[HN Gopher] Chatbots are not the future
___________________________________________________________________
Chatbots are not the future
Author : paulshen
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-05-01 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wattenberger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wattenberger.com)
| itake wrote:
| > Good tools make it clear how they should be used.
|
| This is such a weird statement from someone in the tech space.
| Programming languages rarely have an opinion for how they are to
| be used (for example JS MUST only run the browser or which code
| style to use).
|
| When I chat with customer support, I wish they could meet me
| where I am instead of me needing to learn their tools. For
| example, I want to say "cancel my subscription" and my subscript
| get cancelled. I don't want to have to figure out which sub menu
| of the sub menu that has the magic "end subscription" button.
|
| I know how to use my tool (english). LLMs teach computers how to
| use that tool too.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Actually, as i recall, that statement is somewhat foundational
| for human computer interaction...of course my recollection is
| from my HCI college course a couple of decades ago...But, yeah,
| whenever i make something - digital or otherwise - i hope to
| design it properly enough that the intended user intuitively
| understands how it should be used. (I do add documentation
| beyond the base design, but because i want to further help the
| person.)
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| I think the problem in your example of cancelling the
| subscription is that service providers often make it difficult
| on purpose. I doubt they'll allow chatbots to make it any
| simpler.
| itake wrote:
| I get support emails for "how do I cancel my Apple App Store
| Subscription?" when Apple governs the cancellation process in
| a centralized and simple manner.
|
| I also get support emails for password resets, which I try to
| make as simple as possible.
|
| People don't want to learn new tools if their existing tools
| (language) work just fine.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| > Programming languages rarely have an opinion for how they are
| to be used
|
| Erm, they absolutely have an opinion. That's why I can't just
| write however I like in whatever language. I need to stick to
| the designer's opinions on syntax and semantics otherwise it
| won't work.
| itake wrote:
| When chatting with a Chatbot, you also would need to stick
| with the language's syntax and semantics otherwise it won't
| work. You can't just write however and whatever you want and
| expect the bot to understand you.
| rurp wrote:
| Subscription cancellation buttons are _intentionally_ confusing
| and hard to find. It 's easy to add a big red Cancel button in
| an obvious place that works immediately, but companies choose
| to avoid that route in order to extract more money from
| customers. Nothing about that dynamic will change with LLMs,
| those same companies will have the same priorities.
|
| The only difference will be that script-following customer
| service reps giving you the runaround will be replaced by
| indefatigable chatbots giving you the runaround, which honestly
| sounds pretty hellish to me.
| swyx wrote:
| Amelia presented a bit more on her demo at our meetup last week:
|
| https://www.latent.space/p/build-ai-ux
|
| full recording in the video at the bottom!
| itsuka wrote:
| Someone said that using a chat-only interface is like using CLI
| tools. It's even worse, I would add, because there is no
| autocomplete or man command to help you out. Most of us here
| probably get it, but my dad had a hard time getting a good answer
| from GPT when he first tried it, even with GPT-4 model.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| isn't it ironic that there's no autocomplete on the tool that's
| literally autocomplete? haha
|
| where's the fine-tuned prompt helper model?
| andrepd wrote:
| We clearly need to ask chatgpt to write a model for the
| prompt helper model.
| abe-101 wrote:
| Both Bard and Bing chat have auto-complition
| twelve40 wrote:
| Hence the need for specially trained people who can do the
| back-and-forth with humans to understand exactly what is
| required, then enter it (into the brittle prompt in this case)
| in a way that the computer would understand.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Or more like a basic understanding of what the thing can do
| and what it can't do. It's not that complicated.
| born-jre wrote:
| Very very offtopic:
|
| He called ChatGPT oracle, nice but not enough.
|
| I want someone to name chatbot their `oracle of delphi` plz.
| thank you.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| She*
| pornel wrote:
| When it's about the future, limitations of current
| implementations aren't a strong argument.
|
| ChatGPT can be confidently stupid, but what if it gets better?
|
| You need explanations/affordances of what it can and can't do
| only when its capabilities are limited. If it really could do
| whatever you asked, you wouldn't need it. Just say what you want.
| uxabhishek wrote:
| Contextually relevant suggested options (that can be acted upon
| with a single click), alongside the free form input box will
| emerge as the norm.
|
| Down the line people will expect applications to be chat ready.
| They will see an input box and expect the application to
| understand natural language and respond in the most helpful way.
