I can't help but wonder how much of the Chat** hype is driven by a frustration with the state of modern user experiences. The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response." When faced with the state of the modern web chatbots actually are preferable, sorry.
A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven is it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host ads, with the information. We need publishers to be able to make money from content without ads, and to be able to make money from providing it in raw form via APIs to third parties. It's that or the chatbot intermediaries are going to take over.
I can't wait for the major llm to place ads in the responses to extract more money
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You know this is coming with Uber: you book an Uber to a fancy restaurant and get Macdonald’s ads in the app, and then the driver’s app picks a route that drives past Macdonald’s and tells them to offer you a $5 off coupon on any order in the next 10 minutes.
So basically the same experience one gets in some countries, where the taxi driver or tourist guide, bring people into some friends shop, and one only gets out after buying half of the store, unless they are good at standing by their opinion no matter what.
It’s a segmentation issue. The ad buy was for “people going to restaurants” but it might have been “people going to {type} restaurants.”
Thought it’s probably not that simple. A naive ad buy might not care to target, or targeting is too expensive and you’re ok wasting some impressions because it might be all-in cheaper, or {brand} has the media budget to pay to be in front of your eyeballs all the time.
I suspect a more sophisticated chatbot will upsell the restaurant's offerings. "Would you like a bottle of champagne chilled and waiting for you? The Mushroom Bruschetta with Brie, Sage and Truffle Oil appetizer is the special of the day" that sort of thing.
Then you get there and find out it hallucinated and ordered you the cheesesteak eggrolls. But this is okay because you love cheesesteak eggrolls and come on... truffle oil? Really?
If they are taking an Uber to of the fancy restaurant and passing a McDonald’s chances are highly likely they will take a very similar route on the way home. They will still want to stop at McDonald’s for a $4 Large fry or an ice cream cone but no coupon this time. The line is now longer which increases the ride time and the drivers perceived profit.
Hahaha this is so spot on that I would take a bet against anyone who thinks this will NOT happen. Of course it will. I see no reason to believe AI will change the fundamental power structures, incentives and disrespect for human beings. New tech often has a little honeymoon phase where you get a few breadcrumbs more in order to try the new thing.
Anyway, it’s not like the different actors desperately trying to steal your attention today will go away because the UI is different. So if the issue with todays tech is ads, upselling, cookie forms etc then hoping that it will “go away” with LLMs is hilariously hopeful.
The people who think AI will distribute power rather than concentrate it are naive and optimistic at best. I prefer to call them delusional and insane. They keep repeating the same thing (developing technologies only entrenched giants can use at scale) and expecting different results (equitable society? where's the profit in that?).
I fear an LLM that is trained to provide ad-based responses in ways that don’t clearly disclose to users that the answer is an ad. YouTube review video culture already has a huge problem with this and it’s not even AI-driven.
Once companies start training models to respond based on advertising inputs (and you know they will eventually), it’s gonna be even harder to trust anything it says.
This is a certainty. The chatbot will be constantly upselling. "Would you like fries with that?" or "Extra cheese on your pizza is only 50 cents, add it?", only more sophisticated. And like some ordering systems today, you won't be able to bypass it. The "yes, please add more things to my cart" answer will be the default and easy answer, declining the offer will take more effort.
I'm not sure if it's the same story since it's from June, but a few days ago WTOP played some audio from one of their reporters trying to order from a drive-thru...
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
Reporter: "No."
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
Reporter: "No."
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
It keeps asking until you say yes then it will always add the extra cheese just like last time. You have to specifically ask for no extra cheese. Then it will always ask for it again.
People will learn creative prompts like telling it you have a potato allergy to make it stop asking if you want fries. But then it will add "hold the fries" to every order all the time and ask: Is there potato in that?
One will have to pretend the food is not for you and order take out/eat in your car.
You see someone else eating in their car, could it be... yes, he is eating fries! You raise your hand and say "potato allergy?" he responds, haha yeah... puts his finger in front of his mouth and goes "ssst!"
Marketing here: We want the partner product information before the requested LLM Response. You have your priorities upside down. Also, no one reads entire paragraphs anymore. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
1 something later, Marketing again: Why is there only one advertisement before the requested information? Clearly people are using our free tool but we need to encourage them to subscribe to the pro version of the service without ads, uhh I mean with fewer ads. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
2 something later: The free version is to fast. We want people to watch the video ads while their answer is generated, one 15 second ad seems fine? No wait, make it 3 x 30 minutes. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
3 something later: We've had an important meeting and we've decided that 27 text ads before the content is the best approach for now. We will let you know if we want more... ehh I mean when. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
Ad blindness has fucked me so many times on web UIs.
