From Prompt Engineering to Collaborating: A Human-Centered ...

most often, people will begin engaging with all kinds of technology, including GenAI, before they know exactly what they want and need—even before having a specific meaning in mind.

We can do this by building our systems with the ability to behave more collaboratively: to ask relevant questions, to offer multiple potential paths to help the user evolve their knowledge and intent, and to provide evidence of progress toward shared understanding.

Why is there so much discussion of prompt engineering as the future paradigm describing language interactions with generative AI? It's one tool in our arsenal, one that's useful for experts and in those cases where someone knows, and can (with some effort) articulate, exactly what they want. But it certainly isn't natural language as people use it,... See more

When people engage with LLMs, they ask for suggestions, refer to shared history and context, and build on previous responses. Their top expressed need is for systems to have a back-and-forth with them, to help them learn, to help them narrow things down, and to let them know what the system needs to provide better responses.

The conduit metaphor and prompt engineering as a paradigm are based on two fundamental assumptions: that people have a specific meaning in mind and that it's one person's responsibility to put that meaning into words to impart to the other. Neither of these aligns with the primary way in which people engage in language interactions. Instead, people... See more

While we agree the new user interface paradigm affords a move from "command-based" to "intent-based" interactions, we suggest that the future is much more about shared control (i.e., collaboration), where both human and machine work to understand and refine intents. Specifically, we propose that future HCI will be grounded in an interactive and ite... See more