Why Chatbots Are Not the Future of Interfaces

The idea is: learn to prompt chatbots very well = get way better outputs.

Right now, intricate prompting is helpful for some tasks. But over time, we think it’s an overrated skill. Here’s why:

1. As AI models improve, they require less “engineered” prompts. DALL-E 3 is a great example of this (you get top-tier images with < 10-word prompts).

In this c... See more

We’re far from replacing humans for many tasks now being delegated to large language models. That doesn’t mean LLMs can’t be helpful; it just means they’re being used wrong. The key is applying them to tasks they’re well-suited to, such as analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating data, and not for making important decisions on behalf of people.

An ... 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.

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

In a digitally decentralized world where generative AI can lower the barriers of creation even farther than ever before, and bots can be trained under the perspective of your choosing, an already fractured reality becomes at risk for disintegration. Or, as science-fiction writer and professional futurist Madeline Ashby told us in a recent interview... See more

If what you want is a content-marketing blog post that serves more to incrementally improve Google search results than to be read by an actual human, AI might help. If you want to think deeply through a subject and synthesize knowledge, then communicate that knowledge to others, it’s going to be better if you just struggle through the painful proce... See more

Humanity is waking up to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence, but we don’t yet understand our role. People talk about unexplainable AI when they should be more concerned about the unexplainable humans running the companies that develop the AI. (Hiya, Sam!) People worried about AI taking their jobs and taking control are comp... See more