23 ms·

AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

291 points by ssn 3y ago

james-bcn 3y ago
That website has a surprisingly boring design. I haven't looked at it in years, and was expecting some impressively clean and elegant design. But it looks like a Wordpress site.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  I'll be honest...I like it. Boring with easily readable content is far better than most of the other junk that is put forward nowadays...
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  You should see his old site.
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    I do have a soft spot for the very reduced design of that site and the sister site useit.com had in the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516012145/http://www.nngroup.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010516012145/http://www.nngrou... https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit.... A redesign should not has been as brutalistic, but keeping the same spirit and personality.
- brayhite 3y ago
  What isn’t “clean” about it? I’ve found it incredibly easy to navigate and digest its content. What more are you looking for?
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Maybe you could do a CSS redesign of it ? You could even hold a contest on Twitter or on blogs to compare redesigns/relooking people are coming up with ? That could be interesting.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  I read this comment before clicking, and wow, oh boy do I disagree! The information design is impressively straight-forward. I can see every feature of the site right away with no overload or distraction from the content. There's an intuitive distinction categorizing every page element and I know what everything does and how to get everywhere without having to experiment. The fonts, spacing, groupings, and colors are all nice looking, purposeful, and consistent. I'm not exactly sure how you're using the word "boring" in this context. There are good kinds of boring and bad kinds of boring, and I think this is the good kind.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's clear, easy to read, and easy to navigate. I wish lots more of the web were as "boring" as this site.
- alphabet9000 3y ago
  yeah the site is bad, but not because it is boring, but because it should be even more simplified than how it is now. almost of the CSS "finishing touches" have something wrong with them. the content shifts on page load: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif bizarre dropdown button behavior: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif and i can go on and on. i don't feel this nitpick whining is unwarranted considering the site purports to be a leader in user experience.
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    Reading this made me realize just how much my priorities have changed over the course of my career. In the beginning, this is exactly the kind of thing I would absolutely never let pass, and I still am very keen to fix this kind of ugliness when I have the leeway. But nowadays, I'm ecstatic just to see something useful and not confusing or frustrating. These kinds of rough edges that give the user the impression of crappy software but don't materially harm usability have come to be second-order issues that I often don't even think about until larger problems have been fixed. Arguably what I've adopted is a form of pessimism.
97-109-107 3y ago
Two recent events suggest to me that this type of analytical look on interaction modes is commonly underappreciated in the industry. I write this partially from the perspective of a disillusioned student of interaction design. 1. Recent news of vehicle manufacturers moving away from touchscreens 2. Chatbot gold rush of 2018 where most business were sold chatbots under the guise of cost-saving (edit: formatting)
- p_j_w 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand point 1 here. Do you mean that vehicle manufacturers moving away from touchscreens is bad or that they would never have moved to them in the first place if they had properly investigated the idea?
  - 97-109-107 3y ago
    The latter - had they given proper thought to the consequences of moving into touch-screens they would've never gone there. Obviously I'm generalizing and discarding the impact of novelty on sales and marketing.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      It seems everyone is in a rush to LLMify their interfaces same as the chatbot rush. Same as the blockchain all the things rush. And so on. I thought about interfaces a lot and realizdd that, for most applications, a well-designed GUI and API is essential. For composability, there can be standards developed. LLMs are good for generating instructions in a language, that can be sort of finagled into API instructions. Then they can bring down the requirements to be an expert in a specific GUI or API and might open up more abilities for people. Well, and for artwork, LLMs can do a lot more. They can give even experts a sort of superhuman access to models that are “smooth” or “fuzzy” rather than with rigid angles. They can write a lot of vapid bullshit text for instance, or make a pretty believable photo effect that works for most people!
      - throwuwu 3y ago
andrewstuart 3y ago
I would have said ChatGPTs interface is a descendant of Infocomm adventure games which are a descendant of Colossal Cave. When using ChatGPT it certainly evokes the same feeling. Maybe this guy never played adventure.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    Both Infocomm adventures and ChatGPT have a text based interface in which you interact with the software as though you were interacting with a person. You tell the software the outcome you want using natural language and it responds to you in the first person. That is a common UI paradigm. example: "get the cat then drop the dog then open the door, go west and climb the ladder" - that is a natural language interface, which is what ChatGPT has. In both the Infocomm and ChatGPT case the software will respond to you in the first person as though you were interacting with someone. >> Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In fact Dragon's Lair was possibly the least interactive of almost all computer games - it was essentially an interactive movie with only the most trivial user interaction. >> Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. This was not my experience of Infocomm adventures.
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      Is natural language simply mean using words? Is SQL natural language? I think what makes it a natural language is that it follows natural language rules, which Infocomm games surely did not. Furthermore, Infocomm games used basically 100% precanned responses. It would do the rudimentary things like check if a window was open so if you looked at a wall it might say the window on that wall was open or closed, but that's it. I don't understand how that can make it a natural language interface. > This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In both games there's a set path you follow. You follow those commands you win, if not, you lose. There's no semantically equivalent way to complete the game. I remember spending most of my time with Infocomm games doing things like "look around the field" and it telling me "I don't know the word field" -- and I'm screaming because it just told me I'm in an open field! The door is blocked... blocked with what?! You can't answer me that?! There were a set of commands and objects it wanted you to interact with. That's it. That's not natural language, any more than SQL is. It's a structured language with commands that look like English verbs.
api 3y ago
I'd argue that multi-touch gestural mobile phone and tablet interfaces were different enough from mouse and keyboard to be considered a new paradigm.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I'd have multi-touch be a sidebar in the textbook, but not a new section. Gestural interaction is not fundamentally different than a pointer device: it doesn't allow meaningful new behavior. It is sometimes a more intuitive way to afford the same behavior, though. I would agree that portable devices amount to a new paradigm in something—maybe UX—but not UI per se.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    It allows manipulations that are impossible with single touch (like a mouse). It’s pretty big for things like 3D manipulation.
    - dlivingston 3y ago
      You can do all of those multi-touch manipulations on a Macintosh trackpad (zoom, pan, rotate, scale, etc). However, that trackpad would still be categorized as a form of a mouse -- correctly, in my opinion. All of these gestures can be (and are, given that 3D modeling is historically done on desktop) handled with a standard mouse using a combination of the scroll wheel and modifier keys.
    - karaterobot 3y ago
      Whether it's your fingers or an on-screen pointer, it's the same paradigm in the sense of it being the same model of interaction. You move a pointer around and activate controls on the screen by touching them. I'm not knocking gestural controls, just saying if I had to classify them, I'd say they're an evolution of the mouse or touchpad rather than a whole new model. And they aren't an evolution in all aspects, either. Multi-touch controls are easier for some things, harder for others. Fine-grain manipulation, for example selecting cells on a spreadsheet, or playing an FPS video game, are harder with touch controls than with a device like a mouse. They've also got a size constraint (the size of your fingertip) that makes many interfaces harder to use.
golemotron 3y ago
> Summary: AI is introducing the third user-interface paradigm in computing history, shifting to a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, not how to do it — thus reversing the locus of control. Like every query language ever. I'm not sure the distinction between things we are searching for and things we're actively making is as different as the author thinks.
- sp332 3y ago
  Or constraint-based programming, where some specification is given for the end result and the comouter figure out how to make it happen. But that's usually a programming thing, and UIs with that kind of thing are rare. But I wouldn't say they were nonexistent for 60 years.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  In your view, then, is AI best described as an incremental improvement over (say) SQL in terms of the tasks it enables users to complete?
  - golemotron 3y ago
    Incremental improvement over Google search. And, it's not about the tasks that it enables users to complete, it is about the UI paradigm as per the article.
    - karaterobot 3y ago
      Sorry for the confusion, I just view UI as being basically synonymous with task completion: in the end, the user interface is the set of tools the system gives users to complete tasks. Since the Google search interface is meant to look like you're talking to an AI, and probably has a lot of what we'd call AI under the hood, to turn natural language prompts into a query, I'm not surprised you view it as an incremental improvement at best.
- Klathmon 3y ago
  But this is basically the absence of a query syntax, a way to query via natural language, and not just get back a list of results, but have it almost synthesize an answer. To everyone who isn't a software developer, this is a new paradigm with computers. Hell even for me as a software dev it's pretty different. Like I'm not asking Google to find me info that I can then read and grok, I'm asking something like ChatGPT for an answer directly. It's the difference between querying for "documentation for eslint" but instead asking "how do you configure eslint errors to warnings" or even "convert eslint errors to warnings for me in this file". It's a very different mental approach to many problems for me.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
Not sure I would lump command line interfaces from circa 1964 with GUIs from 1984 through to the present, all in a single "paradigm". That seems like a stretch.
