Why Chatbots Are Not the Future of Interfaces

We could be facing a world in which AI-model interfaces are the new gatekeepers of knowledge, and people are prompting chatbots instead of reading encyclopedias

focus less on AI as something separate from humans, and more on tools that enhance human cognition rather than replacing it… If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.

None of this is to imply that human beings should repudiate the technologies that make us more efficient. We just have to recognize which needs greater quantity can meet, and which it cannot. For example, AI chatbots cannot meet the need for intimacy. LLMs cannot meet the need for creativity. AI-generated art cannot meet the need for aesthetic nour... See more

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of useful AI is not about creating an artificial human personality. It is about creating tools that are endowed with intelligence, and capable of performing far more complex tasks than before.

Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.

This isn’t to say the digital won’t remain, or even that it won’t remain the primary medium. Rather, I think there are going to be more efforts to make the digital experience more human, to shift our relationships with it. Some say AI threatens this, I say it only reinforces it: nobody, really, likes AI, and our general distaste for it is going to ... See more

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more