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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?

#141

Post by bitwize »

rzzzt wrote: post #110
Bjorkbat wrote: post #88

I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools. Which i…

AutoCAD and Rhino 3D are two examples that I remember having a command prompt sitting proudly somewhere at the bottom of the UI. Your mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts were all converted into commands in text form. If you look at your command history, it's a script - a bit boring since it is completely linear, but add loops, conditionals and function/macro support and you get a very capable scripting environment.

AutoCAD definitely was CLI-based, with menus and dialogs basically filling in parameters to the commands. But in the late 90s or so Autodesk got religion and decided that AutoCAD should be a Windows product and follow Microsoft UI guidelines, so I don't know how well they stuck with the "command line underneath" over the years.

Early in AutoCAD's history, Autodesk did add loops and conditionals to its CLI -- with Lisp! Type an open paren and the command line became a REPL. You could define new commands, directly manipulate entity data structures, and have all the control structures Lisp affords -- not Common Lisp, it was way simpler, but it was powerful.

To this day, wayward mech engineers still sometimes ask Autolisp-related questions on unrelated Lisp fora, such as r/lisp.

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

#142

Post by ilaksh »

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…

What sort of retrieval augmented generation system are you working on?

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

#143

Post by ilaksh »

yencabulator wrote: post #121
isoprophlex wrote: post #19

"intent-based outcome specification"... so, a declarative language such as SQL?

I think you'll find that INSERT and UPDATE are very much commands. SQL queries are outcome-driven sure, but try to move beyond pure queries and outcome-driven computing, without some sort of machine learning, gets quite difficult. And moving outside of a single SELECT is a huge barrier. Even within the scope of SQL, consider an ML system that can slice-and-dice previous SQL queries interactively, based on non-expert…

I built a system that uses GPT to write KQL queries (similar to SQL) for a specific table. It could even combine multiple queries or throw in a custom chart if requested.

OpenAI's models are good at writing SQL. I think they finally allow the type of use case that SQL itself was supposed to provide as originally envisioned.

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

#144

Post by yencabulator »

ilaksh wrote: post #139
yencabulator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With the new function calling feature you may not need the second system. Only present options to ChatGPT that are valid. Feed it updated state information as JSON. Have it describe and elaborate on what the game engine is doing, or use functions to invoke entity creation that can then be tracked by the engine. So for example the engine can do combat rolls and the LLM can give each a unique description of the type of…

Yes, but then I fear you're back to having limited "things that can happen", with predefined entities and so on. I'd prefer the acid trip to break more paradigms, tell a story, while the lawyer makes sure there remain challenges.

For example: with strict entities "behind an API", the diamond is the singular diamond and is a diamond. With an ML-based lawyer, well, maybe you can duplicate the diamond? Maybe you can transmogrify it temporarily into a non-diamond, which the Enemy drops as undesirable? Maybe you can wander into an elaborate system of mines full of dwarves who actually know how to mine a diamond, as long as you help them with this pesky dragon... No human has to come up with all these possibilities.

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

#145

Post by hyperthesis »

philovivero wrote: post #89
Animats wrote: post #63

This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…

> Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Are humans limited to low-risk applications like that? Because humans, even some of the most humble, will still assert things they THINK are true, b…

> Are humans limited to low-risk applications like that?

No, but arguably civilization consists of mechanisms to manage human fallibility (separation of powers, bicameralism, "democracy", bureaucracy, regulations, etc). We might not fully understand why, but we've found methods that sorta kinda "work".

> could have caused

That's why they didn't.

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

#146

Post by mrob »

moffkalast wrote: post #95
a1371 wrote: post #39

I don't really get this. The paradigm has always been there, it has been the technology limitations that have defined the UI so far. Having robots and computers that humans talk to has been a fixture of sci-fi movies. Perhaps the most notable example being 2001: A Space Odyssey which came out 55 years ago.

Sure, but it's sort of how actual usable and economical flying cars would be a paradigm change for transport. The idea exists, but it's made up fairy magic with capabilities and limitations based on plot requirements. Once it's actually made real it hardly ever ends up being used the way it was imagined. Like for example in 2001, the video call tech. They figured it would be used like a payphone with a cathode ray tu…

I don't recall a single cathode ray tube in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is notable for having the first depiction of a tablet computer. They went to considerable effort to show flat-screen displays instead of CRTs.

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

#148

Post by ilaksh »

yencabulator wrote: post #144
ilaksh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the new function calling feature you may not need the second system. Only present options to ChatGPT that are valid. Feed it updated state information as JSON. Have it describe and elaborate on what the game engine is doing, or use functions to invoke entity creation that can then be tracked by the engine. So for example the engine can do combat rolls and the LLM can give each a unique description of the type of…

Yes, but then I fear you're back to having limited "things that can happen", with predefined entities and so on. I'd prefer the acid trip to break more paradigms, tell a story , while the lawyer makes sure there remain challenges. For example: with strict entities "behind an API", the diamond is the singular diamond and is a diamond. With an ML-based lawyer, well, maybe you can duplicate the diamond? Maybe you can tr…

Good point. You could also have the system create the entities on-the-fly if necessary by calling a function. But having them there in the prompt as a structure it's supposed to adhere to some degree makes it more consistent and would give it tools such as for dice rolls or a precise inventory and game state database etc.

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

#149

Post by 101008 »

Timon3 wrote: post #34
wbobeirne wrote: post #16

> 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 i…

I think the important part from the article that establishes the difference is this: > As I mentioned, in command-based interactions, the user issues commands to the computer one at a time, gradually producing the desired result (if the design has sufficient usability to allow people to understand what commands to issue at each step). The computer is fully obedient and does exactly what it’s told. The downside is tha…

As the parent comment says, it's just another abstraction level. You have chosen a granularity, but even with "going to a website, enter your comment and click add comment" you are abstracting a lot. You are nto caring about connecting to a server, authentication, etc. The final user doesn't care about that at all, it's just telling the software to post a comment.

Right now the granularity may be "Comment on Hacker News article about UI this and this and that...", and in 100 years someone will say "But that's too complicated. You need to tell the IA which article to comment and what, while my new IA just guess it from reading my mind..."

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

#150

Post by memefrog »

philovivero wrote: post #89
Animats wrote: post #63

This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…

> Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Are humans limited to low-risk applications like that? Because humans, even some of the most humble, will still assert things they THINK are true, b…

Can people please stop making this comment in reply to EVERY criticism of LLMs? "Humans are flawed too".

We do not normally hallucinate. We are sometimes wrong, and sometimes are wrong about the confidence they should attach to their knowledge. But we do not simply hallucinate and spout fully confidence nonsense constantly. That is what LLMs.

You remember a few isolated incidents because they're salient. That does not mean that it's representative of your average personal interactions.

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