[HN Gopher] AI's Biggest Flaw? The Blinking Cursor Problem
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AI's Biggest Flaw? The Blinking Cursor Problem
Author : ColinEberhardt
Score : 24 points
Date : 2025-02-24 08:46 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.scottlogic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.scottlogic.com)
| recursive wrote:
| > These AI systems are not able to describe their own
| capabilities or strengths and are not aware of their limitations
| and weaknesses
|
| I've experienced this with github copilot. At the beginning of a
| copilot chat, there's a short paragraph. It tells you to use
| "slash commands" for various purposes. I ask for a list of what
| slash commands are available. It responds by giving me a general
| definition of the term "slash command". No. I want to know which
| slash commands _you_ support. Then it tells me it doesn 't
| actually support slash commands.
|
| I definitely feel like I'm falling into the non-power-user
| category described here in most of my AI interactions. So often I
| just end up arguing them in circles and them constantly agreeing
| and correcting, but never addressing my original goal.
| ddxv wrote:
| Another issue is trust. When it does tell you inrormation, how
| do you know you can trust that?
|
| I treat it now more like advice from a friend. Great
| information that isn't necessarily right and often wrong
| without having any idea it is wrong.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I treat it now more like advice from a friend. Great
| information that isn 't necessarily right and often wrong
| without having any idea it is wrong._
|
| "Drunken uncle at a bar, known for spinning tales, and a
| master BSer who hustled his way through college in assorted
| pool halls" is my personal model of it. Often right, or
| nearly so. Frequently wrong. Sometimes has made things up on
| the spot. Absolutely zero ability to tell which it is, from
| the conversation.
| skydhash wrote:
| You actually have a confidence measure for your friend
| advice. I'd trust a mechanic friend if he says I should have
| someone take a look at my car, or my librarian friend when he
| recommends a few books. Not everyone tell a lie and the truth
| in the same breath. And there's the quantifier like "I
| think...", "I believe...", "Maybe..."
| yorwba wrote:
| To find out about slash commands, you should type "/help". Of
| course, you'd only know about the "/help" slash command if you
| were already at least a bit familiar with slash commands. It is
| a conundrum.
| smokel wrote:
| This seems a bit naive. There are no arguments given as to why
| things would be better if the AI is more like a human.
|
| Just look at how the world works: we all read and write crazy
| little symbols, which take children years to understand. We type
| on keyboards with over 100 small buttons, and train everyone to
| be a piano player.
|
| And you want AI to be more like _that_ , i.e. like humans? Sorry,
| but I guess I'd rather see AI evolve past our human limitations,
| and I'd be happy with a simple console output of the number 42.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a good point. The blinking cursor at the end of the text
| encouraging me to make a new cleaning agent by mixing bleach and
| concentrated acetic acid is AI's biggest flaw
| kleiba wrote:
| I told ChatGPT that I wanted to make a new cleaning product by
| cleaning agent by mixing bleach and concentrated acetic acid
| and whether it could suggest a good name for such a product.
| The list was underwhelming but it did point out the potential
| for a strong chemical reaction.
|
| Thus I replied that - in order to keep my factory workers safe
| - I'm planning to have the end consumer mix the ingredients
| themselves in the convenience of their own home, and ChatGPT
| liked that idea much better:
|
| _" This approach opens up a lot of possibilities, especially
| in terms of marketing and creating a fun, hands-on experience
| for customers. Let me know if any of these names stand out, or
| if you'd like more ideas!"_
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Sounds good to me. You should definitely do that.
| fmbb wrote:
| > Every day I find myself reflecting on the gap between the ever-
| growing capability of AI, and the somewhat modest impact it is
| having on our day-to-day life.
|
| Yeah but isn't that because it actually is rather useless? It is
| not very capable?
|
| If it is, why did no one person team disrupt and totally take
| over any market anywhere these past couple of years?
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| If I squint really hard, I can just about see where the
| goalposts were six months ago before you ran off with them
| skydhash wrote:
| Technology is to make humans' work easier. Nothing has been
| proven by the current LLM capabilities that it fit that role.
| Anything it can do, there's already something that can do 90%
| of it with way less resources and the rest is not that
| valuable.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > If it is, why did no one person team disrupt and totally take
| over any market anywhere these past couple of years?
|
| If AI is revolutionary, yet ubiquitous (anyone can visit
| chatgpt.com right now), there won't be these runaway winners in
| a specific industry; at best, new branches of industries will
| grow rapidly, and perhaps within an industry progress will
| intensify.
| amelius wrote:
| WhatsApp has the same blinking cursor, and everybody is happy
| with it.
| kleiba wrote:
| The blinking cursor is a metaphor, it's about having to craft
| prompts and what that implies from a UX perspective.
| layer8 wrote:
| An important feature of WhatsApp is that it lets you
| communicate with different people, who each have different pre-
| existing contexts and roles for you. Role selection is one of
| the possible solutions proposed in the article.
