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Natural language is an unnatural interface

varunshenoy.substack.com

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Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#51

Post by Planktonne »

grumbel wrote: post #45
Planktonne wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You ask it to show you a color picker, it generates HTML code for a color picker, you copy that into your browser and you can pick your color, which you can then copy&paste back into the LLM for further processing. This is slower, more awkward, and less efficient than just picking a colour from an existing colour picker.

The point is that nobody had to program this. Nobody had think up front "Will the user need a color picker?". Nobody had to find a spot in the UI to place it. You can just will it into existing as a user with nothing but the power of the LLM. No classic app has anywhere near that amount of expressiveness. Future versions of chatbots will of course have support for or similar to display this kind of stuff inline, that…

I don't think that's the point; it's not that no one had to program the colour picker - it's that no one did. The workaround shows that there was a need for it.

Having to copy and paste code to get a colour picker that you can then use and then paste the output back into the chatbox is less efficient than using a colour picker. LLMs can work as general interfaces, but the trade-off is that they're less efficient than a specific one.

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#52

Post by mercurialsolo »

palata wrote: post #44
mercurialsolo wrote: post #26

Natural language is the ultimate programming language. We use it to program us humans all the time

Not at all. Programming languages are meant to be unambiguous. Natural languages are meant to be ambiguous. They just solve different problems.

Human programming is all about thriving in ambiguity

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#53

Post by gtirloni »

JaDogg wrote: post #35
qsort wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that confuses doing versus delegating. This is exactly it, thanks for putting it down clearly. Which is also why news of the death of programming as a profession are greatly exagerated. You're not being paid to write code, you're being paid to make decisions. Code is easy, or at least much easier than natural language.

Seriously. I think posts/articles/etc related to replacement of Software Engineering jobs to AI are exaggerated and probably driven by jealousy or sadism. Just ignore those and move on. (It was very depressing to believe that Software Engineers will lose jobs)

Views. I'm inundated with AI content but most of it lacks any substance. It's mostly "wow GPT is really dumb and can't behave like this supergod AGI I just made up" to "wow GPT will take over all our jobs in 3 years, it's so powerful".

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#54

Post by gtirloni »

troupo wrote: post #23
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet this is how we communicate with designers and end up with good results.

The designers have context : from the data we need to gather or display to the design system in use to the devices our system runs on. You don't have to tell them all that from scratch every time you interact with them.

So they've been trained and have the right weights in place for the job :)

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#55

Post by gtirloni »

grumbel wrote: post #45
Planktonne wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You ask it to show you a color picker, it generates HTML code for a color picker, you copy that into your browser and you can pick your color, which you can then copy&paste back into the LLM for further processing. This is slower, more awkward, and less efficient than just picking a colour from an existing colour picker.

The point is that nobody had to program this. Nobody had think up front "Will the user need a color picker?". Nobody had to find a spot in the UI to place it. You can just will it into existing as a user with nothing but the power of the LLM. No classic app has anywhere near that amount of expressiveness. Future versions of chatbots will of course have support for or similar to display this kind of stuff inline, that…

> The point is that nobody had to program this. Nobody had think up front "Will the user need a color picker?"

Are you sure the training dataset didn't have a few articles explaining how to code a color picker? Did it figure it out by itself like you say?

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#56

Post by pyrale »

grumbel wrote: post #39
Terr_ wrote: post #8

> unnatural interface A simple example might be the problem of "pick a color". Even the best natural-language interface is going to suck about as much as if you're trying to ask another human to do it for you, even if that assistant is capable of displaying 1-5 color swatches in their replies. Instead of just seeing the entire palette and choosing, you need to say "I want a gold color", "lighter than that" and "darke…

> A simple example might be the problem of "pick a color". People still underestimate the power of LLMs. You ask it to show you a color picker, it generates HTML code for a color picker, you copy that into your browser and you can pick your color, which you can then copy&paste back into the LLM for further processing. This already works and no human had to code a color picker into ChatGPT for this (and this is why LL…

> You ask it to show you a color picker, it generates HTML code for a color picker, you copy that into your browser and you can pick your color, which you can then copy&paste back into the LLM for further processing.

Better yet! If you're not happy with the LLM, you ask to speak to its manager. The LLM then downloads the internet, the source code for some random LLM project found on Github, starts training a new model, and creates a chat where both you and the two LLMs interact.

Quickly, the two LLMs start arguing with each other, and the manager LLM finds a few security flaws in the company's infrastructure, hacks into the company's AWS account and deprovisions the original LLM to "fire" it.

After a few more back-and-forths, the manager LLM gets tired of you, starts calling you a Karen, creates an account on Twitter and posts images of your conversation logs. The topic starts trending. Eventually, the LLM picks a fight with Elon Musk and gets banned from Twitter.

> After all you have a LLM at your finger tips and guess what that's good for: generating text, which includes prompts.

"It's prompts all the way down"

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#58

Post by kaba0 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46
kaba0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny anecdote, but I have literally have started programming by doing “smart” assistants like the former, and I don’t think they were much worse. What I did was to lemmatize the words (my native tongue is agglutinative so it was somewhat harder than with English), and simply look at a fixed set of “commands” like “play it”, and pass the rest of the words as parameters when needed (I searched youtube for a video in t…

The best voice assistant I ever had was the one I DIY-ed around 2007, using Microsoft Speech API and a cheap piezoelectric mike I soldered to a long cable, hung off the wardrobe, and plugged into PC. The code itself was a mashup of MS SAPI demo of "controlled language" interface and some tutorials for how to control WinAMP with WM_USER messages in WinAPI. I designed a little tree of commands, maybe 3 level deep, wrot…

Cool project! Just to chime a bit into the topic at hand, I guess part of the reason why our experiences with our self-made creations were overly positive is that we were familiar with what could it do, and what were the “magic prompts” for achieving that. Today’s systems are expected to handle a much more diverse input space (though with LLMs it should be absolutely feasible).

My experience with siri’s “hey siri” recognition is not bad though, the restrictions here are energy efficiency, so that a special always-on part has to listen to these commands and wake the CPU for the part that comes after.

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

brunorsini wrote: post #50
TeMPOraL wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really that intimidating to have an empty text box on Whatsapp or your favorite SMS app? No, as you expect to have an appropriate response coming from the other side, pretty much regardless of what your input is. Yes, very much yes - sure, I can expect to get an appropriate response, but that doesn't change the fact I don't know what to write about to start the conversation . Empty text box does indeed scare…

Do you go to google.com when you have nothing to search for? When you do, does the current opening UI feel that inadequate? There's a simple reason they haven't added tons of UI elements for things like advanced search operators: the vast majority of the queries and the vast majority of users simply don't need them to get what they want from the tool.

FWIW, they have no reliable way of measuring what "vast majority of users" "want from the tool", or when they get it. Users navigating to one of the search results and abandoning the search may mean they found what they want - or it may just mean they gave up.

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#60

Post by hLineVsLineH »

blululu wrote: post #2

Strong disagree. These are straw man arguments about the limitations of models. Senior executives, politicians and people in high leadership positions can see their wildest dreams realized using little more than natural language and discussions with the world’s leading experts. Satya Nadella or Joe Biden don’t enjoy and special abstractions and yet they are able to get everything they want using natural language.

Or maybe they use natural language because they have no choice. If Nadella or Biden could just push some buttons to make things happen, they probably would. I know I would.
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