- deleted 3y ago
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- mritchie712 3y ago
  Agreed. Also, Uber (and many other mobile apps) wouldn't work as a CLI or desktop GUI, so leaving out mobile is another stretch.
  - savolai 3y ago
    That seems like a technology centered view. Nielsen is talking from the field of Human-Computer Interaction where he is pioneer, which deals with the point of view of human cognition. In terms of the logic of UI mechanics, what about mobile is different? Sure gestures and touch UI bring a kind of difference. Still, from the standpoint of cognition, desktop and mobile UIs have fundamentally the same cognitive dynamics. Command line UIs make you remember conmands by heart, GUIs make you select from a selection offered to you but they still do not undestand your intention. AI changes the paradigm as it is ostensibly able to understand intent so there is no deterministic selection of available commands. Instead, the interaction is closer to collaboration.
    - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
      Good CLIs don't make users remember commands by heart. Except at a very basic level. I often joke that the average Linux user only really needs three keys on their keyboard: Up, Enter and Tab. (Not strictly true, since sometimes you press ctrl-R, but that's a substitute for pressing Up a bunch of times.) Tab completion on many CLIs is good enough that I'm often frustrated when the tab key isn't the 'do what I'm thinking' button. And whenever browsers change their predictive text algorithms so I need to type more than three letters of a URL for it to complete, I get annoyed because I'm so used to the predictor knowing what I want. And I get the feeling that if Google doesn't autocomplete your query long before you're finished writing it, it's because you're not going to get any results for it anyway. The implementation may be different, but expecting a computer to know what I want based on my or similar people's past behaviour rather than telling it exactly has been the norm for quite some time. Some of this is from humans using their experience to implement rules, and some of it is actually ML that predates the current LLM trend.
wbobeirne 3y ago
> With this new UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, the user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished. This doesn't seem like a whole new paradigm, we already do that. When I hit the "add comment" button below, I'm not specifically instructing the web server how I want my comment inserted into a database (if it even is a database at all.) This is just another abstraction on top of an already very tall layer of abstractions. Whether it's AI under the hood, or a million monkeys with a million typewriters, it doesn't change my interaction at all.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Yeah I would agree with this, the article struggles really classifying the different paradigms, and due to this the conclusion winds up not holding true. We're still relying on "batch processing".
- blowski 3y ago
  If I had a spectrum of purely imperative on one side and purely declarative on the other, these new AIs are much closer to the latter than anything that has come before them. SQL errors if you don’t write in very specific language. These new AIs will accept anything and give it their best shot.
  - roncesvalles 3y ago
    But that's just a change in valid input cardinality at the cost of precision.
- Timon3 3y ago
  I think the important part from the article that establishes the difference is this: > As I mentioned, in command-based interactions, the user issues commands to the computer one at a time, gradually producing the desired result (if the design has sufficient usability to allow people to understand what commands to issue at each step). The computer is fully obedient and does exactly what it’s told. The downside is that low usability often causes users to issue commands that do something different than what the users really want. Let's say you're creating a new picture from nothing in Photoshop. You will have to build up your image layer by layer, piece by piece, command by command. Generative AI does the same in one stroke. Something similar holds for your comment: you had to navigate your browser (or app) to the comment section of this article, enter your comment, and click "add comment". With an AI system with good usability you could presumably enter "write the following comment under this article on HN: ...", and have your comment be posted. The difference lies on the axis of "power of individual commands".
kaycebasques 3y ago
There's something ironic to me about the fact that building AI experiences still requires the first computing paradigm: batch processing. At least, my experience building a retrieval-augmented generation system requires a lot of batch processing. Well, I shouldn't say "requires". I'm sure you can build them without batch processing. But batch processing definitely felt like the most natural and straightforward way to do it in my experience.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  He's talking about human-computer interaction paradigms, not computing paradigms. He's not a general computing expert, he's a UI/UX expert. "Batch computing" in this context refers to the era of punch cards, needing to wait for results overnight, and the difficulty of editing pre-existing programs -- and how all of that utterly dictated the style of interaction one had with computers.
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    Yep, I was aware of the difference before I made my original comment. There's still something ironic and interesting about it to me. Can't quite put my finger on it, though.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  What sort of retrieval augmented generation system are you working on?
isoprophlex 3y ago
"intent-based outcome specification"... so, a declarative language such as SQL?
- zgluck 3y ago
  While it was initially meant as user interface layer of sorts, I think, it's not really something that the typical user can be expected to know nowadays.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I think you'll find that INSERT and UPDATE are very much commands. SQL queries are outcome-driven sure, but try to move beyond pure queries and outcome-driven computing, without some sort of machine learning, gets quite difficult. And moving outside of a single SELECT is a huge barrier. Even within the scope of SQL, consider an ML system that can slice-and-dice previous SQL queries interactively, based on non-expert user input. Consider an ML system that essentially edits an proposed SQL transaction as a whole, based on your requests. Previewing results etc, adjusting INSERTs and UPDATEs as user clarifies intent. User terminology focuses on the outcome, not on the individual commands, ordering, etc. Now move from that narrow domain into something like "I want to organize a conference", "I want to write a book", etc, and all the things that are beyond a single SQL SELECT.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    I built a system that uses GPT to write KQL queries (similar to SQL) for a specific table. It could even combine multiple queries or throw in a custom chart if requested. OpenAI's models are good at writing SQL. I think they finally allow the type of use case that SQL itself was supposed to provide as originally envisioned.
kaycebasques 3y ago
> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Maybe we can borrow programming paradigm terms here and describe this as Imperative UX versus Declarative UX. Makes me want to dive into SQL or XSLT and try to find more parallels.
- webnrrd2k 3y ago
  I was thinking of imperative vs declarative, too. SQL is declaritive with a pre-defined syntax and grammar as an interface, where as the AI style of interaction has a natural language interface.
  - echelon 3y ago
    SQL and XSLT are declarative, but the outputs are clean and intuitive. The data model and data set are probably well understood, as is the mapping to and from the query. AI is a very different type of declarative. It's messy, difficult to intuit, has more dimensionality, and the outputs can be signals rather than tabular data records. It rhymes, but it doesn't feel the same.
    - Hedepig 3y ago
      The recent additions OpenAI have made allows for tighter control over the outputs. I think that is a very useful step forward.
    - bavell 3y ago
      Yeah, it's declarative but fuzzy and non-deterministic as well.
- deleted 3y ago
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danielvaughn 3y ago
Interesting to bundle both cli/gui under the "command" based interaction paradigm. I've never heard it described that way but it does make sense intuitively. Is that a common perception? I think of the development of the mouse/gui as a very significant event in the history of computing interfaces.
- zgluck 3y ago
  When you zoom out on the time scale it makes more sense. I think he's got a point. Both CLIs and GUIs are "command based". LLM prompts are more declarative. You describe what you want.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Well LLMs are also “command-based”. They are called prompts. In fact they’d just continue the text but were specifically trained by RLHF to be command-following. Actually, we can make automomous agents and agentic behavior without LLMs very well, for decades. And we can program them with declarative instructions much more precisely than with natural language. The thing LLMs seem to do is just give non-experts a lot of the tools to get some basic things done that only experts could do for now. This has to do with the LLM modeling the domain space and reading what experts have said thus far, and allowing a non-expert to kind of handwave and produce results.
    - zgluck 3y ago
      (I added a bit to the comment above, sorry) I think there's a clear difference between a command and a declaration. Prompts are declarative.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    I've been at a SQL command prompt a decade or several before LLM.
    - zgluck 3y ago
      That is not the point here. Did you any point believe that you were experiencing a mass market user experience at those times?
EGreg 3y ago
FB’s AI head just said LLMs are a fad. I thought about how to use them… I wish they could render an interface (HTML and JS at least, but also produce artifacts like PowerPoints). What is really needed is for LLMs to produce some structured markup, that can then be rendered as dynamic documents. Not text. As input, natural language is actually inferior to GUIs. I know the debate between command line people and GUI people and LLMs would seem like they’d boost the command-line people’s case, but any powerful system would actually benefit from a well designed GUI.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Here is the main reason: Any sufficiently advanced software has deep structure and implementation. It isn’t like a poet who can just bullshit some rhymes and make others figure out what they mean. The computer program expects some definite inputs which it exposes as an API eg a headless CMS via HTTP. Similar with an organization that can provide this or that servicd or experience. Therefore given this rigidity, the input has limited options at every step. And a GUI can gracefully model those limitations. A natural language model will make you think there is a lot of choice but really it will boil down to a 2018-era chatbot that gives you menus at every step and asks whether you want A, B or C.
- dlivingston 3y ago
  As someone who just spent 2 hours in my company's Confluence site, trying to track down the answer to a single question that could have been resolved in seconds by an LLM trained on an internal corporate corpus -- LLMs are very much not a fad.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    How do you know the answer is right? Because it linked you to the source? Like a vector database would? Google offered to index sites since 1996.
    - dlivingston 3y ago