| Which might be showing an error message or suggesting relevant
| next steps.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| TL;DR, more targeted tools could be more helpful for specific
| tasks than an unstructured text interface for everything.
| morelisp wrote:
| > I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for
| LLMs.
|
| I was already convinced of this. What I'm not convinced of, and
| the article has little to say about, is
|
| > Chatbots Are Not the Future... chatbots are not the future of
| interfaces.
|
| Chatbots are a terrible interface to LLMs, and yet they are
| absolutely going to be the future of every third godawful website
| I must visit.
| c7b wrote:
| Not sure I'm convinced - natural language is one of the most
| intuitive interfaces we have, it's also how most instructions in
| professional contexts are delivered. What current ChatBots are
| missing right now isn't radiobuttons for different styles but
| context. No one who just reads my messages can know what kind of
| style I'm looking for until they either get laborious
| instructions, or, probably better, they see some examples.
|
| I'm guessing that training custom language models on a company's
| data must be one of the hottest things you can be working on
| right now if you're looking for VC money (if there's something
| out there that compares to how well StableDiffusion+Dreambooth
| works for images, I'd be thankful for any pointers).
| tekni5 wrote:
| Not a very convincing argument, your gizmo sliders and checkboxes
| or whatever aren't going to replace chatbots but only slightly
| extend them and really aren't needed if AI gets better over time.
|
| Some neural connection to the brain that will interpret your
| thoughts is the only logical thing that will supersede chat ai,
| but that won't happen for a while. Maybe a connection to all your
| data will happen first so the AI will better understand what type
| of person you are and what you want, that's already probably
| happening based on past responses.
| skybrian wrote:
| Learning how to use freeform text input can be pretty annoying
| when only a few things work. Some examples are playing a text
| adventure ("guess the verb") and using an unfamiliar command line
| interface. Good error messages can help.
|
| Web search changed that. Most queries work, at least somewhat.
|
| There's a point where freeform text input becomes better than
| structured input. A simple search box is what people mostly use
| instead of an advanced search form, let alone a web directory
| (like Yahoo! back in the day).
|
| For web search, there are very few error messages. If you enter a
| query that doesn't work very well, you get back results that
| aren't very good or what you wanted, so you try something else.
|
| With AI chatbots, expectations are sky-high, but there are times
| when they _should_ refuse with a good error message, because they
| really can 't do what you're hoping to do. An example is when you
| ask it to explain its reasoning. An LLM never knows why it wrote
| what it did, but it will try to invent a plausible explanation
| anyway. [1]
|
| Better error messages that help users understand what chatbots
| can actually do would help avoid misconceptions, but this won't
| happen unless the error messages are trained in.
|
| [1] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-
| th...
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. A freeform input promises it can do 'anything at
| all' but if it can't in reality, it's always a frustrating
| interface.
|
| Classic example, Siri. It's so easy to quickly find stuff you
| feel like it should be able to do, but it just can't. "When was
| my last message from Steve" etc.
| rocketbop wrote:
| I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before now, that using
| ChatGPT is quite to similar to playing Zork and Infocom games
| from the 1980s, with less trial and error needed to get something
| out of it.
|
| The point and click adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts
| were a huge step forward in interaction, although you didn't have
| to use your imagination as much to solve the puzzles.
|
| And here we are again asking users to type their way to success.
| cout wrote:
| Chatgpt or a successor dynamically generating in-game dialogue
| could be fun. Or maybe it won't be. I'm interested in seeing it
| done.
| notahacker wrote:
| The other obvious UX comparison point is with sending instant
| messages to a person until they get it right....
|
| Provided the responses aren't _too_ brittle (and the LLM
| getting it wrong isn 't too upsetting or find-out-too-late)
| lots of non power-users are going to prefer it, at least in
| cases where a menu or form input with about six options won't
| suffice.
| autokad wrote:
| > When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question,
| I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know?
|
| I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already
| have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if
| you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you
| don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible
| tools because they tried to perform surgery on someone and
| botched it up.
|
| One day, not too far off, we are going to be able to tell a 'chat
| bot': make me a cartoon, it takes place in a steam punk fantasy.
| make it 2 seasons with 22 episodes each season. great, add a
| cliff hanger at the end of episode 11. add a love story component
| to it. reduce it back down to 1 season but 44 minute episodes.
