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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?

#171

Post by rzzzt »

bitwize wrote: post #141
rzzzt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Lis…

I was just trying to address the parent and others' doubt that a graphical user interface can be thought of as a command-based paradigm, seen in these threads:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36395900

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36397115 (we are here)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36395727

The designers behind the examples mentioned wanted to expose and capitalize on the connection between traditional "type command" CLI and "press button, drag rectangle" GUI workflows.

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

#172

Post by USB3_0 »

> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Thus, the third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification.

Wow! For the first time ever, I will be able to describe to a trained professional what I want, and they will do it for me! Before today I used to write out the exact arm motions a carpenter would need to carve me a chair, but now I can just ask them for one!

This article is stupid. AI will make it easier for computers to interpret human interactions leading to increased efficiency and usability. Just like every other useful tool ever invented. There, I've put more insight into this comment than their article.

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

#173

Post by babyshake »

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…

Verifiability is a much easier concept than Truth. It's sufficient at least 80-90% of the time for an AI to know whether something is reasonably verifiable, rather than whether it is true. Of course, with sufficient amounts of misinformation and disagreement over which sources can be used for verifiability it's a more complicated act in practice.

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

#174

Post by danybittel »

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…

The difference is one is an assistant and the other is a tool. Essentially a tool, has one function. The outcome of all inputs is clear, once you learn the tool. An assistant, behaves different in different environment, it anticipates and interprets. It may not be deterministic. It's easier to use but harder (or impossible) to understand.

For example, the lasso selection in Photoshop is clearly a tool. A "content aware" selection on the other hand is an assistant.

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

#175

Post by savolai »

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…

I’d love to understand the relevance of this comment, but I sincerely don’t.

You describe two cases that are specially designed to anticipate needs of professionals operating a system. That’s automation, sure, but not AI. The system doesn’t even ostensibly understand yser intent, it’s still simply and obviously deterministic, granted complex.

Do you have an underlying assumption about you wishing tech to only be for solving professional problems?

The context Nielsen comes from is the field of Human-Computer Interaction, which to me is about a more varied usage context than that.

LLMs have flaws, sure.

But how does all this at all relate to the paradigm development the article discusses?

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

#176

Post by Timon3 »

101008 wrote: post #149
Timon3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 N…

I guess you could also argue that telling another person 17 tasks to do is just another abstraction level. That doesn't change that it's a completely different interaction paradigm than the ones before.

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

#177

Post by quaintdev »

savolai wrote: post #175
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…

I’d love to understand the relevance of this comment, but I sincerely don’t. You describe two cases that are specially designed to anticipate needs of professionals operating a system. That’s automation, sure, but not AI. The system doesn’t even ostensibly understand yser intent, it’s still simply and obviously deterministic, granted complex. Do you have an underlying assumption about you wishing tech to only be for…

LLMs have flaws but they are exceptionally good at transforming data or outputting data in the format I want.

I once asked ChatGPT to tabulate calories of different food. I then asked it to convert table to CSV. I even asked it to provide SQL insert statement for same table. Now the data might be incorrect but the transformation of that data never was.

This works with complex transforms as well like asking it to create docker compose from docker run or podman run command and vice versa. Occasionally the transform would be wrong but then you realise it was just out of date with newer format which is expected because it's knowledge is limited to 2021

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

#180

Post by dorkwood »

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…

Couldn’t you make this same argument with a chat bot that wasn’t an LLM at all?

“Yes, it may have responded with total nonsense just now, but who among us can say they’ve never done the same in conversation?”

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