      We have internal search. Finding things isn't the problem. It's contextualizing massive amounts of text and making it queryable with natural language. The question I was trying to solve was -- "what is feature XYZ? How does it work in hardware & software? How is it exposed in our ABC software, and where do the hooks exist to interface with XYZ?" The answers exist across maybe 30 different Confluence pages, plus source code, plus source code documentation, plus some PDFs. If all of that was indexed by an LLM, it would have been trivial to get the answer I spent hours manually assembling.
tobr 3y ago
Well, what counts as a “paradigm”? I can’t see any definition of that. If you’d ask 10 people to divide the history of UI into some number of paradigms, you would for sure get 10 different answers. But hey, why not pick the one that makes for a hyperbolic headline. Made me click.
- deleted 3y ago
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- savolai 3y ago
  The division does not seem arbitrary to me at all. What about the below is questionable to you? From sibling comment [1]: Nielsen is talking from the field of Human-Computer Interaction where he is pioneer, which deals with the point of view of human cognition. In terms of the logic of UI mechanics, what about mobile is different? Sure gestures and touch UI bring a kind of difference. Still, from the standpoint of cognition, desktop and mobile UIs have fundamentally the same cognitive dynamics. Command line UIs make you remember conmands by heart, GUIs make you select from a selection offered to you but they still do not undestand your intention. AI changes the paradigm as it is ostensibly able to understand intent so there is no deterministic selection of available commands. Instead, the interaction is closer to collaboration. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396244
a1371 3y ago
I don't really get this. The paradigm has always been there, it has been the technology limitations that have defined the UI so far. Having robots and computers that humans talk to has been a fixture of sci-fi movies. Perhaps the most notable example being 2001: A Space Odyssey which came out 55 years ago.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Sure, but it's sort of how actual usable and economical flying cars would be a paradigm change for transport. The idea exists, but it's made up fairy magic with capabilities and limitations based on plot requirements. Once it's actually made real it hardly ever ends up being used the way it was imagined. Like for example in 2001, the video call tech. They figured it would be used like a payphone with a cathode ray tube lol. Just as in reality nobody in the right mind would hand over complete control of a trillion dollar spaceship to a probabilistic LLM. The end applications will be completely different and cannot be imagined by those limited by the perspective of their time.
  - mrob 3y ago
    I don't recall a single cathode ray tube in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is notable for having the first depiction of a tablet computer. They went to considerable effort to show flat-screen displays instead of CRTs.
krm01 3y ago
The article fails to grasp the essence of what UI is actually about. I agree that AI is adding a new layer to UI and UX design. In our work [1] we have seen an increase in AI projects or features the last 12 months (for obvious reasons). However, the way that AI will contribute to better UI is to remove parts of the Interface. not simply giving it a new form. Let me explain, the ultimate UI is no UI. In a perfect scenario, you think about something (want pizza) and you have it (eating pizza) as instant as you desire. Obviously this isn’t possible so the goal of Interface design is to find the least amount of things needed to get you from point A to the desired Destination as quickly as possible. Now, with AI, you can start to add a level of predictive Interfaces where you can use AI to remove steps that would normally require users to do something. If you want to design better products with AI, you have to remember that product design is about subtracting things not adding them. AI is a technology that can help with that. [1] https://fairpixels.pro https://fairpixels.pro
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > the goal of Interface design is to find the least amount of things needed to get you from point A to the desired Destination as quickly as possible. That shouldn't be the primary goal of user interfaces, in my opinion. The primary goal should be to allow users to interface with the machine in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load. I understand a lot of UI design these days prioritizes the sort of "efficiency" you're talking about, but I think that's one of the reasons why modern UIs tend to be fairly bad. Efficiency is important, of course! But (depending on what tool the UI is attached to) it shouldn't be the primary goal.
  - krm01 3y ago
    > The primary goal should be to allow users to interface with the machine in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load. If you use your phone, is your primary goal to interface with it in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. You go read the news, send a message to a loved one etc. there’s a human need that you’re aiming to fulfill. Interfacing with tech is not the underlying desire. It’s what happens on the surface as a means.
croes 3y ago
>Then Google came along, and anybody could search Then they flooded the search results with ads and now you can search but hardly find. I bet the same will happen with software like ChatGPT.
thih9 3y ago
What about voice assistants? These are not as impressive when compared to LLMs, so perhaps wouldn't cause a UX shift on their own. But in essence Siri, Alexa, etc also seem to put the user's intent first.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I'd argue that voice assistants are somewhat part of the same paradigm[1], and ChatGPT etc focused on pure text input mostly to make the research easier. Voice assistants just focused on the challenges of understanding speech, facilitated by limited allowed grammar, while ChatGPT-style research focused on the challenges of understanding language, facilitated by limiting input to text. "Just" produce ChatGPT input tokens from a voice-to-text-with-extra-hints machine and you have them combined. [1] Yes, voice assistants tend to be more command-oriented, but I view that as a limitation of the technology when they were popularized, not as an inherent part of the concept of a voice assistant. Voice is just an input modalism.
- esafak 3y ago
  A voice assistant is simply a speech-driven conversational UI; they belong to the same class of UIs as chatGPT. In fact, you could very well power your voice assistant with GPT.
travisgriggs 3y ago
GPT based UIs inspired by the idea that if you get the right sequence of prompts you’ll get stochastically acceptable results. So now I’m imagining the horror predictions for Word where 90% of the screen was button bars. But the twist is that you type in some text and then click on “prompt” buttons repeatedly hoping to get the document formatting you wanted, probably settling for something that was “close enough” with a shrug.
Animats 3y ago
This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The system would then light up all possible "exit" tracks from the junction. This took into account conflicting routes already set up and trains present in the junction. Only reachable exits lit up. The dispatcher pushed the button for the desired exit. The route setup was then automatic. Switches moved and locked into position, then signals along the route went to clear. All this was fully interlocked; the operator could not request anything unsafe. There were control panels before this, but this was the first system where the UI did more than just show status. It actively advised and helped the operator. The operator set the goal; the system worked out how to achieve it. Another one I encountered was an early computerized fire department dispatching system. Big custom display boards and keyboards. When an alarm came in, it was routed to a dispatcher. Based on location, the system picked the initial resources (trucks, engines, chiefs, and special equipment) to be dispatched. Each dispatcher had a custom keyboard, with one button for each of those resources. The buttons lit up indicating the selected equipment. The dispatcher could add additional equipment with a single button push, if the situation being called in required it. Then they pushed one big button, which set off alarms in fire stations, printed a message on a printer near the fire trucks, and even opened the doors at the fire house. There was a big board at the front of the room which showed the status of everything as colored squares. The fire department people said this cut about 30 seconds off a dispatch, which, in that business, is considered a big win. Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Now, the promising feature of LLMs in this direction is the ability to use the context of previous questions and answers. It's still query/response, but with enough context that the user can gradually make the system converge on a useful result. Such systems are useful for "I don't know what I want but I'll know it when I see it" problems. This allows using flaky LLMs with human assistance to get a useful result. [1] https://online.anyflip.com/lbes/vczg/mobile/#p=1 https://online.anyflip.com/lbes/vczg/mobile/#p=1
marysnovirgin 3y ago
The usability of a system is mostly irrelevant. The measure of a good UI is how much money it can get the user to spend, not how intuitively it enables the user to achieve a task.
- pilgrim0 3y ago
  Ah, I love when someone gets it! What design has come to is beyond sad, it’s revolting.
retrocryptid 3y ago
<unpopular-opinion> Bardini's book about Doug Engelbart recaps a conversation between Engelbart and Minsky about the nature of natural language interfaces... that took place in the 1960s. AI interfaces taking so long has less to do with the technology (I mean... Zork understood my text sentences well enough to get me around a simulated world) and more to do with what people are comfortable with. Lowey talked about MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.) I think it's taken this long for people to be okay with the inherent slowness of AI interfaces. We needed a generation or two of users who traded representational efficiency for easy to learn abstractions. And now we can do it again. You can code up a demo app using various LLMs, but it takes HOURS of back and forth to get to the point it takes me (with experience and boilerplate) minutes to get to. But you don't need to invest in developing the experience. And I encourage every product manager to build a few apps with AI tools so you'll more easily see what you're paying me for. </unpopular-opinion>
- maximecampbell 3y ago
  [dead]
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Sure, and not many people are seriously trying to suggest that one should hire an AI instead of a software engineer _at this point_, assuming you have a real budget. But, especially with GPT-4, it is entirely feasible to create a convenient and relatively fast user experience for building a specific type of application that doesn't stray too far from the norm. AI can call the boilerplate generator and even add some custom code using a particular API that you feed it. So many people are trying to build that type of thing (including me). As more of these become available, many people who don't have thousands of dollars to pay a programmer will hire an AI for a few tens or hundreds of dollars instead. The other point is that this is the current state of generative AI at the present moment. It gets better every few months. Project the current rate of progress forward by 5-10 years. One can imagine that if we are selling something at that point, it's not our own labour. Maybe it would be an AI that we have tuned with skills, knowledge, face, voice, and personality that we think will be saleable. Possibly using some of our own knowledge and skills to improve that recipe. Although there will likely be marketplaces where you can easily select the abilities or characteristics you want.