|
| content creation is no longer going to be tied back to knowing
| how to draw cartoons, or have armies of writers. yes, we can get
| garbage out of the system. but its a tool, plenty of tools
| produce garbage results if you dont know how to use them.
|
| As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one
| my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my
| brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's
| powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'.
| vkou wrote:
| > Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop
| complaining that you don't like it.
|
| It's a tool that can be opaquely configured to be used in a
| million different ways, and when using it does not bring about
| the desired result, its acolytes sneer, and suggest that you're
| using it wrong.
|
| It's like a multi-tool, that only works when you're
| blindfolded. Sure, it can be used to hammer nails and tighten
| screws and strip wires and measure a tire's pressure, but it
| makes it quite difficult to find the magical incantation that
| will apply the right end to the job.
|
| (And most of the time, it quietly leaves the screw untightened,
| the wire clipped, and the tire with a hole in it. It's the user
| who's wrong, of course.)
| regularjack wrote:
| Scalpel manufacturers don't advertise their scalpels as capable
| of performing surgery on their own.
| warent wrote:
| Do you have an example of AI false advertising?
| __loam wrote:
| _gesticulates broadly at the entire field_
| moffkalast wrote:
| Fair enough
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan
| (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to
| what my brother produced, after working on it for a month.
| That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'.
|
| How much knowledge and ideas did your brother personally
| develop over this month in addition to the business plan? Being
| handed a working plan is sometimes less useful than the
| aggregate experience leading up to the plan.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Every "impressive chatgpt" story I hear is about someone
| comparing what chatgpt produced to what a human produced, and
| saying it's scary close. No one talks about all the times they
| asked chatgpt to produce something, didn't compare it to what a
| human could do, and then realized it was catastrophically wrong
| once implemented.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Chatgpt is a tool
|
| When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes
| not hit/screw the nail?
|
| If ChatGPT is a tool for knowledge transfer/extraction, it
| can't hallucinate/lie to you/be wrong/make stuff up.
|
| If it's a tool for potentially discovering some knowledge that
| may be true and needs to almost always be verified by either a
| compiler or a followup "find me a reference/discussion" Google
| search to make sure it's accurate, then sure. But I don't think
| that's what it's primarily being advertised as.
| brokencode wrote:
| Beyond the obvious fact that you can accidentally hit your
| thumb with a hammer or strip the head off a screw with a
| screwdriver, I'd very much like to hear about any tool for
| collecting knowledge that is perfect.
|
| Web searches will for sure give you wrong answers. Even
| professors or other experts in a field will be wrong
| sometimes. Heck, even Einstein got some things wrong.
|
| Your goalpost is in the wrong spot. Tools don't need to be
| and probably never can be perfect. But that doesn't mean
| they're not useful.
| ukuina wrote:
| > When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to
| sometimes not hit/screw the nail?
|
| Not sure about drills, but this absolutely happens with
| drivers if you fumble mating the bit to the screw head, or if
| you miss the stud, or if you overtighten, or if you don't
| sometimes pre-drill, or if you strip the head, or if you
| don't correctly gauge underlying material composition, or
| thickness, or if you...
| tootie wrote:
| I think the point of the article is that this does not
| constitute a chatbot. It's not conversational. It's not really
| general-purpose. That doesn't mean it isn't powerful, just that
| telling users to have a freeform conversation isn't going to
| work. It's also why everyone is getting excited for "prompt
| engineering" to make better use of it. The biggest user value
| is still going to be a level above the open-ended chat UI we
| have right now. He's not saying GPT is useless, he's saying we
| haven't put it into it's optimal context yet.
| willio58 wrote:
| Exactly. I use ChatGPT for help coding sometimes and it's like
| 50/50 if I get an answer that is truly helpful, but that's
| infinitely better of a tool than I thought we'd have 1 year
| ago.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's
| output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention
| to detail and _self-expression_.
|
| Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate
| levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never
| going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution
| and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every
| single tree and rock is placed with intent.
|
| I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless
| versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even
| elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me
| artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content.
|
| If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's
| fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things
| that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them.
| Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long.
| It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile
| visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.
| autokad wrote:
| I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story
| telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean
| the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad
| strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means
| the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a
| whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is
| an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a
| human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I
| don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was
| written by the ghost writer.
|
| If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed
| instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a
| person.
|
| If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not
| art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem.
| If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about
| that, then this is a very, very serious problem.
