Do people understand the impact ChatGPT can have on how we control our software? No more hunting through menus among a thousand options to figure out how to do something. Just use natural human language. The UIs we've had to design and live with will be a thing of the past. Yet no one seems to be talking about this.
@davew People in the UX community are most certainly talking about this. There is tremendous potential here. There is a tendency though for more technical users to over-index on typing as a perfect experience. For repetitive tasks, it can get old. This doesn't take anything from you point. To the contrary, it's WHY we're talking so much about this.
Strapping an LLM powered CLI into an app is an obvious first step but we'll likely do something much more interesting
@scottjenson@davew TBH, I’d be pretty psyched for a local LLM trained on all the man pages so I can just describe what I want and get the commands. I know I can do this with ChatGPT today but would much prefer everything staying local.
The other angle is using it to effective replace AppleScript for compositional workflows between apps. Maybe Apple is building this into Shortcuts…
@chrisgervais@davew exactly. that type of "let me describe it and it'll do all the work for me" type front end seems like a very interesting direction to go. The gotcha, however, is how often is it going to get it wrong? Even describing something to another human is error prone!
And if you do describe the actions that the computer is to take, in rigorous, clear, unambiguous terms that cannot possibly be misunderstood, congratulations, you're a programmer using a programming language.
@davew Like Star Trek computer — it will always process human command with minimal context and complete task exactly that user wished — and yet it never solve any actual problem in the show
@davew Are you expecting voice interfaces or chat bots or both? Voice and chat bots have been shown deficient repeatedly in recent memory, after similar hype. Someone’s going to have to do the work to show how great it is before people will get excited.
I’d argue that ChatGPT is too stupid for general purpose tasks and too inefficient for narrow purpose ones.
But at some point someone will make an actual breakthrough.
@davew Being able to search in an application’s settings/preferences has been a huge improvement over digging, but I’m still pretty skeptical on AI for that.
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