Xen9 3y ago
Marvin Minsky, a genius who saw the future.
aqme28 3y ago
This is not a new UI paradigm. Virtual assistants have been doing exactly this for years. It's just gotten cheap and low-latency enough to be practical.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Yep, although they were doing it 'badly', I guess it not being quite so terrible is the 'new paradigm', which is eyeroll worthy IMO.
jl6 3y ago
Is it a new paradigm, or an old paradigm that finally works? Users have been typing commands into computers for decades, getting responses of varying sophistication with varying degrees of natural language processing. Even the idea of an “AI” chatbot that mimics human writing is decades old. The new thing is that the NLP now has some depth to it.
dekhn 3y ago
As a demo once, I trained an object detector on some vector art (high quality art, made by a UX designer) that looked like various components of burgers. I also printed the art and mounted it on magnets and used a magnetic dry board; you could put components of a burger on the board, and a real-time NN would classify the various components. I did it mainly as a joke when there was a cheeseburger emoji controversy (people prefer cheese above patty, btw). But when I was watching I realized you could probably combine this with gesture and pose detection and build a little visual language for communicating with computers. It would be wasteful and probably not very efficient, but it was still curious how much object detection enabled building things in the real world and having it input to the computer easily.
- yutreer 3y ago
  What you imagined sounds vaguely like dynamicland from Bret Victor. https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ The dots around the paper are encoded programs, and you can use other shapes, objects, or sigils that communicate with the computer vision system.
vsareto 3y ago
>And if you’re considering becoming a prompt engineer, don’t count on a long-lasting career. There's like this whole class of technical jobs that only follow trends. If you were an en vogue blockchain developer, this is your next target if you want to remain trendy. It's hard to care about this happening as the technical debt incurred will be written off -- the company/project isn't ingrained enough in society to care about the long-term quality. So best of luck, ye prompt engineers. I hope you collect multi-hundred-thousand dollar salaries and retire early.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools. Which is why the notion of conversational AI (or whatever dumb name they came up with for the “third paradigm”) seems kind of alien to me. I mean, I definitely see its utility, but I find it hard to imagine it being as dominant as some are arguing it could be. Any task that involves browsing for information seems like more of an object manipulation task. Any task involving some kind of visual design seems like a tool manipulation task, unless you aren’t too picky about the final result. Ultimately I think conversational UI is best suited not for tasks, but services. Granted, the line between the two can be fuzzy at times. If you’re looking for a website, but you don’t personally know anything about making a website, then that task morphs into a service that someone or something else does. Which I suppose is kind of the other reason why I find the idea kind of alien. I almost never use the computer for services. I use it to browse, to create, to work, all of which entail something more intuitively suited to object or tool manipulation.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  AutoCAD and Rhino 3D are two examples that I remember having a command prompt sitting proudly somewhere at the bottom of the UI. Your mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts were all converted into commands in text form. If you look at your command history, it's a script - a bit boring since it is completely linear, but add loops, conditionals and function/macro support and you get a very capable scripting environment.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    AutoCAD definitely was CLI-based, with menus and dialogs basically filling in parameters to the commands. But in the late 90s or so Autodesk got religion and decided that AutoCAD should be a Windows product and follow Microsoft UI guidelines, so I don't know how well they stuck with the "command line underneath" over the years. Early in AutoCAD's history, Autodesk did add loops and conditionals to its CLI -- with Lisp! Type an open paren and the command line became a REPL. You could define new commands, directly manipulate entity data structures, and have all the control structures Lisp affords -- not Common Lisp, it was way simpler, but it was powerful. To this day, wayward mech engineers still sometimes ask Autolisp-related questions on unrelated Lisp fora, such as r/lisp.
afavour 3y ago
Weren’t voice assistants a new UI paradigm? Also, tellingly, they turned out to not be anywhere near as useful as people hoped. Sometimes new isn’t a good thing.
tin7in 3y ago
I agree that chat UI is not the answer. It’s a great start and a very familiar UI but I feel this will default to more traditional UI that shows pre defined actions and buttons depending on the workflow.
layoric 3y ago
I built a proof of concept recently that tries to show a generic hybrid of command and intent[0]. The UI generates form representations of API calls the AI agent has decided on making to complete the task (in this case booking a meeting). Some API calls are restricted so only a human can make them, which they do by being presented with a form waiting for them to submit to continue. If the user is vague, the bot will ask questions and try to discover the information it needs. It’s only a proof of concept but I think it’s a pattern I will try to build on , as it can provide a very flexible interface. [0] https://gptmeetings.netcore.io/ https://gptmeetings.netcore.io/
dustingetz 3y ago
UI is a high frequency concurrency problem. The “deep rooted usability problems” (like lag, glitches, and clumsiness - general lack of fluency) are due to staffing UI projects with web designers and not concurrency engineers. The fluent conversational AI systems and other movie UIs that folks are imagining up are therefore blocked on the concurrency sub-problem. This is the space we research at Hyperfiddle, we put forth our proposed solution here: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric
d_burfoot 3y ago
What strikes me most powerfully when interacting with the LLMs is that, unlike virtually ever other computer system I've ever used, the bots are extremely forgiving of mistakes, disfluencies, typos, and other errors I make when I'm typing. The bot usually figures out what I mean and tells me what I want to know.
ThomPete 3y ago
Here is how I think about it The LLM's are infinity app stores. All you need is an LLM and a database plus the ability to speak english and you can replace most features provided by SaaS services today. The GUI becomes a byproduct of the problem you want to solve rather than the gatekeeper to what you can solve. https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1660463528984150018?s=20 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1660463528984150018?s...
- drvdevd 3y ago
  I share this opinion as well, I think. I’m looking at any CRUD app I’ve worked on and thinking: this is just a specification over a database. Same with most other software but the web and most mobile apps seem ripe to just become generated patterns.
earthboundkid 3y ago
It would be neat if someone could make a good adventure game with an LLM, but they’re too prone to getting argued into just letting you win or whatever.
throwoutchatgpt 3y ago
ChatGPT and all AI is crap. If we don't want to use it, then it will fail to exist and will be nothing but a massive new failure for Microsoft.
USB3_0 3y ago
> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Thus, the third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. Wow! For the first time ever, I will be able to describe to a trained professional what I want, and they will do it for me! Before today I used to write out the exact arm motions a carpenter would need to carve me a chair, but now I can just ask them for one! This article is stupid. AI will make it easier for computers to interpret human interactions leading to increased efficiency and usability. Just like every other useful tool ever invented. There, I've put more insight into this comment than their article.
nologic01 3y ago
So many words to describe "declarative programming"
trojan13 3y ago
I am surprised this article does not even mention multimodal LLMs. Because the more kinds of media the LLM can take as in input and interpret the easier the interaction with it gets.
bambax 3y ago
> in command-based interactions, the user issues commands to the computer one at a time, gradually producing the desired result. The computer is fully obedient and does exactly what it’s told. > With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. I think that's true, and a big part of the AI revolution. Instead of filling endless forms that have subtle controls to guide the user, we could have a simple conversation, like SIRI but that would actually work. At my current client's, we're working on a big application that has many such forms. Once filled, the forms send the data to a back-end system (SAP). There's a team trying to train an LLM so that it can answer questions about the app and about how to fill the forms. But I think the whole point of AI, as regards to this app, is to eventually replace it entirely. Just let end users ask questions and tell the machine what they want, and the machine can build the proper data and send it to SAP. I don't think AI is a threat for back-end systems like SAP, at least not yet. But for front-end work, it's obvious that it would be infinitely more pleasant -- and possibly, more efficient -- to tell the machine what to do rather than filling forms.
leroman 3y ago
Chat UI/UX is a tool for experts. To drive this point home consider a user prompting "produce a founder agreement document", for which the AI will happily produce -something-. Even thought he user is able to read the document he does not understand the contents in "legal" terms. In contrast if the user would go to an expert lawyer, who would start by asking the user some relevant questions (=domain questions) and put together a prompt tailored to the needs and circumstances of the user in the domain language, with all relevant nuances.. I am working to create this experience by augmenting the AI interaction with step-by-step leading questions and interaction UI, similar to how users would interact with a domain expert. https://pth.ai https://pth.ai Would love feedback! :)
- danielbln 3y ago
  Interesting, I like this sort of wizard approach. Would you share any implementation details? Langchain, presumably?
  - leroman 3y ago
    Actually, I'm not using Langchain. I'm now adding "agent" functionality, specifically to enable the AI to do some "research" on the web, at the moment this will also be done without a framework. So I'm either missing something or I am doing something simple enough that does not require the framework overhead / added value..
    - danielbln 3y ago
      I think that's good, langchain is a spaghetti monster and I think you're better off rolling your own, especially now with the baked in functions feature that GPT has'
      - leroman 3y ago
        I am able to implement complex logic without using this new "functions" feature, I am considering using it with the agent implementation, but might not need to as the new GPT4 version improves on it's JSON handling so that is already plenty robust for my needs..
tasuki 3y ago
> Clicking or tapping things on a screen is an intuitive and essential aspect of user interaction that should not be overlooked. I don't know, is it? Humanity made do without it for thousands of years.

