Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chatbots are not the future

wattenberger.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 156 posts

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#91

Post by JusticeJuice »

sitkack wrote: post #27

> Text inputs have no affordances It has all the affordances. You can turn it into anything you want. Want it respond with json, check, it can do that. Turn a wall of text into a Python data structures, check, it can do that too. You can take your LLM text interface and put what ever api you want on top. You start with clay and mold it into anything you need. You construct a parser so that the way data is already con…

I dunno, I think his point is very valid. Chat bots can't do literally anything at all, and an empty text input isn't going to help guide a user towards what it can do, and what it's good at. Just because a system has a LLM to interact with it, doesn't mean it'll suddenly support any desired action the user wants done.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#92

Post by LASR »

akiselev wrote: post #60
anonylizard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable.…

> You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. There's something really funny about using an algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures.

Reminds me of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

You can certainly generate unpredictability from a predictable mechanism.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#93

Post by bravura »

starmftronajoll wrote: post #63
anonylizard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable.…

Perhaps the resolution to your cognitive dissonance is not to conclude that artists hate art. Instead I’d suggest that often, artists’ love of art doesn’t stem from concepts like “annihilating what came before” or “outcompeting hard.” Perhaps, like the parent comment said, it comes from self-expression — the pleasure, for both creator and audience, of the “mirage created by the writer,” to borrow your poetic term.

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it” – Bertolt Brecht.

I'm neither dissenting with your or OP here, FYI.

Mediocre artists will just copy what exists more easily.

And powerful artists will have new tools to shape reality.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#94

Post by unshavedyak »

dahwolf wrote: post #84

A lot of people are projecting for ChatGPT to come for the search market, but I wonder how that will play out for lowly cognitive queries. Quite a few people use search by awkwardly typing on mobile one or two words, probably misspelled and/or auto-completed as they type it. The query isn't sophisticated, lacks a lot of context and parameters, which the search engine then tries to guess. When you use ChatGPT in that…

> When you use ChatGPT in that way, you'll get useless generic answers. It seems to shine specifically when being more specific, detailed, which also suggests users are willing and able (education level) to give such rich input.

Sidenote, i've found GPT useful enough to pay for (GPT Plus) by doing the opposite. Or rather, i find it very useful when i struggle to search for problems. ChatGPT helps guide me to new search or research terms, sometimes even providing the answer more directly.

It feels like the olden days where Google was great at finding a movie based on some vague movie description. GPT does that for a ton of things for me, enough that i found it useful.

It hasn't replaced online research but it has accelerated it for me.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#95

Post by uxabhishek »

Contextually relevant suggested options (that can be acted upon with a single click), alongside the free form input box will emerge as the norm.

Down the line people will expect applications to be chat ready. They will see an input box and expect the application to understand natural language and respond in the most helpful way. Which might be showing an error message or suggesting relevant next steps.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#96

Post by krapp »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #70
JohnFen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don…

It comes under the category of "generative art". It isn't intentional or self-expression, regardless of what the prompt engineers may kid you. Is it "art"? Sure. Is it traditional art? No.

It is intentional, it's just a generated approximation of intention.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#97

Post by JohnFen »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #70
JohnFen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don…

It comes under the category of "generative art". It isn't intentional or self-expression, regardless of what the prompt engineers may kid you. Is it "art"? Sure. Is it traditional art? No.

I totally agree with this. But as an art lover, I want some real way of being able to tell if a piece of art is this, or is traditional.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#98

Post by graiz »

Chatbots are the future but your points are valid. They don't provide affordances, however chatbots provide a form of progressive disclosure and direct interaction that was previously impossible.

Toolbars and menus provide affordances but you still need to know what things are called and what order to use them. "I'd like to email this file as a PDF and I'd also like to print it." may be much easier in a chat UX than in a menu based UX. Often these things can co-exist but chatUX has access to much more nuanced UI that would otherwise be too complex to build or expose.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#99

Post by stephencoyner »

I think the future interface is a smart assistant for your life that gives you suggestions on what you should be doing (both for work and personal life). Sure, there may be a prompting text box, but the assistants will be so good at suggesting that you won't need it very often (besides searching for the occasional thing or giving feedback).

Driving these suggestions is all of your data as well as your goals and values that you can give to the assistant in natural language.

At work the goal might be: "I want to sell $100,000 worth of widgets this quarter" and it will break down step by step how that might be possible.

For personal life it might be "I want to get involved in the kayaking community" and it will recommend activities, clubs, etc.

Once these assistants are good enough, it will be reckless to not use one (especially at work). We will then live in a world where AI and human live together and make decisions together hand in hand. Buckle up.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#100

Post by kookylooky »

anonylizard wrote: post #41
hammyhavoc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression . Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree an…

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable.…

Literally implies embodiment of an unintentional emergent nature. The characters only exist in the figurative way we think of humans existing as individuals with personhood.

Ideas such AI being alive are not universal among the public. Let’s not anthropomorphize plastic and metal we etched human like sentence construction into.

Post reply on HN