{"id":21534,"date":"2024-02-04T16:40:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T00:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/?p=21534"},"modified":"2024-02-04T16:45:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-05T00:45:57","slug":"making-todays-ai-interfaces-look-completely-absurd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/04\/making-todays-ai-interfaces-look-completely-absurd\/","title":{"rendered":"Making today’s AI interfaces “look completely absurd”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Time is a flat circle…<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daring Fireball’s Mac 40th anniversary post<\/a> contained a couple of quotes that made me think about the current state of interaction with AI tools, particularly around imaging. First, there’s this line from Steven Levy’s review of the original Mac:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

[W]hat you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a \u201cprompt,\u201d consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Think about how revolutionarily different & better (DOS-head haters’ gripes notwithstanding) this was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background, little pictures called \u201cicons\u201d appear, representing choices available to you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And then there’s this kicker:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

\n\n

\u201cWhen you show Mac to an absolute novice,\u201d says Chris Espinosa, the twenty-two-year-old head of publications for the Mac team, \u201che assumes that\u2019s the way all computers work. That\u2019s our highest achievement. We\u2019ve made almost every computer that\u2019s ever been made look completely absurd.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

I don’t know quite what will make today’s prompt-heavy approach to generation feel equivalently quaint, but think how far we’ve come in less than two years since DALL\u2022E’s public debut\u2014from swapping long, arcane codes to having more conversational, iterative creation flows (esp. via ChatGPT) and creating through direct, realtime UIs like those offered via Krea & Leonardo. Throw in a dash of spatial computing, perhaps via “glasses that look like glasses,” and who knows where we’ll be!<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But it sure as heck won’t mainly be knowing “some sort of opaque code, called a ‘prompt.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time is a flat circle… Daring Fireball’s Mac 40th anniversary post contained a couple of quotes that made me think about the current state of interaction with AI tools, particularly around imaging. First, there’s this line from Steven Levy’s review of the original Mac: [W]hat you might expect to see is some sort of opaque […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[66,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21534"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21554,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions\/21554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}