291 points by ssn 3y ago

That website has a surprisingly boring design. I haven't looked at it in years, and was expecting some impressively clean and elegant design. But it looks like a Wordpress site.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
I'll be honest...I like it. Boring with easily readable content is far better than most of the other junk that is put forward nowadays...
Gordonjcp 3y ago
You should see his old site.
- ttepasse 3y ago
  I do have a soft spot for the very reduced design of that site and the sister site useit.com had in the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516012145/http://www.nngroup.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010516012145/http://www.nngrou... https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit.... A redesign should not has been as brutalistic, but keeping the same spirit and personality.
brayhite 3y ago
What isn’t “clean” about it? I’ve found it incredibly easy to navigate and digest its content. What more are you looking for?
johnchristopher 3y ago
Maybe you could do a CSS redesign of it ? You could even hold a contest on Twitter or on blogs to compare redesigns/relooking people are coming up with ? That could be interesting.
happytoexplain 3y ago
I read this comment before clicking, and wow, oh boy do I disagree! The information design is impressively straight-forward. I can see every feature of the site right away with no overload or distraction from the content. There's an intuitive distinction categorizing every page element and I know what everything does and how to get everywhere without having to experiment. The fonts, spacing, groupings, and colors are all nice looking, purposeful, and consistent. I'm not exactly sure how you're using the word "boring" in this context. There are good kinds of boring and bad kinds of boring, and I think this is the good kind.
JohnFen 3y ago
It's clear, easy to read, and easy to navigate. I wish lots more of the web were as "boring" as this site.
alphabet9000 3y ago
yeah the site is bad, but not because it is boring, but because it should be even more simplified than how it is now. almost of the CSS "finishing touches" have something wrong with them. the content shifts on page load: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif bizarre dropdown button behavior: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif and i can go on and on. i don't feel this nitpick whining is unwarranted considering the site purports to be a leader in user experience.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  Reading this made me realize just how much my priorities have changed over the course of my career. In the beginning, this is exactly the kind of thing I would absolutely never let pass, and I still am very keen to fix this kind of ugliness when I have the leeway. But nowadays, I'm ecstatic just to see something useful and not confusing or frustrating. These kinds of rough edges that give the user the impression of crappy software but don't materially harm usability have come to be second-order issues that I often don't even think about until larger problems have been fixed. Arguably what I've adopted is a form of pessimism.

97-109-107 3y ago

Two recent events suggest to me that this type of analytical look on interaction modes is commonly underappreciated in the industry. I write this partially from the perspective of a disillusioned student of interaction design. 1. Recent news of vehicle manufacturers moving away from touchscreens 2. Chatbot gold rush of 2018 where most business were sold chatbots under the guise of cost-saving (edit: formatting)

p_j_w 3y ago
I'm not sure I understand point 1 here. Do you mean that vehicle manufacturers moving away from touchscreens is bad or that they would never have moved to them in the first place if they had properly investigated the idea?
- 97-109-107 3y ago
  The latter - had they given proper thought to the consequences of moving into touch-screens they would've never gone there. Obviously I'm generalizing and discarding the impact of novelty on sales and marketing.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    It seems everyone is in a rush to LLMify their interfaces same as the chatbot rush. Same as the blockchain all the things rush. And so on. I thought about interfaces a lot and realizdd that, for most applications, a well-designed GUI and API is essential. For composability, there can be standards developed. LLMs are good for generating instructions in a language, that can be sort of finagled into API instructions. Then they can bring down the requirements to be an expert in a specific GUI or API and might open up more abilities for people. Well, and for artwork, LLMs can do a lot more. They can give even experts a sort of superhuman access to models that are “smooth” or “fuzzy” rather than with rigid angles. They can write a lot of vapid bullshit text for instance, or make a pretty believable photo effect that works for most people!
    - throwuwu 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago

I would have said ChatGPTs interface is a descendant of Infocomm adventure games which are a descendant of Colossal Cave. When using ChatGPT it certainly evokes the same feeling. Maybe this guy never played adventure.

kenjackson 3y ago
I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Both Infocomm adventures and ChatGPT have a text based interface in which you interact with the software as though you were interacting with a person. You tell the software the outcome you want using natural language and it responds to you in the first person. That is a common UI paradigm. example: "get the cat then drop the dog then open the door, go west and climb the ladder" - that is a natural language interface, which is what ChatGPT has. In both the Infocomm and ChatGPT case the software will respond to you in the first person as though you were interacting with someone. >> Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In fact Dragon's Lair was possibly the least interactive of almost all computer games - it was essentially an interactive movie with only the most trivial user interaction. >> Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. This was not my experience of Infocomm adventures.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    Is natural language simply mean using words? Is SQL natural language? I think what makes it a natural language is that it follows natural language rules, which Infocomm games surely did not. Furthermore, Infocomm games used basically 100% precanned responses. It would do the rudimentary things like check if a window was open so if you looked at a wall it might say the window on that wall was open or closed, but that's it. I don't understand how that can make it a natural language interface. > This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In both games there's a set path you follow. You follow those commands you win, if not, you lose. There's no semantically equivalent way to complete the game. I remember spending most of my time with Infocomm games doing things like "look around the field" and it telling me "I don't know the word field" -- and I'm screaming because it just told me I'm in an open field! The door is blocked... blocked with what?! You can't answer me that?! There were a set of commands and objects it wanted you to interact with. That's it. That's not natural language, any more than SQL is. It's a structured language with commands that look like English verbs.

api 3y ago

I'd argue that multi-touch gestural mobile phone and tablet interfaces were different enough from mouse and keyboard to be considered a new paradigm.

karaterobot 3y ago
I'd have multi-touch be a sidebar in the textbook, but not a new section. Gestural interaction is not fundamentally different than a pointer device: it doesn't allow meaningful new behavior. It is sometimes a more intuitive way to afford the same behavior, though. I would agree that portable devices amount to a new paradigm in something—maybe UX—but not UI per se.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  It allows manipulations that are impossible with single touch (like a mouse). It’s pretty big for things like 3D manipulation.
  - dlivingston 3y ago
    You can do all of those multi-touch manipulations on a Macintosh trackpad (zoom, pan, rotate, scale, etc). However, that trackpad would still be categorized as a form of a mouse -- correctly, in my opinion. All of these gestures can be (and are, given that 3D modeling is historically done on desktop) handled with a standard mouse using a combination of the scroll wheel and modifier keys.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Whether it's your fingers or an on-screen pointer, it's the same paradigm in the sense of it being the same model of interaction. You move a pointer around and activate controls on the screen by touching them. I'm not knocking gestural controls, just saying if I had to classify them, I'd say they're an evolution of the mouse or touchpad rather than a whole new model. And they aren't an evolution in all aspects, either. Multi-touch controls are easier for some things, harder for others. Fine-grain manipulation, for example selecting cells on a spreadsheet, or playing an FPS video game, are harder with touch controls than with a device like a mouse. They've also got a size constraint (the size of your fingertip) that makes many interfaces harder to use.

golemotron 3y ago

> Summary: AI is introducing the third user-interface paradigm in computing history, shifting to a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, not how to do it — thus reversing the locus of control. Like every query language ever. I'm not sure the distinction between things we are searching for and things we're actively making is as different as the author thinks.

sp332 3y ago
Or constraint-based programming, where some specification is given for the end result and the comouter figure out how to make it happen. But that's usually a programming thing, and UIs with that kind of thing are rare. But I wouldn't say they were nonexistent for 60 years.
karaterobot 3y ago
In your view, then, is AI best described as an incremental improvement over (say) SQL in terms of the tasks it enables users to complete?
- golemotron 3y ago
  Incremental improvement over Google search. And, it's not about the tasks that it enables users to complete, it is about the UI paradigm as per the article.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Sorry for the confusion, I just view UI as being basically synonymous with task completion: in the end, the user interface is the set of tools the system gives users to complete tasks. Since the Google search interface is meant to look like you're talking to an AI, and probably has a lot of what we'd call AI under the hood, to turn natural language prompts into a query, I'm not surprised you view it as an incremental improvement at best.
Klathmon 3y ago
But this is basically the absence of a query syntax, a way to query via natural language, and not just get back a list of results, but have it almost synthesize an answer. To everyone who isn't a software developer, this is a new paradigm with computers. Hell even for me as a software dev it's pretty different. Like I'm not asking Google to find me info that I can then read and grok, I'm asking something like ChatGPT for an answer directly. It's the difference between querying for "documentation for eslint" but instead asking "how do you configure eslint errors to warnings" or even "convert eslint errors to warnings for me in this file". It's a very different mental approach to many problems for me.