|
| Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a
| printing press. It's something completely different, and
| more than a tool.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| It comes under the category of "generative art". It isn't
| intentional or self-expression, regardless of what the
| prompt engineers may kid you. Is it "art"? Sure. Is it
| traditional art? No.
| krapp wrote:
| It is intentional, it's just a generated approximation of
| intention.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| No, it isn't intentional, it's generative.
| StableDiffusion DALL-E, MidJourney et al are quite
| literally by definition _a generative art model_. This
| isn 't up for debate. That is quite literally how they
| function.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I totally agree with this. But as an art lover, I want
| some real way of being able to tell if a piece of art is
| this, or is traditional.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Artistry is a beautiful thing. It's also why I love
| hearing from industrial designers on how they arrived at
| their design decisions, challenges they faced, intent,
| nuances in the design you might overlook that were
| difficult etc.
|
| Unfortunately, short of more behind-the-scenes material
| and interviews, the only way to really get a feel for it
| is looking at their body of work as a whole. The great
| ones always have a specific style that they refine or
| evolve over time. It's unmistakably x.
|
| I have to say, I've yet to see any AI artist hit a
| signature style, and I've yet to have an AI generated
| piece of art move me emotionally or conceptually.
|
| Are they interesting? Sure. So's glitch art, but there's
| not much substance to any of it, and I remember none of
| it. Intent and self-expression is such a huge part of
| art.
|
| Can you imagine what Hitchcock would say about AI
| _anything_? He wanted it 100% his way.
| jhbadger wrote:
| In the early days of Pixar, some traditionalist animators
| claimed that Pixar was "cheating" because they used 3D
| modelling tools rather than physically drawing the
| frames. The traditionalists didn't see computer animation
| as a "tool"; they saw it as the computer doing the work
| of the animator. Were they right? Computers make making
| things easier. But the human using the computer is the
| real creator.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Toy Story was not generative art though. Pointless
| comparison.
|
| Compare generative art tools to other generative art
| tools.
| krapp wrote:
| Artists using 3d modeling software actually design and
| create the model, rigging and animation themselves, they
| don't tell the software "Metal articulated lamp bouncing
| across wooden table, 3d render, realistic lighting and
| shadows" and call it a day.
|
| It's a matter of how much control you have over the end
| product, with AI it's very little. At best, if you want
| to be charitable, you could describe the role of the
| person using AI as an art director, but not an artist.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on
| detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer,
| not a person.
|
| I completely disagree with this. According to this, no
| code can be art. For instance, videogames.
|
| It has been enough time since ready-made (Duchamps
| urinal) and found objects, djing and sampling, and
| concept art. Art is not only drawing beautiful
| illustrations since at least the 2 world wars.
|
| > If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer
| about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone
| would say that I wrote the story.
|
| This is exactly how many artists work today, with a small
| army of workers, even interns, to execute the plan of the
| artist. Even Rembrandt had people painting to produce
| more pictures. Another example would be architects: does
| the star architect execute everything, or do they have
| the vision and instruct their very large teams?
|
| IMO it is all about the intent and interpretation of a
| human.
| erksa wrote:
| Yes, the artist that chooses to use AI-tools to generate
| art-work are in fact artist.
|
| For those who are afraid of AI being content generators
| that puts artist out of work will most likely be
| disappointed. However the technical gatekeeping some
| artist do goes away, and it makes room for more people
| being able to express them self creatively.
|
| Art is about the why. We as humans will always ask that
| question, and we will produce answers, no matter the
| tools.
|
| We've gone through multiple iterations of technology
| questioning if you are really an "artist" for using it,
| but the new creations and the new generation of artist
| puts that to shame in my opinion.
|
| Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not
| move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it
| matter?
|
| AI-tools speeds up the creative process which for some
| will let them go places we currently are having a hard
| time to imagine.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Digital pixels are not paint brushes. So if you do not
| move your mouse/brush to generate a stroke? What does it
| matter?
|
| If you are literally explaining every stroke, then it
| doesn't. But that's not what we're talking about here.
| We're talking about describing something in pretty
| general terms and allowing a computer to make the
| creative decisions (what "brush strokes" to make).
| renewiltord wrote:
| And if you move a horsehair brush, do you determine where
| each hair lands? If you spray paint, do you say where
| each drop lands? We have, for long, handed control to
| physical random processes. To modify that to land on
| mathematical random processes is not some categorical
| shift.
