Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Bard, can be used to generate sentences based on statistical likeliness. While the results of these tools can look very impressive (they're designed to), I can't think of cases where the use of LLM-generated content actually improves an end user's experience. Even if not all of the time, LLM output is often nonsensical, false, unclear and boring. Hence, when organisations force LLM-output on users instead of paying people to create their content, they don't center users.
User centered design means we make the user our main concern when we design. When I recently told a friend about this concept, explaining my new job is at a government department focused on centering users, they laughed in surprise. “This is a thing?”, they asked. “What else would you make the main concern when you design?” It made little sense to them that users had to be specifically centered.
If you work in tech, you probably saw projects center other things than users. Business needs, the profit margin, search engines, that one designer's personal preference, the desire to look as cool as a tech brand you love… and so on. Sadly, projects center them instead of users all the time. Most arguments I heard for using LLMs in the content production process quoted at least one of these non-user-centric reasons.
Organisations are starting to use or at least experiment with LLMs to create content for web projects. The hype is real and I worry that, by increasing nonsense, falsehoods and boredom, LLM-generated content is going to worsen user experiences across the board. Why force this content on users? And what about the impact of LLM-generated content beyond individual websites and user experiences: it's also going to pollute the web as a whole and make search worse (as well as itself).
None of this is new, we've had robot-like interactions way before LLMs. When the tax office sends a letter that means you need to pay or receive money, that information is often buried in civil servant speak. When Silicon Valley startup founders announce they were bought, they will mention their “incredible journey”. When lawyers describe employment, customer service phone lines pronounce “your call is important to us” (a great read, BTW)… this is all to say that, even without LLMs, we're used to people that sound more robotic and less human. They speak a lingo.
Lingo gets in the way of clarity. Not just because it feels impersonal and boring, it is also made-up, however brilliantly our prompts will be ‘engineered’. Yes, even if it's sourced—or stolen, in many cases—from original content. That makes it like the lingo humans produce, but much worse. Sure, LLM-generated content could give users clarity, except in a way that's only helpful if the user already knows a lot about the thing that is clarified (so that they can spot falsehoods). This is the crux and why the practical applicability of LLMs isn't nearly as wide as their makers claim.
I can see how a doctor's practice / government department / bank / school could save money and time by putting a chatbot between themselves and the people. There are benefits to one-click-content-creation for organisations. But I don't see how end users could benefit, at all. Who would prefer reading convincing-but-potentially-false chatbot-advice to a conversation with their doctor (or force the bot on others). Zooming out from specific use cases to the wider ecosystem… aren't even those who shrug at ideals like centering humans worried that LLMs-generated content wipes out the very “value” capitalists wants to extract from the web (by enshittification)? I certainly hope so.
Addendum: I didn't know writing this post that OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman literally wrote he looked forward to “AI medical advisors for people who can't afford care”. From his thread on 19 February 2023:
the adaptation to a world deeply integrated with AI tools is probably going to happen pretty quickly; the benefits (and fun!) have too much upside.
these tools will help us be more productive (can't wait to spend less time doing email!), healthier (AI medical advisors for people who can’t afford care), smarter (students using ChatGPT to learn), and more entertained (AI memes lolol).
(…)
we think showing these tools to the world early, while still somewhat broken, is critical if we are going to have sufficient input and repeated efforts to get it right. the level of individual empowerment coming is wonderful, but not without serious challenges.
He talks about “individual empowerment [that] is wonderful”, I think it's incredibly dystopian.
List of updates
- 31 July 2023: Added addendum
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Tyler Sticka, Nicolas Chevobbe, Thomas Bassetto, Linux in a Bit 🐧, John Ulrik, Baldur Bjarnason, 小影, Dawn Ahukanna, Leonard/Janis aka lj·rk, Lewis Cowles, Jørn, Hugh, Elly Loel ✨🌱, Ryan the Design Lion and Ryan the Design Lion liked this
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@hdv Someone on the World of Warcraft Reddit made a posts saying how excited they were about new (nonexistent) content in the game. Bots picked this up and generated articles off this one Reddit post.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/
Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of WarcraftAdded a quick addendum to this post as I found out that Sam ChatGPT actually said the dystopian doctor scenario is a solution for those who can't afford care, calling the future of “individual empowerment” nothing less than “wonderful” https://hidde.blog/llms-user-centered/#addendum
“AI” content and user centered designMy main question here is: would Sam himself rely on ChatGPT instead of doctors? Or is he building an alternative for those who can't afford what he can? If so, it needs more Golden Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
Golden Rule - WikipediaThese two hyperlinks personal dropped at mind a local I’ve been pondering rather a lot about.
The most elementary, Amy Hoy’s post, points out that the tech bubble—the particular particular person that has been saved inflated over the last sixteen years with low curiosity rates, non-existent antitrust regulations, and a appropriate form surroundings for tech that, in the US no longer lower than, has effectively been a free-for-all—is now over. The incestuous startup ecosystem that largely consisted of over-funded bullshit companies procuring for products and companies from every replacement is executed. The enterprise’s capability to remark ogle-watering exits–IPOs and acquisitions—for money-shedding companies and not using a realistic direction to profitability, has been limited by increased scrutiny from authorities on either facet of the Atlantic and by increased scepticism in regards to the promise that tech will at last mumble magical income.
