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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?

#111

Post by abecedarius »

kenjackson wrote: post #97
andrewstuart wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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'…

I think you're mixing Infocom with some of the much cruder adventure games of the time. Or maybe remembering an unrepresentative Infocom game or part of one.

Not to say Infocom included AI. They just used a lot of talent and playtesting to make games that felt more open-ended.

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

#112

Post by ttepasse »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #6
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.

You should see his old site.

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.nngrou...

https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit....

A redesign should not has been as brutalistic, but keeping the same spirit and personality.

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

#113

Post by TeMPOraL »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #84
ignoramous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. Only a matter of time (~3 to 5 years [0]) given the amount of research going into it? With that in mind, ambient computing has always threatened to be the next frontier in Human-Computer Interaction. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and G Home predate today's LLM hype. Dare I say, the hype is real. As a consumer, GPT4 has shown capabilities far beyond whatever preceded it (with th…

> Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. I don't think that's likely unless there was a latent space of "Truth" which could be discovered through the right model. That would be a far more revolutionary discovery than anyone can possibly imagine. For starters the last 300+ years of Western Philosophy would be essentially proven unequivocally wrong. edit: If you're going to downvote this please elaborate. LLMs currentl…

They may not be a surface directly encoding the "truth" value, but unless we assume that the training data LLMs are trained on are entirely uncorrelated with the truth, there should be a surface that's close enough.

I don't think the assumption that LLM training data is random with respect to truth value is reasonable - people don't write random text for no reason at all. Even if the current training corpus was too noisy for the "truth surface" to become clear - e.g. because it's full of shitposting and people exchanging their misconceptions about things - a better-curated corpus should do the trick.

Also, I don't see how this idea would invalidate the last couple centuries of Western philosophy. The "truth surface", should it exist, would not be following some innate truth property of statements - it would only be reflecting the fact that the statements used in training were positively correlated with truth.

EDIT: And yes, this would be a huge thing - but not because of some fundamental philosophical reasons, but rather because it would be an effective way to pull truths and correlations from aggregated beliefs of large number of people. It's what humans do when they synthesize information, but at a much larger scale, one we can't match mostly because we don't live long enough.

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

#114

Post by yencabulator »

andrewstuart wrote: post #5

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.

Well there's a thought. A zorklike where the game content is whatever generative ML hallucinates (instead of the built-in fixed maps & interactions) -- as long as a second ML system agrees that the answer follows some more general rules.

For example: Rules say "In the beginning, the Enemy has a diamond. User cannot get the diamond from the Enemy if the Enemy is still alive. The Enemy is a fierce opponent and hard to kill." but nothing about the details of the enemy, shape of the map, or the available tools. Re-generate each response until it succeeds the verification.

Let the adventure be randomized by the hallucinations, while keeping some basic challenges in place.

An acid-tripping D&D dungeon master coming up with plot twists, combined with a rulebook-reading lawyer. Bonus points for adding generated "cut scene" visuals every now and then.

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

#115

Post by kenjackson »

abecedarius wrote: post #111
kenjackson wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I think you're mixing Infocom with some of the much cruder adventure games of the time. Or maybe remembering an unrepresentative Infocom game or part of one. Not to say Infocom included AI. They just used a lot of talent and playtesting to make games that felt more open-ended.

No. I actually went and played Zork again to be sure. Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy had me pulling my hair out as a kid. It was definitely Infocom.

I also, as a kid, write a lot of Infocom-style games, so I can appreciate how good of a job they did. but I've also looked at their source code since it has all been released and I wasn't too far behind them.

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

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

jart wrote: post #107
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my. This is the first time I've seen this kind of distinction between "users" and "operators" in context of a single system. I kind of always assumed that "operator" is just a synonym for "user" in industries/contexts that are dealing with tools instead of toys. But this absolutely makes sense, and it is a succinct description for the complaints some of us frequently make about modern UI trends: bad interfaces are…

Oh snap, did I just pull back the curtain?

Indeed you did; half of my brain capacity is currently being used by a background process sifting through everything I remember ever thinking or learning that's associated with computers, to re-evaluate it in context of the difference between "users" and "operators".

Seriously. Until your comment, I thought the two terms to be synonyms.

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

#117

Post by yencabulator »

kaycebasques wrote: post #17

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…

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.

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

#118

Post by abecedarius »

kenjackson wrote: post #115
abecedarius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're mixing Infocom with some of the much cruder adventure games of the time. Or maybe remembering an unrepresentative Infocom game or part of one. Not to say Infocom included AI. They just used a lot of talent and playtesting to make games that felt more open-ended.

No. I actually went and played Zork again to be sure. Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy had me pulling my hair out as a kid. It was definitely Infocom. I also, as a kid, write a lot of Infocom-style games, so I can appreciate how good of a job they did. but I've also looked at their source code since it has all been released and I wasn't too far behind them.

I forgot about Hitchhiker's -- to be fair, that did seem less like a game/world and more like a big, funny... art piece? I never got back to it after needing hints to make it to the Heart of Gold.

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

#119

Post by dustingetz »

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

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

#120

Post by happytoexplain »

alphabet9000 wrote: post #85
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.

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 bizarre dropdown button behavior: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif and i can go on and on. i don't feel this nitpick whining is unwarranted considering t…

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.
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