DebtDeflation 3y ago

Not sure I would lump command line interfaces from circa 1964 with GUIs from 1984 through to the present, all in a single "paradigm". That seems like a stretch.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mritchie712 3y ago
Agreed. Also, Uber (and many other mobile apps) wouldn't work as a CLI or desktop GUI, so leaving out mobile is another stretch.
- savolai 3y ago
  That seems like a technology centered view. Nielsen is talking from the field of Human-Computer Interaction where he is pioneer, which deals with the point of view of human cognition. In terms of the logic of UI mechanics, what about mobile is different? Sure gestures and touch UI bring a kind of difference. Still, from the standpoint of cognition, desktop and mobile UIs have fundamentally the same cognitive dynamics. Command line UIs make you remember conmands by heart, GUIs make you select from a selection offered to you but they still do not undestand your intention. AI changes the paradigm as it is ostensibly able to understand intent so there is no deterministic selection of available commands. Instead, the interaction is closer to collaboration.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    Good CLIs don't make users remember commands by heart. Except at a very basic level. I often joke that the average Linux user only really needs three keys on their keyboard: Up, Enter and Tab. (Not strictly true, since sometimes you press ctrl-R, but that's a substitute for pressing Up a bunch of times.) Tab completion on many CLIs is good enough that I'm often frustrated when the tab key isn't the 'do what I'm thinking' button. And whenever browsers change their predictive text algorithms so I need to type more than three letters of a URL for it to complete, I get annoyed because I'm so used to the predictor knowing what I want. And I get the feeling that if Google doesn't autocomplete your query long before you're finished writing it, it's because you're not going to get any results for it anyway. The implementation may be different, but expecting a computer to know what I want based on my or similar people's past behaviour rather than telling it exactly has been the norm for quite some time. Some of this is from humans using their experience to implement rules, and some of it is actually ML that predates the current LLM trend.

wbobeirne 3y ago

> With this new UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, the user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished. This doesn't seem like a whole new paradigm, we already do that. When I hit the "add comment" button below, I'm not specifically instructing the web server how I want my comment inserted into a database (if it even is a database at all.) This is just another abstraction on top of an already very tall layer of abstractions. Whether it's AI under the hood, or a million monkeys with a million typewriters, it doesn't change my interaction at all.

waboremo 3y ago
Yeah I would agree with this, the article struggles really classifying the different paradigms, and due to this the conclusion winds up not holding true. We're still relying on "batch processing".
blowski 3y ago
If I had a spectrum of purely imperative on one side and purely declarative on the other, these new AIs are much closer to the latter than anything that has come before them. SQL errors if you don’t write in very specific language. These new AIs will accept anything and give it their best shot.
- roncesvalles 3y ago
  But that's just a change in valid input cardinality at the cost of precision.
Timon3 3y ago
I think the important part from the article that establishes the difference is this: > As I mentioned, in command-based interactions, the user issues commands to the computer one at a time, gradually producing the desired result (if the design has sufficient usability to allow people to understand what commands to issue at each step). The computer is fully obedient and does exactly what it’s told. The downside is that low usability often causes users to issue commands that do something different than what the users really want. Let's say you're creating a new picture from nothing in Photoshop. You will have to build up your image layer by layer, piece by piece, command by command. Generative AI does the same in one stroke. Something similar holds for your comment: you had to navigate your browser (or app) to the comment section of this article, enter your comment, and click "add comment". With an AI system with good usability you could presumably enter "write the following comment under this article on HN: ...", and have your comment be posted. The difference lies on the axis of "power of individual commands".

kaycebasques 3y ago

There's something ironic to me about the fact that building AI experiences still requires the first computing paradigm: batch processing. At least, my experience building a retrieval-augmented generation system requires a lot of batch processing. Well, I shouldn't say "requires". I'm sure you can build them without batch processing. But batch processing definitely felt like the most natural and straightforward way to do it in my experience.

yencabulator 3y ago
He's talking about human-computer interaction paradigms, not computing paradigms. He's not a general computing expert, he's a UI/UX expert. "Batch computing" in this context refers to the era of punch cards, needing to wait for results overnight, and the difficulty of editing pre-existing programs -- and how all of that utterly dictated the style of interaction one had with computers.
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  Yep, I was aware of the difference before I made my original comment. There's still something ironic and interesting about it to me. Can't quite put my finger on it, though.
ilaksh 3y ago
What sort of retrieval augmented generation system are you working on?

isoprophlex 3y ago

"intent-based outcome specification"... so, a declarative language such as SQL?

zgluck 3y ago
While it was initially meant as user interface layer of sorts, I think, it's not really something that the typical user can be expected to know nowadays.
yencabulator 3y ago
I think you'll find that INSERT and UPDATE are very much commands. SQL queries are outcome-driven sure, but try to move beyond pure queries and outcome-driven computing, without some sort of machine learning, gets quite difficult. And moving outside of a single SELECT is a huge barrier. Even within the scope of SQL, consider an ML system that can slice-and-dice previous SQL queries interactively, based on non-expert user input. Consider an ML system that essentially edits an proposed SQL transaction as a whole, based on your requests. Previewing results etc, adjusting INSERTs and UPDATEs as user clarifies intent. User terminology focuses on the outcome, not on the individual commands, ordering, etc. Now move from that narrow domain into something like "I want to organize a conference", "I want to write a book", etc, and all the things that are beyond a single SQL SELECT.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  I built a system that uses GPT to write KQL queries (similar to SQL) for a specific table. It could even combine multiple queries or throw in a custom chart if requested. OpenAI's models are good at writing SQL. I think they finally allow the type of use case that SQL itself was supposed to provide as originally envisioned.

kaycebasques 3y ago

> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Maybe we can borrow programming paradigm terms here and describe this as Imperative UX versus Declarative UX. Makes me want to dive into SQL or XSLT and try to find more parallels.

webnrrd2k 3y ago
I was thinking of imperative vs declarative, too. SQL is declaritive with a pre-defined syntax and grammar as an interface, where as the AI style of interaction has a natural language interface.
- echelon 3y ago
  SQL and XSLT are declarative, but the outputs are clean and intuitive. The data model and data set are probably well understood, as is the mapping to and from the query. AI is a very different type of declarative. It's messy, difficult to intuit, has more dimensionality, and the outputs can be signals rather than tabular data records. It rhymes, but it doesn't feel the same.
  - Hedepig 3y ago
    The recent additions OpenAI have made allows for tighter control over the outputs. I think that is a very useful step forward.
  - bavell 3y ago
    Yeah, it's declarative but fuzzy and non-deterministic as well.
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danielvaughn 3y ago

Interesting to bundle both cli/gui under the "command" based interaction paradigm. I've never heard it described that way but it does make sense intuitively. Is that a common perception? I think of the development of the mouse/gui as a very significant event in the history of computing interfaces.

zgluck 3y ago
When you zoom out on the time scale it makes more sense. I think he's got a point. Both CLIs and GUIs are "command based". LLM prompts are more declarative. You describe what you want.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Well LLMs are also “command-based”. They are called prompts. In fact they’d just continue the text but were specifically trained by RLHF to be command-following. Actually, we can make automomous agents and agentic behavior without LLMs very well, for decades. And we can program them with declarative instructions much more precisely than with natural language. The thing LLMs seem to do is just give non-experts a lot of the tools to get some basic things done that only experts could do for now. This has to do with the LLM modeling the domain space and reading what experts have said thus far, and allowing a non-expert to kind of handwave and produce results.
  - zgluck 3y ago
    (I added a bit to the comment above, sorry) I think there's a clear difference between a command and a declaration. Prompts are declarative.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  I've been at a SQL command prompt a decade or several before LLM.
  - zgluck 3y ago
    That is not the point here. Did you any point believe that you were experiencing a mass market user experience at those times?

EGreg 3y ago

FB’s AI head just said LLMs are a fad. I thought about how to use them… I wish they could render an interface (HTML and JS at least, but also produce artifacts like PowerPoints). What is really needed is for LLMs to produce some structured markup, that can then be rendered as dynamic documents. Not text. As input, natural language is actually inferior to GUIs. I know the debate between command line people and GUI people and LLMs would seem like they’d boost the command-line people’s case, but any powerful system would actually benefit from a well designed GUI.

EGreg 3y ago
Here is the main reason: Any sufficiently advanced software has deep structure and implementation. It isn’t like a poet who can just bullshit some rhymes and make others figure out what they mean. The computer program expects some definite inputs which it exposes as an API eg a headless CMS via HTTP. Similar with an organization that can provide this or that servicd or experience. Therefore given this rigidity, the input has limited options at every step. And a GUI can gracefully model those limitations. A natural language model will make you think there is a lot of choice but really it will boil down to a 2018-era chatbot that gives you menus at every step and asks whether you want A, B or C.
dlivingston 3y ago
As someone who just spent 2 hours in my company's Confluence site, trying to track down the answer to a single question that could have been resolved in seconds by an LLM trained on an internal corporate corpus -- LLMs are very much not a fad.
- EGreg 3y ago
  How do you know the answer is right? Because it linked you to the source? Like a vector database would? Google offered to index sites since 1996.
  - dlivingston 3y ago
    We have internal search. Finding things isn't the problem. It's contextualizing massive amounts of text and making it queryable with natural language. The question I was trying to solve was -- "what is feature XYZ? How does it work in hardware & software? How is it exposed in our ABC software, and where do the hooks exist to interface with XYZ?" The answers exist across maybe 30 different Confluence pages, plus source code, plus source code documentation, plus some PDFs. If all of that was indexed by an LLM, it would have been trivial to get the answer I spent hours manually assembling.

tobr 3y ago

Well, what counts as a “paradigm”? I can’t see any definition of that. If you’d ask 10 people to divide the history of UI into some number of paradigms, you would for sure get 10 different answers. But hey, why not pick the one that makes for a hyperbolic headline. Made me click.