The tide goes out and other people are slowly realising that the becoming companies that take hold of honest money in tech are the monopolists or quasi-monopolists. A limited group of firm companies personal every locked down their user putrid—preserve watch over every facet of their segment of the market—and are essentially abusing that plight to extract income at the expense of varied companies in tech and the economy in customary.
Within the 2d link Zach Leatherman writes about one of the significant most adjustments which might perchance perchance be taking plight in Eleventy, the launch source project he runs. Pattern on the project outdated skool to be funded by Netlify, nonetheless they seem like dialling down their investment in launch source, so Zach used to be compelled to reassess the direction that the project used to be on and discover current techniques of maintaining it sustainable.
Eleventy is a well structured piece of design that I’ve outdated skool in a pair of initiatives myself, so I’m snug to leer the partnership between it and CloudCannon. The 2 initiatives leer very complementary.
They additionally notion to simplify the project and preserve it focused on what it does well, and this touches on something I’ve been focused on for a pair of weeks, ever since I read a dialog on Mastodon between Zach and Jim Nielsen on Jim’s weblog post “Language-Level Toll Roads”. And that weblog post makes a bunch of appropriate form points (emphasis customary):
I used to be making an strive to settle out techniques of articulating the tension the connection between free/libre/launch source design (FLOSS) and the economic surroundings it exists in after I realised that FLOSS created the surroundings. Trendy tech most appealing exists thanks to free and launch source design.
Reduction in the extraordinary days—in the sooner than times after I first made web sites—the tech world used to be predominantly closed source. The “dot” in dot-com had been closed source servers akin to these by Solar Microsystems (years sooner than they caught the launch source worm). Browsers had been closed. Working systems had been closed—for essentially the most segment. The instruments had been largely closed. Even heaps of the in style programming languages outdated skool, akin to ColdFusion or Java, had been closed. For heaps of customers, when they visited a web page online, the whole stack used to be cease-to-cease closed. Database, server, browser, and running design.
That took a truly very prolonged time to trade, nonetheless now the core computing journey—browsing the web—is predominantly in maintaining with launch source:
Even in the native app arena, so much of the frameworks other people employ to take hold of execrable-platform apps are launch source.
A majority of the payment created by original design in the atomize comes from free and launch source design.
From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about developing payment nonetheless about strip-mining FLOSS initiatives and communities. The dimensions is for extraction.
The tension is that these merchants don’t appropriate form prefer to take hold of this payment for themselves, they prefer to extract scheme more payment from the communities surrounding the initiatives.
That’s why in style frameworks continually open to spawn what Jim described as built-in proprietary points. One instance is the basic-payment provider that is being baked into the otherwise very perfect Deno project. One other, more refined instance, comes from Eleventy itself: Eleventy Edge.
There isn’t anything else inherently proprietary about Eleventy Edge. In belief, there are a pair of “edge computing” products and companies that should be ready to enhance it, nonetheless in note, the company that employed the project lead at the time and the becoming company actively funding the characteristic, goes to be the becoming one whose provider is reliably supported.
Right here is the motive why I’m fascinated by the partnership between Eleventy and CloudCannon and the project’s refocusing. It isn’t that the project will discover more straightforward to make employ of (though I’d be fully contented if it does) nonetheless the complementary nature of the collaboration creates a dynamic the attach every segment of the project benefits the neighborhood as a entire, in a non-extractive manner.
The extractive dynamic between a tech company and financially dependent launch source initiatives is amazingly licensed and few form out it moreover Zach appears to be like to personal, each and every at some stage in his time at Netlify, and with the resolution now to rejig things. Netlify’s dominance over the project might perchance perchance personal been lethal—making it incapable of surviving with out Netlify’s financial toughen.
The transition that’s taking plight is due to with much less money floating around, the tech enterprise is retrenching and in so much of circumstances that manner they’re either no longer funding FLOSS to any extent extra or that they’re ramping up their attempts to extract payment from the neighborhood. Companies invest much less in FLOSS and prefer to steal more of the payment created.
Concurrently, the increased recognition of language units in design pattern, themselves a blatant strip-mining of FLOSS code, likely has the atomize of deflating the size of the communities themselves. Why employ an launch source project should which that you just would be in a position to be ready to discover a language model that’s trained on that project to rehash it and inject it into your code? Why give somebody credit for the traces of code you’ve adapted to your possess project should which that you just would be in a position to be ready to discover a language model to whitewash it and allow you to advise it as your possess?
To me, it feels a bit love the connection between the enterprise and FLOSS communities has switched from being considerably productive and sometimes abusive to being outright looting.
Finding partnerships which might perchance perchance be essentially mutually priceless, which is something I’m hoping Eleventy has managed, is one direction out of this. One other is for these working in tech to continue to steal a leer at and discover techniques of making neighborhood-supported initiatives more sustainable.
But I’m terrorized that many free and launch source initiatives, limited and gargantuan, are about to personal a moderately exhausting time, and with them their communities.
I don’t essentially know the scheme most appealing to mitigate that, and I’m form of hoping that my sense of unease is appropriate form spurious.
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