AI Will Eat UI

Just Plain Wrong:

Reason 1: Generative Design is a horrible basis for building UIs.

GD requires a well understood model of how the design needs to operate and be built (ie, physics + specifications + machine tool kinematics). We don't have a physics of UI design. GD makes weird, ugly stuff.

Reason 2: Do you not remember how awful Clippy was?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

TLDR Extract: The program was widely reviled among users as intrusive and annoying,[22][23] and was criticized even within Microsoft... Smithsonian Magazine called Clippit "one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing".

Reason 3: Also brought to you by Microsoft: the UI Hell of Adaptive Menus in Office 2000.

See: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/10/combatin...

TLDR Extract: Adaptive Menus were not successful. In my opinion, they actually add complexity to the interface...Auto-customization, unless it does a perfect job, is usually worse than no customization at all.

It's not about rearranging menu-items, but rather learning how an individual user could optimally interact with an application and then tailoring the interface accordingly.

If you visit booking.com it's unlikely you'll ever see the same website twice. It's because their product team does continuous design and A/B testing, trying to come up with the best one-size-fits-all solution. If this loop of designing and testing were to be automated, UIs could be designed based on individual user data rather than aggregate.

The premise is that just like our content feeds (e.g. Facebook, YouTube autoplay) are unique, so will our context (i.e. interface) become unique.

Will see about that.

Define optimally. Seriously, there is always going to be some easily measurable value(s) that will operate as a proxy for "optimal". Even if the model perfectly maximizes the goodness of the proxy values for every customer, the model will still be wrong inasmuch as the proxies are divorced from the actual "optimal". Also, if optimal-ness is focused entirely on maximizing revenue under the current model, the result will be a an automated user-abuse mechanism that entraps the user and forces them to put up with a horrible experience just to eke out a 3% boost in ad impressions and the 0.003% boost in clicks that generates.

And I hate, hate, hate that aspect of Facebook. God forbid you should ever want to find a post a second time. God forbid I should see posts from my friends in a timely manner. Nah, show me posts from banks and cell phone companies that I will not do business with, ever, and show them 50 times.

YouTube Autoplay is a pain in my ass that I keep having to disable.

It's too bad we weren't responsible enough to manage Usenet and email in a Spam-free way. Now we've driven ourselves into a walled-garden, crappy version of Usenet with proprietary clients that serve only the site operators. At least we know where the spam comes from...