| alimov wrote:
| > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on
| detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer,
| not a person.
|
| Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They
| don't know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu
| of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they
| are still artists.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But that's entirely different. A digital artist is
| directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case,
| just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the
| one making all the creative decisions.
|
| To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that
| nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the
| one who made the creative decisions. I just described
| what I wanted to another person who made the creative
| decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not
| me.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Really?
|
| For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to
| actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue
| (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a
| character to life, each character is driven by a different
| persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories
| that will create, will annihilate what came before.
|
| You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it
| unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is
| now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the
| writer.
|
| No need to describe scenery, no need to describe character
| appearances. Feed those descriptions into txt2img, and you
| get portraits that would have cost $1000/pic from top tier
| artists.
|
| Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY PEOPLE.
| Too many people involved in production, means the creator
| must dilute intent, appeal to wider audiences, and limit
| risks, to ensure costs are reclaimed. Once AI gets going,
| you'll see indie creators making full anime series, and
| releasing them on youtube. Because for an individual creator,
| even ad + patreon revenue alone would be able to sustain a
| comfortable existence, with no dependency on corporate or
| teams.
|
| I thought people who love art, would be exhilarated by AI. I
| realized, the majority of artists don't love art. They love
| drawing, but not art. They love socializing with artists, but
| not art. They love receiving attention and income from their
| art, but not art. That's all fair and fine. But there will be
| people, who just want to create the best possible art, no
| matter the method, no matter the reward, and with AI, this
| latter group will outcompete the first, hard.
| wwweston wrote:
| > Generic and formulaicness, comes from having TOO MANY
| PEOPLE.
|
| You know what else comes from the output of many people?
| What AIs produce.
|
| > They love drawing, but not art. They love socializing
| with artists, but not art. They love receiving attention
| and income from their art, but not art.
|
| Love of drawing, socializing with artists, and attention
| and income when people connect and buy their art are all
| forms of _deeper engagement /investment with art_.
|
| The _generous_ reading I can make of the mistake that sets
| these up as the other side of an inimical dichotomy where
| engaging these things is _not_ loving art is if you 're
| limited to the perspective of someone whose experience with
| art is that of a consumer and equates that perspective with
| loving art.
|
| Being concerned about alienation from drawing, from
| connection with a community of other artists making
| efforts, and yes from attention and income that makes their
| focus socially/economically viable seems pretty reasonable
| (much more than the "they love drawing but not art"
| bullshit).
|
| It's also reasonable to be interested in what new tools can
| do and I rather imagine there will be people who enjoy that
| as well, some of whom may be able to produce visions that
| were previously inaccessible to them. That's interesting
| and exciting, but it doesn't mean there's no downsides.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it
| unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure
| is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the
| writer._
|
| There's something really funny about using an algorithm
| that _predicts the next most likely token_ to generate
| _unpredictable_ adventures.
| LASR wrote:
| Reminds me of:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox
|
| You can certainly generate unpredictability from a
| predictable mechanism.
| pharrington wrote:
| >algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to
| generate unpredictable adventures
|
| but enough about the human nervous system
| starmftronajoll wrote:
| Perhaps the resolution to your cognitive dissonance is not
| to conclude that artists hate art. Instead I'd suggest that
| often, artists' love of art doesn't stem from concepts like
| "annihilating what came before" or "outcompeting hard."
| Perhaps, like the parent comment said, it comes from self-
| expression -- the pleasure, for both creator and audience,
| of the "mirage created by the writer," to borrow your
| poetic term.
| bravura wrote:
| "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer
| with which to shape it" - Bertolt Brecht.
|
| I'm neither dissenting with your or OP here, FYI.
|
| Mediocre artists will just copy what exists more easily.
|
| And powerful artists will have new tools to shape
| reality.
| renewiltord wrote:
| There is some competitive notion, for certain, since
| there is a lot of pushback on AI-generated art from
| artists.
| kookylooky wrote:
| [dead]
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Well? So what?
|
| If I was writing dialogue, I already know exactly what I
| want to say, that's why I'm writing it in the first place.
| Sure, some people might like that, but I never feel devoid
| of inspiration because I consider the greater narrative of
| a project.
|
| Why would I want to ask the AI for ideas? The joy is in the
| process of having it my way by my own hand, word-for-word,
| pixel-by-pixel, note-by-note.
