"intent-based outcome specification"... so, a declarative language such as SQL?
While it was initially meant as user interface layer of sorts, I think, it's not really something that the typical user can be expected to know nowadays.
AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
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Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#42FB’s AI head just said LLMs are a fad. I thought about how to use them… I wish they could render an interface (HTML and JS at least, but also produce artifacts like PowerPoints). What is really needed is for LLMs to produce some structured markup, that can then be rendered as dynamic documents. Not text. As input, natural language is actually inferior to GUIs. I know the debate between command line people and GUI peo…
As someone who just spent 2 hours in my company's Confluence site, trying to track down the answer to a single question that could have been resolved in seconds by an LLM trained on an internal corporate corpus -- LLMs are very much not a fad.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#43> 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. Maybe we can borrow programming paradigm terms here and describe this as Imperative UX versus Declarative UX. Makes me want to dive into SQL or XSLT and try to find more parallels.
I was thinking of imperative vs declarative, too. SQL is declaritive with a pre-defined syntax and grammar as an interface, where as the AI style of interaction has a natural language interface.
SQL and XSLT are declarative, but the outputs are clean and intuitive. The data model and data set are probably well understood, as is the mapping to and from the query.
AI is a very different type of declarative. It's messy, difficult to intuit, has more dimensionality, and the outputs can be signals rather than tabular data records.
It rhymes, but it doesn't feel the same.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#44The 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 scenario, you think about something (want pizza) and you have it (eating pizza) as instant as you desire.
Obviously this isn’t possible so 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.
Now, with AI, you can start to add a level of predictive Interfaces where you can use AI to remove steps that would normally require users to do something.
If you want to design better products with AI, you have to remember that product design is about subtracting things not adding them. AI is a technology that can help with that.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this is basically the absence of a query syntax, a way to query via natural language, and not just get back a list of results, but have it almost synthesize an answer. To everyone who isn't a software developer, this is a new paradigm with computers. Hell even for me as a software dev it's pretty different. Like I'm not asking Google to find me info that I can then read and grok, I'm asking something like ChatGPT…
For years I've just typed questions, in English, into browser search bars. It works great. Maybe that is why it doesn't seem like a new paradigm to me.
Search engines like Google + countless websites outshine LLMs, and they've been around for a good 20 years. What's the added value of an LLM that you can't get with Google coupled with the internet?
Oh, yes, websites like HN, Reddit & forums create spaces where you can ask experts for targeted advice. People >> GPT, we already could ask the help of people before we met GPT-4. You can always find someone available to answer you online, and it's free.
It is interesting to notice that after 20 years of "better than LLM" resources available for free there was no job crash.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#46I 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.
I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#47Not sure I would lump command line interfaces from circa 1964 with GUIs from 1984 through to the present, all in a single "paradigm". That seems like a stretch.
Agreed. Also, Uber (and many other mobile apps) wouldn't work as a CLI or desktop GUI, so leaving out mobile is another stretch.
That seems like a technology centered view. Nielsen is talking from the field of Human-Computer Interaction where he is pioneer, which deals with the point of view of human cognition. In terms of the logic of UI mechanics, what about mobile is different? Sure gestures and touch UI bring a kind of difference. Still, from the standpoint of cognition, desktop and mobile UIs have fundamentally the same cognitive dynamics. Command line UIs make you remember conmands by heart, GUIs make you select from a selection offered to you but they still do not undestand your intention. AI changes the paradigm as it is ostensibly able to understand intent so there is no deterministic selection of available commands. Instead, the interaction is closer to collaboration.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#48Earlier 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.
You can do all of those multi-touch manipulations on a Macintosh trackpad (zoom, pan, rotate, scale, etc). However, that trackpad would still be categorized as a form of a mouse -- correctly, in my opinion.
All of these gestures can be (and are, given that 3D modeling is historically done on desktop) handled with a standard mouse using a combination of the scroll wheel and modifier keys.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#49The 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…
> 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 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.
Efficiency is important, of course! But (depending on what tool the UI is attached to) it shouldn't be the primary goal.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#50I 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.
I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
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, which is what ChatGPT has. In both the Infocomm and ChatGPT case the software will respond to you in the first person as though you were interacting with someone.
>> Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT
This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In fact Dragon's Lair was possibly the least interactive of almost all computer games - it was essentially an interactive movie with only the most trivial user interaction.
>> Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next.
This was not my experience of Infocomm adventures.