daily basis with my friends, though they're knowledge about me and them and our interactions, especially since 2021, is unmatched. (Until GPT4's image analysis is released and someone trains a model against Instagram stories, maybe.) A drawing of spiral binding in a digital notebook is ornamental but text chat is not because it will be a long time before human conversation becomes obsolete. Still, a look at GPTforwork.com and their spreadsheet add-on says that there are better interfaces for certain kinds of lookup and analysis.

samwillis 3y ago
But having the system trained to respond with a human like conversational voice very much is ornamental to the underlying function of a generative system. The "ornamental design cues" of skeuomorphism are ornamental when applied to the new system, they are not ornamental on the old you are borrowing from. To take your example of a "spiral binding in a digital notebook", the spiral binding is a necessary and deeply functional aspect of the old system, but entirely ornamental on the new. It's the same with ChatGPT, it doesn't need to present a human like conversational voice when interacting with the user, the developers have added that to aid in our understanding of it. Literally calling it "Chat" is skeuomorphic, it's just a REPL (read even print loop).
- zamnos 3y ago
  The word chat isn't skeuomorphic just because we as developers have our own jargon for interacting with computers. It's not ornamental, it helps non-technical users understand what to do with the system. Is naming the calculator app "Calculator" a skeuomorphism? They tried completion mode, and it's there with text-davinci-003 in the OpenAI Playground *. Give it a shot. It's the same grade of model as powers ChatGPT, but it's pretty hard to get the same sort of mileage out of it. Well, maybe you can, but I couldn't. That suggests to me, well for me at least, that the chat interface isn't ornamental and is fundamental for users getting use out of an LLM. I'm not ruling out future improvements to the technology leading to a different interface, but for now, the chat interface to a GPT model seems as fundamental and necessary as folders are on computers. * https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=complete https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=complete

rwmj 3y ago

People have deep and meaningful conversations with their cats, so I'm not hopeful that people will change their attitudes to chatbots.

gumballindie 3y ago

What puzzles me is why by and large these models rely on text as input and output. A reliable voice input ai could convert queries to text internally and send them over to gpt, the convert the output. Optionally we can have tie it into system commands. Like siri or alexa, but actually useful.