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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?

#211

Post by throwuwu »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #61
zgluck wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you zoom out on the time scale it makes more sense. I think he's got a point. Both CLIs and GUIs are "command based". LLM prompts are more declarative. You describe what you want.

I've been at a SQL command prompt a decade or several before LLM.

You’re still in the command paradigm with some batch processing thrown in. With an LLM interface to a db you don’t write queries, you express an intent such as “I’d like to know why my customers are not resubscribing” and the LLM will write one or more queries and then interpret the results to give you an answer in plain English with a chart attached.

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

#213

Post by JohnFen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #134
JohnFen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the goal of Interface design is to find the least amount of things needed to get you from point A to the desired Destination as quickly as possible. That shouldn't be the primary goal of user interfaces, in my opinion. The primary goal should be to allow users to interface with the machine in a way that allows maximal understanding with minimal cognitive load. I understand a lot of UI design these days prioritizes…

> I understand a lot of UI design these days prioritizes the sort of "efficiency" you're talking about, but I think that's one of the reasons why modern UIs tend to be fairly bad. IMO, the main problem is that this "efficiency" usually involves making assumptions that can't be altered, which achieves "efficiency" by eliminating choices normally available to the user. This is rarely done for the benefit of the user -…

> In fact, I've been present on UI design discussions for a certain SaaS product

That makes sense. An SaaS-type offering is fundamentally different from selling a product. SaaS companies are incentivized to engage in manipulation of their customers. For them, the UI is more a sales tool than a user interface.

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

#214

Post by karaterobot »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #26
karaterobot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It allows manipulations that are impossible with single touch (like a mouse). It’s pretty big for things like 3D manipulation.

Whether it's your fingers or an on-screen pointer, it's the same paradigm in the sense of it being the same model of interaction. You move a pointer around and activate controls on the screen by touching them. I'm not knocking gestural controls, just saying if I had to classify them, I'd say they're an evolution of the mouse or touchpad rather than a whole new model.

And they aren't an evolution in all aspects, either. Multi-touch controls are easier for some things, harder for others. Fine-grain manipulation, for example selecting cells on a spreadsheet, or playing an FPS video game, are harder with touch controls than with a device like a mouse. They've also got a size constraint (the size of your fingertip) that makes many interfaces harder to use.

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

#215

Post by pilgrim0 »

marysnovirgin wrote: post #66

The usability of a system is mostly irrelevant. The measure of a good UI is how much money it can get the user to spend, not how intuitively it enables the user to achieve a task.

Ah, I love when someone gets it! What design has come to is beyond sad, it’s revolting.

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

#216

Post by ozim »

ilyt wrote: post #198
ozim wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downside is nowadays in office setting one has to operate 20+ different applications to get work done. While as operator you would spend more like 80% of your time using the same interface and application. I could spend my time to type 100WPM but I am not a typist - as a software dev it is quite enough to go with 40-60WPM because it is just small part of my work.

> Downside is nowadays in office setting one has to operate 20+ different applications to get work done. Like ? Even as a developer I'm not consistently using 20 different "big apps". 2 chat programs, IDE, terminal, mail client, wireshark, maybe some GUI DB tool if I feel lazy that day > I could spend my time to type 100WPM but I am not a typist - as a software dev it is quite enough to go with 40-60WPM because it is…

Maybe not daily, but still consistently: word/excel/pdf reader for documentation and all company documents to refer, web browser - each internal/SaaS app we use for tracking tickets managing deployments/repositories. I count each web-app as app, just like if I use GIT and kubectl from terminal still two different apps that I have to understand and operate with some knowledge but not in depth.

That was also my point on WPM I don’t operate computer like I would operate typing machine where I can learn set of motions and be done. I don’t operate terminal as well I operate apps That have text interface. These apps also change during months depending on what I am working on.

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

#217

Post by Mawr »

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?

Yes, of course. That's why the systems the parent mentioned designed humans out of the safety-critical loop.

> Because humans, even some of the most humble, will still assert things they THINK are true, but are patently untrue, based on misunderstandings, faulty memories, confused reasoning, and a plethora of others.

> I can't count the number of times I've had conversations with extremely well-experience, smart techies who just spout off the most ignorant stuff.

The key difference is that when the human you're having a conversation with states something, you're able to ascertain the likelihood of it being true based on available context: How well do you know them? How knowledgeable are they about the subject matter? Does their body language indicate uncertainty? Have they historically been a reliable source of information?

No such introspection is possible with LLMs. Any part of anything they say could be wrong and to any degree!

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

#218

Post by elendee »

krm01 wrote: post #44

The article fails to grasp the essence of what UI is actually about. I agree that AI is adding a new layer to UI and UX design. In our work [1] we have seen an increase in AI projects or features the last 12 months (for obvious reasons). However, the way that AI will contribute to better UI is to remove parts of the Interface. not simply giving it a new form. Let me explain, the ultimate UI is no UI. In a perfect sce…

sometimes I wonder if the edges of articulated desire may always be essentially binary / quantitative, meaning that slow yes / nos are in fact the best way for us to grapple with them, and systems that allow us a set of these yes/no buttons are in fact a reflection of ourselves and not a requirement of the machine. So long as we are builders, I think we'll have buttons. even in transhumanist cyberspace perhaps. Still waiting on peer review for that one though

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

#219

Post by maximecampbell »

retrocryptid wrote: post #67

Bardini's book about Doug Engelbart recaps a conversation between Engelbart and Minsky about the nature of natural language interfaces... that took place in the 1960s. AI interfaces taking so long has less to do with the technology (I mean... Zork understood my text sentences well enough to get me around a simulated world) and more to do with what people are comfortable with. Lowey talked about MAYA (Most Advanced Ye…

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