|
| If other people enjoy another method, fine, but you are
| invalidating the traditional and highly enjoyable method.
| Creativity isn't about efficiency or whatever. This is why
| people leave AAA to go indie, and have it their way, not to
| whatever the budget is or what the shareholders or managers
| want, but because they have a vision and are naturally
| creative, making a labour of love they know every detail of
| because it's in their head.
|
| I'd rather support the artists and pay the thousand bucks
| because it's all a part of the traditional process.
|
| Indies already release anime on YouTube, Netflix, TV et al,
| and have done for decades.
|
| Art isn't about the output for most artists. Art is about
| the process. People consume art. Artists enjoy the creative
| process and having it their way.
|
| I hate attention. I haven't had a photo taken in 13 years.
| I've stopped all interviews. I mostly work behind-the-
| scenes on documentaries and games these days. I don't even
| care about if a project makes a return, we do it because we
| love it and enjoy the process.
|
| There is no "best", art is subjective. Art isn't even a
| competition. Crass and vulgar. Are you sure you actually
| understand art and aren't conflating it with monetizing it
| in a business context?
| jutrewag wrote:
| Procedural generation is miles away from what these LLMs are
| doing. It's not just coming up with a random maze/map for a
| fetch mission. Right now, it can generate a novel quest, with
| all of its characters, come up with a unique set of mission
| goals and theoretically generate those assets and characters
| (atleast in 2D). Turns out, all this self-expression or
| whatever is cheap.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Not in this context of self-expression. Neither are
| intentional, both are broad strokes.
|
| Technologically? Yes, you're right, very different.
|
| But in output? It's still generative.
| jutrewag wrote:
| "Intentional" is a weasel word in this context. It means
| very little in terms of the end result. Humans making art
| is generative as well even all the way back to cave
| paintings which were interpretations of animals in
| nature.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| No, it isn't. Do you really think Alfred Hitchcock would
| leave his film up to others, let alone a machine? No. It
| wasn't his vision, thus it wasn't his self-expressive
| intent. Read about auteur theory.
|
| That's not what generative art is, mate.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video
| game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or
| interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured
| game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock
| is placed with intent.
|
| The popularity of Minecraft and other procedural games would
| imply that there is still a large number of people who value
| exploring the unknown generated content, even if it means
| it's not curated.
|
| Yes the quality won't be as good, but you do get quantity
| instead. And the quality will improve.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Not to mention the middleground of handmade pieces and
| putting them together in a randomly generated way. That's
| how a ton of games work - from Noita, to Cataclysm DDA, to
| Dead Cells.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| That's quite literally how Minecraft works. That's also
| how games I've worked on function.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Yup, I ran a Minecraft server for about 8 years, I loved a
| bunch of procedurally generated games. I've worked on games
| in the past and present that use procedural generation.
| Furthermore, the most interesting part of Minecraft was
| what people built, not what world the seed generated, IME.
| Usually we'd WorldEdit vast swathes of it away to have flat
| areas to build and have fun, or we'd WE with brushes and
| materials to hand create terrain because the procedural
| generation was so-so.
|
| My point still remains that there's a very different
| experience in something intentional and exact. One feels
| very human.
|
| The quality isn't the issue, the broad strokes without
| intent are.
|
| This is like preferring impressionism over a Dutch master.
| Audiences for both. I'm not invalidating any of them, I'm
| just saying that for me, I prefer something more human and
| different.
| root_axis wrote:
| ChatGPT including the GPT-4 variant sucks quite terribly at
| creative writing, especially the kind of writing necessary to
| create long-form narratives like that in serial television and
| especially novels. The technology will certainly improve and it
| will definitely become a staple in the editor's toolbox, but it
| is so far away from being able to produce long form narratives
| well that it's not a given it will eventually get there.
| graiz wrote:
| Chatbots are the future but your points are valid. They don't
| provide affordances, however chatbots provide a form of
| progressive disclosure and direct interaction that was previously
| impossible.
|
| Toolbars and menus provide affordances but you still need to know
| what things are called and what order to use them. "I'd like to
| email this file as a PDF and I'd also like to print it." may be
| much easier in a chat UX than in a menu based UX. Often these
| things can co-exist but chatUX has access to much more nuanced UI
| that would otherwise be too complex to build or expose.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| I think the future interface is a smart assistant for your life
| that gives you suggestions on what you should be doing (both for
| work and personal life). Sure, there may be a prompting text box,
| but the assistants will be so good at suggesting that you won't
| need it very often (besides searching for the occasional thing or
| giving feedback).