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savolai 3y ago
The division does not seem arbitrary to me at all. What about the below is questionable to you? From sibling comment [1]: Nielsen is talking from the field of Human-Computer Interaction where he is pioneer, which deals with the point of view of human cognition. In terms of the logic of UI mechanics, what about mobile is different? Sure gestures and touch UI bring a kind of difference. Still, from the standpoint of cognition, desktop and mobile UIs have fundamentally the same cognitive dynamics. Command line UIs make you remember conmands by heart, GUIs make you select from a selection offered to you but they still do not undestand your intention. AI changes the paradigm as it is ostensibly able to understand intent so there is no deterministic selection of available commands. Instead, the interaction is closer to collaboration. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396244

a1371 3y ago

I don't really get this. The paradigm has always been there, it has been the technology limitations that have defined the UI so far. Having robots and computers that humans talk to has been a fixture of sci-fi movies. Perhaps the most notable example being 2001: A Space Odyssey which came out 55 years ago.

moffkalast 3y ago
Sure, but it's sort of how actual usable and economical flying cars would be a paradigm change for transport. The idea exists, but it's made up fairy magic with capabilities and limitations based on plot requirements. Once it's actually made real it hardly ever ends up being used the way it was imagined. Like for example in 2001, the video call tech. They figured it would be used like a payphone with a cathode ray tube lol. Just as in reality nobody in the right mind would hand over complete control of a trillion dollar spaceship to a probabilistic LLM. The end applications will be completely different and cannot be imagined by those limited by the perspective of their time.
- mrob 3y ago
  I don't recall a single cathode ray tube in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is notable for having the first depiction of a tablet computer. They went to considerable effort to show flat-screen displays instead of CRTs.

krm01 3y ago

The article fails to grasp the essence of what UI is actually about. I agree that AI is adding a new layer to UI and UX design. In our work [1] we have seen an increase in AI projects or features the last 12 months (for obvious reasons). However, the way that AI will contribute to better UI is to remove parts of the Interface. not simply giving it a new form. Let me explain, the ultimate UI is no UI. In a perfect scenario, you think about something (want pizza) and you have it (eating pizza) as instant as you desire. Obviously this isn’t possible so the goal of Interface design is to find the least amount of things needed to get you from point A to the desired Destination as quickly as possible. Now, with AI, you can start to add a level of predictive Interfaces where you can use AI to remove steps that would normally require users to do something. If you want to design better products with AI, you have to remember that product design is about subtracting things not adding them. AI is a technology that can help with that. [1] https://fairpixels.pro https://fairpixels.pro

JohnFen 3y ago
> the goal of Interface design is to find the least amount of things needed to get you from point A to the desired Destination as quickly as possible. That shouldn't be the primary goal of user interfaces, in my opinion. The primary goal should be to allow users to interface with the machine in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load. I understand a lot of UI design these days prioritizes the sort of "efficiency" you're talking about, but I think that's one of the reasons why modern UIs tend to be fairly bad. Efficiency is important, of course! But (depending on what tool the UI is attached to) it shouldn't be the primary goal.
- krm01 3y ago
  > The primary goal should be to allow users to interface with the machine in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load. If you use your phone, is your primary goal to interface with it in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. You go read the news, send a message to a loved one etc. there’s a human need that you’re aiming to fulfill. Interfacing with tech is not the underlying desire. It’s what happens on the surface as a means.

croes 3y ago

>Then Google came along, and anybody could search Then they flooded the search results with ads and now you can search but hardly find. I bet the same will happen with software like ChatGPT.

thih9 3y ago

What about voice assistants? These are not as impressive when compared to LLMs, so perhaps wouldn't cause a UX shift on their own. But in essence Siri, Alexa, etc also seem to put the user's intent first.

yencabulator 3y ago
I'd argue that voice assistants are somewhat part of the same paradigm[1], and ChatGPT etc focused on pure text input mostly to make the research easier. Voice assistants just focused on the challenges of understanding speech, facilitated by limited allowed grammar, while ChatGPT-style research focused on the challenges of understanding language, facilitated by limiting input to text. "Just" produce ChatGPT input tokens from a voice-to-text-with-extra-hints machine and you have them combined. [1] Yes, voice assistants tend to be more command-oriented, but I view that as a limitation of the technology when they were popularized, not as an inherent part of the concept of a voice assistant. Voice is just an input modalism.
esafak 3y ago
A voice assistant is simply a speech-driven conversational UI; they belong to the same class of UIs as chatGPT. In fact, you could very well power your voice assistant with GPT.

travisgriggs 3y ago

GPT based UIs inspired by the idea that if you get the right sequence of prompts you’ll get stochastically acceptable results. So now I’m imagining the horror predictions for Word where 90% of the screen was button bars. But the twist is that you type in some text and then click on “prompt” buttons repeatedly hoping to get the document formatting you wanted, probably settling for something that was “close enough” with a shrug.

Animats 3y ago

This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The system would then light up all possible "exit" tracks from the junction. This took into account conflicting routes already set up and trains present in the junction. Only reachable exits lit up. The dispatcher pushed the button for the desired exit. The route setup was then automatic. Switches moved and locked into position, then signals along the route went to clear. All this was fully interlocked; the operator could not request anything unsafe. There were control panels before this, but this was the first system where the UI did more than just show status. It actively advised and helped the operator. The operator set the goal; the system worked out how to achieve it. Another one I encountered was an early computerized fire department dispatching system. Big custom display boards and keyboards. When an alarm came in, it was routed to a dispatcher. Based on location, the system picked the initial resources (trucks, engines, chiefs, and special equipment) to be dispatched. Each dispatcher had a custom keyboard, with one button for each of those resources. The buttons lit up indicating the selected equipment. The dispatcher could add additional equipment with a single button push, if the situation being called in required it. Then they pushed one big button, which set off alarms in fire stations, printed a message on a printer near the fire trucks, and even opened the doors at the fire house. There was a big board at the front of the room which showed the status of everything as colored squares. The fire department people said this cut about 30 seconds off a dispatch, which, in that business, is considered a big win. Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Now, the promising feature of LLMs in this direction is the ability to use the context of previous questions and answers. It's still query/response, but with enough context that the user can gradually make the system converge on a useful result. Such systems are useful for "I don't know what I want but I'll know it when I see it" problems. This allows using flaky LLMs with human assistance to get a useful result. [1] https://online.anyflip.com/lbes/vczg/mobile/#p=1 https://online.anyflip.com/lbes/vczg/mobile/#p=1

marysnovirgin 3y ago

The usability of a system is mostly irrelevant. The measure of a good UI is how much money it can get the user to spend, not how intuitively it enables the user to achieve a task.

pilgrim0 3y ago
Ah, I love when someone gets it! What design has come to is beyond sad, it’s revolting.

retrocryptid 3y ago

<unpopular-opinion> Bardini's book about Doug Engelbart recaps a conversation between Engelbart and Minsky about the nature of natural language interfaces... that took place in the 1960s. AI interfaces taking so long has less to do with the technology (I mean... Zork understood my text sentences well enough to get me around a simulated world) and more to do with what people are comfortable with. Lowey talked about MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.) I think it's taken this long for people to be okay with the inherent slowness of AI interfaces. We needed a generation or two of users who traded representational efficiency for easy to learn abstractions. And now we can do it again. You can code up a demo app using various LLMs, but it takes HOURS of back and forth to get to the point it takes me (with experience and boilerplate) minutes to get to. But you don't need to invest in developing the experience. And I encourage every product manager to build a few apps with AI tools so you'll more easily see what you're paying me for. </unpopular-opinion>

maximecampbell 3y ago
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ilaksh 3y ago
Sure, and not many people are seriously trying to suggest that one should hire an AI instead of a software engineer _at this point_, assuming you have a real budget. But, especially with GPT-4, it is entirely feasible to create a convenient and relatively fast user experience for building a specific type of application that doesn't stray too far from the norm. AI can call the boilerplate generator and even add some custom code using a particular API that you feed it. So many people are trying to build that type of thing (including me). As more of these become available, many people who don't have thousands of dollars to pay a programmer will hire an AI for a few tens or hundreds of dollars instead. The other point is that this is the current state of generative AI at the present moment. It gets better every few months. Project the current rate of progress forward by 5-10 years. One can imagine that if we are selling something at that point, it's not our own labour. Maybe it would be an AI that we have tuned with skills, knowledge, face, voice, and personality that we think will be saleable. Possibly using some of our own knowledge and skills to improve that recipe. Although there will likely be marketplaces where you can easily select the abilities or characteristics you want.

Xen9 3y ago

Marvin Minsky, a genius who saw the future.

aqme28 3y ago

This is not a new UI paradigm. Virtual assistants have been doing exactly this for years. It's just gotten cheap and low-latency enough to be practical.