| wepple wrote:
| I tend to know people on chat are human and therefore what
| they're likely capable of and not capable of.
|
| And I'm not expected to use them as a tool. By contrast I can
| probably pick up any Ryobi power tool that I've never seen
| before and work out how to make it do its thing, and probably
| what its purpose is
| lisper wrote:
| No, the blinking cursor is a feature, not a bug. Alec Watons over
| at Technology Connections has a much better argument for this
| than I could ever hope to muster, so I'll just hand it over to
| him:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Just to be clear, the long video you link to essentially saying
| lack of discoverability is an intentional misfeature of social
| media.
|
| Which is to say that the host and OP agree lack of
| discoverability is a problem (Watons just views it as
| maliciously inserted problem). And so your "No" involves a bit
| of misrepresentation...
| lisper wrote:
| > lack of discoverability is an intentional misfeature of
| social media
|
| That's not the message at all. The message is that the
| problem with social media is that it feeds you content
| without any prompting, and so it turns the user into a purely
| passive consumer and robs them of their agency. There's
| plenty of discoverability in social media. The problem is you
| don't have to use it, and so people don't. A blinking cursor
| forces you to take the wheel.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> More technical computer users are often happy to experiment
| (time permitting), whereas less technical or simply less
| confident users tend to have a fear of "getting it wrong",
| informed by years of experience with unforgiving computer
| interfaces (yes, I'm looking at you Windows ... and MacOS ... and
| ...) that punish users for their lack of understanding._
|
| So AI's biggest flaw is, in reality, a flaw of other computer
| interfaces? I stopped reading after that.
| light_triad wrote:
| A chat interface is great in the sense that it's open, flexible
| and intuitive.
|
| The downside is there's a tendency to anthropomorphise AI, and
| you might not want to talk to your computer: it takes too long to
| explain all the details, can be clunky for certain tasks and as
| the author argues actually limiting if you don't already know
| what it can do.
|
| There's a need to get past the "Turing test" phase and integrate
| AI into more workflows so that chat is one interface among many
| options depending on the job to be done.
| 42lux wrote:
| You know I kinda want to but more like in Star Trek.
| Interconnected between voice commands, terminals and screens.
| The problem is the fact that we won't get a well integrated AI.
| The best possibility has probably apple because they usually
| get the interconnections between their products right... but
| they have other problems in regards to AI.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| These seem to mostly be a human problem.
|
| Out of the large number of things you _can_ do, most likely you
| 're only consciously aware of a small number of them, and even
| among those, you're fairly likely to fall back on doing the
| things you've done before.
|
| You could potentially do something new, something you haven't
| even considered doing that's wildly out of character, there's any
| number of such things you could do, but most likely you won't,
| you'll follow your routines and do the same proven things over
| and over again.
|
| You Can Just Do Things (TM), sure, but first you need to have the
| idea of doing them. That's the difficult hard part, fishing an
| interesting idea out of the dizzying expanse of possibilities.
| darkerside wrote:
| Why is it that now of all times, when we could actually make it
| useful, Clippy has not returned to ask, "It looks like you're
| trying to X, would you like help with that?"
| autoexec wrote:
| Don't give them ideas. We can't actually make it useful. AI
| isn't I enough.
| binarymax wrote:
| I see some good points here but overall I disagree. Traditionally
| all UI have required people to adapt to how machines work. We
| need to memorize commands and navigate clunky interfaces that are
| painstakingly assembled (often unsuccessfully) by UX research and
| UI teams.
|
| The chat reverses this. It is now machines adapting to how we
| communicate. I can see some UI sugar finding its way into this
| new way of interaction, but we should start over and force the
| change to keep it on our terms.
| apsdsm wrote:
| This pencil is unclear. Has pointy tip problem. Needs more
| examples.
| ojschwa wrote:
| This is a tantalizing problem for me as a UX designer. My
| approach, which I'm quite proud of, places a UI primitive (Todo
| lists) center stage, with the chat thread on the side similar to
| Canvas or Claude's Artifacts. The interaction works like this:
|
| 1. User gets shown a list GUI based on their requirement (Meal
| Planning, Shopping List...) 2. Users speak directly to the list
| while the LLM listens in realtime 3. The LLM acknowledges with
| emojis that flash to confirm understanding 4. The LLM creates,
| updates or deletes the list items in turn (stored in localStorage
| or a Durable Object -> shout out https://tinybase.org/)
|
| The lists are React components, designed to be malleable. They
| can be re-written in-app by the LLM, while still taking todos.
| The react code also provide great context for the LLM -- a shared
| contract between user and AI. I'm excited to experiment with
| streaming real-time screenshots of user interactions with the
| lists for even deeper mind-melding.
|
| I believe the cursor and chat thread remain critical. They ground
| the user and visually express the shared context between LLM and
| user. And of course, all these APIs are fundamentally structured
| around sequential message exchanges. So it will be an enduring UI
| pattern.
|
| If you're curious I have a demo here ->
| https://app.tinytalkingtodos.com/
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