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AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

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Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#11

Post by p_j_w »

97-109-107 wrote: post #4

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)

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?

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#12

Post by sp332 »

golemotron wrote: post #9

> 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.

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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#14

Post by happytoexplain »

james-bcn wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#15

Post by 97-109-107 »

p_j_w wrote: post #11
97-109-107 wrote: post #4

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)

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?

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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#16

Post by wbobeirne »

> 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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#17

Post by kaycebasques »

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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#18

Post by karaterobot »

api wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#20

Post by karaterobot »

golemotron wrote: post #9

> 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.

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?
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