|
| Driving these suggestions is all of your data as well as your
| goals and values that you can give to the assistant in natural
| language.
|
| At work the goal might be: "I want to sell $100,000 worth of
| widgets this quarter" and it will break down step by step how
| that might be possible.
|
| For personal life it might be "I want to get involved in the
| kayaking community" and it will recommend activities, clubs, etc.
|
| Once these assistants are good enough, it will be reckless to not
| use one (especially at work). We will then live in a world where
| AI and human live together and make decisions together hand in
| hand. Buckle up.
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| If you think the far future (100s of years) involves being able
| to talk to a synthetic humanoid using spoken language, then
| Chatbots are almost certainly a point on the curve.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Google Search got to be a pretty successful business and probably
| still the single most popular information retrieval tool on earth
| - it was done using with a single input box.
| dahwolf wrote:
| A lot of people are projecting for ChatGPT to come for the search
| market, but I wonder how that will play out for lowly cognitive
| queries.
|
| Quite a few people use search by awkwardly typing on mobile one
| or two words, probably misspelled and/or auto-completed as they
| type it. The query isn't sophisticated, lacks a lot of context
| and parameters, which the search engine then tries to guess.
|
| When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic
| answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific,
| detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able
| (education level) to give such rich input.
|
| The idea that it's better than search for this specific normy
| behavior, I openly question. And let's not forget about the
| economics. More expensive to run, vastly less ad space, and
| content owners (the whole web) are going to be pissed and will
| put up ever higher walls.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Just wait until we have a model that automatically translates
| vague, awkward prompts into something more useful.
|
| Put differently: if Google's search models already have the
| ability to return great results for poor queries, why couldn't
| a large language model (or a plug-in for one) learn the same
| algorithm?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic
| answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more
| specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and
| able (education level) to give such rich input.
|
| Sidenote, i've found GPT useful enough to pay for (GPT Plus) by
| doing the opposite. Or rather, i find it very useful when i
| struggle to search for problems. ChatGPT helps guide me to new
| search or research terms, sometimes even providing the answer
| more directly.
|
| It feels like the olden days where Google was great at finding
| a movie based on some vague movie description. GPT does that
| for a ton of things for me, enough that i found it useful.
|
| It hasn't replaced online research but it has accelerated it
| for me.
| LASR wrote:
| What people forget is the underlying capability - LLMs are able
| to do reasoning.
|
| So the one-track thinking of garbage-in-garbage-out is not the
| limitation any more.
|
| What we're precisely now able to do is garbage-in-less-garbage
| out.
|
| You can take a vague prompt in and ask GPT to hypothesize on
| what it means, why the user is asking that question and then
| generate a detailed prompt. Then use that that prompt and then
| perform the search.
|
| Trying this out in the playground, I see a suprisingly capable
| search experience.
| raggi wrote:
| one thing I can say for certain: scroll handlers definitely
| aren't the future
| dang wrote:
| I agree, but:
|
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| morelisp wrote:
| For once, that everyone agrees scroll handlers are godawful
| but yet after years they're still omnipresent is germane to
| the article's topic.
| freediver wrote:
| Comments like this confirm that you are indeed reading every
| comment on the website, which should be out of the realm of
| humanely possible.
| dang wrote:
| It's all an illusion.
| slater wrote:
| Or there's lots of people who click the flag link
| sitkack wrote:
| > Text inputs have no affordances
|
| It has _all_ the affordances. You can turn it into anything you
| want. Want it respond with json, check, it can do that. Turn a
| wall of text into a Python data structures, check, it can do that
| too.
|
| You can take your LLM text interface and put what ever api you
| want on top. You start with clay and mold it into anything you
| need. You construct a parser so that the way data is already
| constrained and validated. Same goes for the output.
| disconcision wrote:
| > Text inputs have no affordances
|
| >It has all the affordances.
|
| these are two different ways of saying the same thing
| tdaltonc wrote:
| Whether you want to call it an "empty set" or "the set of all
| possible sets" isn't really relevant to the authors point that
| an empty box has discoverability problems.
| lxgr wrote:
| But what if I don't know what I want?
|
| A graphical UI can provide much more and much more intuitive
| guidance than a chat input ever will. And I say that as a big
| fan of Unix and the shell.