NikkiA 3y ago
Yep, although they were doing it 'badly', I guess it not being quite so terrible is the 'new paradigm', which is eyeroll worthy IMO.

jl6 3y ago

Is it a new paradigm, or an old paradigm that finally works? Users have been typing commands into computers for decades, getting responses of varying sophistication with varying degrees of natural language processing. Even the idea of an “AI” chatbot that mimics human writing is decades old. The new thing is that the NLP now has some depth to it.

dekhn 3y ago

As a demo once, I trained an object detector on some vector art (high quality art, made by a UX designer) that looked like various components of burgers. I also printed the art and mounted it on magnets and used a magnetic dry board; you could put components of a burger on the board, and a real-time NN would classify the various components. I did it mainly as a joke when there was a cheeseburger emoji controversy (people prefer cheese above patty, btw). But when I was watching I realized you could probably combine this with gesture and pose detection and build a little visual language for communicating with computers. It would be wasteful and probably not very efficient, but it was still curious how much object detection enabled building things in the real world and having it input to the computer easily.

yutreer 3y ago
What you imagined sounds vaguely like dynamicland from Bret Victor. https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ The dots around the paper are encoded programs, and you can use other shapes, objects, or sigils that communicate with the computer vision system.

vsareto 3y ago

>And if you’re considering becoming a prompt engineer, don’t count on a long-lasting career. There's like this whole class of technical jobs that only follow trends. If you were an en vogue blockchain developer, this is your next target if you want to remain trendy. It's hard to care about this happening as the technical debt incurred will be written off -- the company/project isn't ingrained enough in society to care about the long-term quality. So best of luck, ye prompt engineers. I hope you collect multi-hundred-thousand dollar salaries and retire early.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools. Which is why the notion of conversational AI (or whatever dumb name they came up with for the “third paradigm”) seems kind of alien to me. I mean, I definitely see its utility, but I find it hard to imagine it being as dominant as some are arguing it could be. Any task that involves browsing for information seems like more of an object manipulation task. Any task involving some kind of visual design seems like a tool manipulation task, unless you aren’t too picky about the final result. Ultimately I think conversational UI is best suited not for tasks, but services. Granted, the line between the two can be fuzzy at times. If you’re looking for a website, but you don’t personally know anything about making a website, then that task morphs into a service that someone or something else does. Which I suppose is kind of the other reason why I find the idea kind of alien. I almost never use the computer for services. I use it to browse, to create, to work, all of which entail something more intuitively suited to object or tool manipulation.

rzzzt 3y ago
AutoCAD and Rhino 3D are two examples that I remember having a command prompt sitting proudly somewhere at the bottom of the UI. Your mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts were all converted into commands in text form. If you look at your command history, it's a script - a bit boring since it is completely linear, but add loops, conditionals and function/macro support and you get a very capable scripting environment.
- bitwize 3y ago
  AutoCAD definitely was CLI-based, with menus and dialogs basically filling in parameters to the commands. But in the late 90s or so Autodesk got religion and decided that AutoCAD should be a Windows product and follow Microsoft UI guidelines, so I don't know how well they stuck with the "command line underneath" over the years. Early in AutoCAD's history, Autodesk did add loops and conditionals to its CLI -- with Lisp! Type an open paren and the command line became a REPL. You could define new commands, directly manipulate entity data structures, and have all the control structures Lisp affords -- not Common Lisp, it was way simpler, but it was powerful. To this day, wayward mech engineers still sometimes ask Autolisp-related questions on unrelated Lisp fora, such as r/lisp.

afavour 3y ago

Weren’t voice assistants a new UI paradigm? Also, tellingly, they turned out to not be anywhere near as useful as people hoped. Sometimes new isn’t a good thing.

tin7in 3y ago

I agree that chat UI is not the answer. It’s a great start and a very familiar UI but I feel this will default to more traditional UI that shows pre defined actions and buttons depending on the workflow.

layoric 3y ago

I built a proof of concept recently that tries to show a generic hybrid of command and intent[0]. The UI generates form representations of API calls the AI agent has decided on making to complete the task (in this case booking a meeting). Some API calls are restricted so only a human can make them, which they do by being presented with a form waiting for them to submit to continue. If the user is vague, the bot will ask questions and try to discover the information it needs. It’s only a proof of concept but I think it’s a pattern I will try to build on , as it can provide a very flexible interface. [0] https://gptmeetings.netcore.io/ https://gptmeetings.netcore.io/

dustingetz 3y ago

UI is a high frequency concurrency problem. The “deep rooted usability problems” (like lag, glitches, and clumsiness - general lack of fluency) are due to staffing UI projects with web designers and not concurrency engineers. The fluent conversational AI systems and other movie UIs that folks are imagining up are therefore blocked on the concurrency sub-problem. This is the space we research at Hyperfiddle, we put forth our proposed solution here: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric

d_burfoot 3y ago

What strikes me most powerfully when interacting with the LLMs is that, unlike virtually ever other computer system I've ever used, the bots are extremely forgiving of mistakes, disfluencies, typos, and other errors I make when I'm typing. The bot usually figures out what I mean and tells me what I want to know.

ThomPete 3y ago

Here is how I think about it The LLM's are infinity app stores. All you need is an LLM and a database plus the ability to speak english and you can replace most features provided by SaaS services today. The GUI becomes a byproduct of the problem you want to solve rather than the gatekeeper to what you can solve. https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1660463528984150018?s=20 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1660463528984150018?s...

drvdevd 3y ago
I share this opinion as well, I think. I’m looking at any CRUD app I’ve worked on and thinking: this is just a specification over a database. Same with most other software but the web and most mobile apps seem ripe to just become generated patterns.

earthboundkid 3y ago

It would be neat if someone could make a good adventure game with an LLM, but they’re too prone to getting argued into just letting you win or whatever.

throwoutchatgpt 3y ago

ChatGPT and all AI is crap. If we don't want to use it, then it will fail to exist and will be nothing but a massive new failure for Microsoft.

USB3_0 3y ago

> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Thus, the third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. Wow! For the first time ever, I will be able to describe to a trained professional what I want, and they will do it for me! Before today I used to write out the exact arm motions a carpenter would need to carve me a chair, but now I can just ask them for one! This article is stupid. AI will make it easier for computers to interpret human interactions leading to increased efficiency and usability. Just like every other useful tool ever invented. There, I've put more insight into this comment than their article.

nologic01 3y ago

So many words to describe "declarative programming"

trojan13 3y ago

I am surprised this article does not even mention multimodal LLMs. Because the more kinds of media the LLM can take as in input and interpret the easier the interaction with it gets.

bambax 3y ago

> in command-based interactions, the user issues commands to the computer one at a time, gradually producing the desired result. The computer is fully obedient and does exactly what it’s told. > With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. I think that's true, and a big part of the AI revolution. Instead of filling endless forms that have subtle controls to guide the user, we could have a simple conversation, like SIRI but that would actually work. At my current client's, we're working on a big application that has many such forms. Once filled, the forms send the data to a back-end system (SAP). There's a team trying to train an LLM so that it can answer questions about the app and about how to fill the forms. But I think the whole point of AI, as regards to this app, is to eventually replace it entirely. Just let end users ask questions and tell the machine what they want, and the machine can build the proper data and send it to SAP. I don't think AI is a threat for back-end systems like SAP, at least not yet. But for front-end work, it's obvious that it would be infinitely more pleasant -- and possibly, more efficient -- to tell the machine what to do rather than filling forms.

leroman 3y ago

Chat UI/UX is a tool for experts. To drive this point home consider a user prompting "produce a founder agreement document", for which the AI will happily produce -something-. Even thought he user is able to read the document he does not understand the contents in "legal" terms. In contrast if the user would go to an expert lawyer, who would start by asking the user some relevant questions (=domain questions) and put together a prompt tailored to the needs and circumstances of the user in the domain language, with all relevant nuances.. I am working to create this experience by augmenting the AI interaction with step-by-step leading questions and interaction UI, similar to how users would interact with a domain expert. https://pth.ai https://pth.ai Would love feedback! :)

danielbln 3y ago
Interesting, I like this sort of wizard approach. Would you share any implementation details? Langchain, presumably?
- leroman 3y ago
  Actually, I'm not using Langchain. I'm now adding "agent" functionality, specifically to enable the AI to do some "research" on the web, at the moment this will also be done without a framework. So I'm either missing something or I am doing something simple enough that does not require the framework overhead / added value..
  - danielbln 3y ago
    I think that's good, langchain is a spaghetti monster and I think you're better off rolling your own, especially now with the baked in functions feature that GPT has'
    - leroman 3y ago
      I am able to implement complex logic without using this new "functions" feature, I am considering using it with the agent implementation, but might not need to as the new GPT4 version improves on it's JSON handling so that is already plenty robust for my needs..

tasuki 3y ago

> Clicking or tapping things on a screen is an intuitive and essential aspect of user interaction that should not be overlooked. I don't know, is it? Humanity made do without it for thousands of years.