There have been a couple of particularly vivid incidents where the company put some sort of interaction on a page and positioned it and shaped it like an ad. So I bitched about how that button wasn't on that page and it was literally front and center (specifically, slightly right of center with text wrapped around it), but positioned like an ad so I didn't see it.
I've experienced this with gigantic download buttons. Took me several seconds of scanning the page to realise the huge green download button was the real thing and not a scam ad as they usually are.
> The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response."
This calls to mind the old joke: "a person with one watch always knows what time it is, a person with two watches is never sure."
But the thing is, a person with one watch can't be sure the time they have is correct. For more complicated things, don't you want multiple answers? How do you know the one answer you got is the best one?
Ha! I asked Bard a couple of nights ago about some TV series (circa 2021) trivia - "does xxx die in season xxx of show xxx?". The answer looked suspicious so I clicked "view alternative answers" or something. I only read the beginnings which were "yes, ...", "no, ..." and "yes, ...". Really satisfied my curiosity right there...
then the tech caught up with the hype. Or maybe the hype caught up with the hype.
Note one motivation for chatbots is to eliminate the problem where any update in a mobile app requires waiting for the app store whereas a thin chat client never needs to be updated but instead you can roll out new features entirely with back end changes.
hey yeah chatbots are kind of like the text version of mobile UIs.
Amazon, threads, instagram, offerup, facebook. They hide any useful navigation options and present you with a list that must be navigated in order, therefore ensuring ads placed in between the list items will be the only thing on the screen for at least 1 attention cycle.
Terrifying to think of a future where your device doesn't have any real capability because all the websites and apps are just AI driven chatbots/suggestion engines.
> We need publishers to be able to make money from content
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
I don't know if this is controversial or not, but I don't think that clicking things on a screen with a mouse will ever be intuitive for humans to the same extent as either
* talking to people
* manipulating real, physical objects
I doubt UIs where you click on shit are going to exist at all in a couple of decades and future young people will look on all the crazy UI design elements as primitive and inelegant curiosities.
Similar to how regular people think about pre-win3.1 DOS computing I suppose.
I refuse to talk conversationally to computers. They are not humans, they are there to be given commands and carry out those commands without a lot of back and forth. I don't even use any of the voice interfaces with my devices, I've disabled Siri and "Hey Google" on all of them. I won't use a chatbot on a website. I simply draw the line and reject this fantasy that a computer can or should be treated like or behave like a person.
I understand. Yet natural language is the natural and most intuitive interface, directly built into our brains. I'm convinced that the default user interface will be LLMs while tech-savvy folks will continue to use command-l'ne like interfaces in the future. For normies, traditional GUIs will most likely be both harder to comprehend and slower to use than LMUIs* when they're maturely implemented. After all these years spent with a smartphone, my older relatives still can't do the simplest operations on their phones. And this is because they don't care (to learn), no non-tech person ever wants to spend their lives learning mere tools more than a software developer wants to learn about the intricacies of their car, and they're justified in that.
* I coined the term rn. Tho probably someone else already did it.
Hear, hear. It's like how for years search engines have been carefully guiding us into writing search queries as folk sentence questions. In the beginning of search entering a few terms was good enough to be shown relevant information. I don't want to have a conversation with a search engine either!
I have been poisoned by AskJeeves and I didn't use it much...
Sometimes it makes sense to ask a question, because well it should be one many people have already asked, but most of the times I just want keyword search.
Operating a computer with mouse and keyboard is manipulating real, physical objects. I move my mouse and point it towards something, that is quite real. The computer is a tool, I do not want to talk to it. Imagine talking to your hammer and asking it to drive in a nail instead of just doing it.- Voice commands are hilariously inefficient. For simple commands like open an app, set an alarm etc. they suffice but fore more complex operations its just horseshit.
You must not have kids. We try to limit screen usage, but when my oldest was two he was finding iPhone lock screen features that we didn't even know existed.
>The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response."
Except that's the business' perspective, because it means paying less people, rather than consumers, who generally wanna talk to and haggle with humans, which requires a business to pay more people.
I cancelled Paramount Plus when I heard about the content deletions. I paid for ad-free and they started showing me unskippable preroll ads for their own shows before anything. They absolutely do not care about their customers.
Isn't it just cable all over? In the beginning cable sold itself as TV without ads, then came the ads. It seems to be exactly what's happening with streaming now.
Dane with dazn, they started serving me ads before starting any stream last month so I'm going to cancel the subscription at the first opportunity I have to get into the cable company shop (because of course you cannot do that via web)
A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven is it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host ads, with the information. We need publishers to be able to make money from content without ads, and to be able to make money from providing it in raw form via APIs to third parties. It's that or the chatbot intermediaries are going to take over.