| IanCal wrote:
| You can ask it. You can explain your problem and ask how it
| might be able to help. You can discuss and narrow down with
| some back and forth what it is you want to do.
|
| I could tell a chat bot I am finding the horizontal split in
| my editor is annoying because I have a wide monitor, and have
| it tell me there's a setting for that and ask if I want the
| default changed.
|
| With a gui I might have to go through the files menu for
| settings, check if it's in edit-preferences, check tools-
| options, before maybe having to find out online it's if it's
| in some settings file.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Yeah this was so weird to read. This is probably the number one
| property I think makes interfaces like ChatGPT compelling - you
| don't _need_ to know how to use it - just use the human
| language you already know. If you don 't understand something
| it says, just ask it to explain it. Essentially, it makes
| affordances obsolete.
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| I dunno, I think his point is very valid. Chat bots can't do
| literally anything at all, and an empty text input isn't going
| to help guide a user towards what it can do, and what it's good
| at. Just because a system has a LLM to interact with it,
| doesn't mean it'll suddenly support any desired action the user
| wants done.
| kmtrowbr wrote:
| I thought this was a funny statement too. Text is the most
| powerful, original medium. It's difficult to overstate how
| powerful and valuable it is. Of course, text won't necessarily
| be the only UI exposed for interacting with these "Large
| Language Models." But that UI can be built on top of the text
| -- which wouldn't work in the other direction.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I think the point is that a "chatbot" is, by (the author's)
| definition, a UI with only a bare text prompt. Once you start
| building more UI on top of that, you're ... doing what the
| article suggests.
| kmtrowbr wrote:
| I see -- my apologies I must not have read it closely
| enough! :blush:
| sitkack wrote:
| I re-read the post. The author is arguing against a
| statement that no one made and then uses the rest of the
| essay to outline their work. It is a bit of a setup.
|
| An LLM-Chatbot is an extremely flexible tool, but I
| haven't seen anyone argue that all of our UIs and
| applications should be replaced by chat. That is
| ridiculous.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| No, they're not, but my reasons for reaching that conclusion are
| somewhat different:
|
| 1) I don't think chatting with anything, human or machine, is a
| learning experience, particularly since the machine veracity is
| poor, untrustworthy, and Hinton's resignation today tells you
| everything you need to know about the narrative inside big
| research orgs right now.
|
| 2) Recognition vs. recall. Given that it's the equivalent of an
| informal language CLI, which I prefer by the way; but there is no
| recognition (as in symbols) only recall.
|
| Long story short, I think the emergent need is for written
| communication, with a tip of the hat to Daniele Procida:
|
| https://ubuntu.com/blog/engineering-transformation-through-d...
|
| Except that what's missing is a human-computer collaboration,
| i.e. sensemaking with another tip of the hat to Peter Pirolli:
|
| https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-...
| wilg wrote:
| Yeah, chat isn't a universally great interface. But it's a great
| default because it's totally free form.
|
| It should be pretty easy (even with today's APIs and technology)
| to have an LLM design a user interface for you for your current
| task.
|
| Simplest way: output a JSON of simple control definitions with
| every answer.
|
| Coolest way: Just have it generate a full-ass React front end or
| whatever on every message.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Interesting. Futuristic idea: on-the-fly generate a front-end
| customized to the user learned preferences. Motivation: humans
| are poor learners, so save them the trouble to learn a new
| interface style. At the limit, real-time generate a whole
| world-in-the-world, fulfill Zuckerberg's dream -- an utterly
| lonely Matrix. Now that's a thinly sugar-coated version of the
| Hell described in e.g. Catholic doctrine. And we will chose it
| ourselves. Deeply sobering.
| efields wrote:
| We are very good learners. That's how we got this far. Not
| all new interface is good and worth learning. Sometimes it
| feels best to stick with what works.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Quality quote:
|
| "There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption
| of shorter, mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at
| people putting on makeup on TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A
| perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot takes on Twitter."
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| 140 chars, he means.
|
| *280 chars, he means.
|
| *4000 chars, he means.
|
| *10000 chars, he means.
| skybrian wrote:
| *she
| efields wrote:
| A contextualized chatbot is still a chatbot. I think they're
| going to stick around for a while... we've effectively been
| trying this out on the web since the AskJeevs days, and that
| dream is mostly realized now.
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