That said, I still agree with the author that it's useless. The autocompletion suggestions are simplistic, banal, and offer no real variety, so their potential for exploration is rapidly exhausted.
This is a huge issue with people using novel interfaces -- the "blank page" problem -- users simply don't know what to do with the empty box. Which is why with AI tools, the most common inputs are generic search terms especially with first time users.
But if I start typing "Led Zepp" into the box, and I see an autocomplete for... "Led Zeppelin if it was techno" or "Led Zeppelin style music with djembe beats" now I have a clue as to what kinds of things I can put here, even if I don't care about those specific things.
I use it like that a lot, what's wrong with that?
Can ChatGPT generate music now? What happens if you actually execute those?
It won't generate music for you (yet). Depending on your phrasing and how outlandish the request is, it might give you suggestions of actual bands to go check out or it may just describe the characteristics of what that would sound like.
When I asked "Led Zeppelin style music with djembe beats", it gave me a high level description of the guitar/drums/vocal sound + some Led Zeppelin songs that may adapt well to the fusion.
I think I get what you mean and I agree, kind of. However, even my "playful" mode is a lot more specific - I used to use ChatGPT a lot just for fun, but I still wanted to ask a somewhat specific question. I will give you an example:
"Can you recommend a realistic movie that takes place in the Middle Ages? I don't mean movies where characters played by actors with whitened teeth act the way modern people act - I was hoping for something well-researched and realistically portrayed."
ChatGPT autocomplete suggestions could be useful if your playful mode is so open that you do not care whether you want to know "What is fascism" or "What is an interesting fact about space?"
Probably, at one point, they did some user testing or similar and figured out that most people don't even know what to ask these chatbots. So they add some "quickstarts" for people to "get inspired" by.
It's not meant for people who know what they want, but meant for people who don't know what they could do.
I used to use ChatGPT a lot. I stopped paying the subscription. Partly because I switched to paid Windsurf, but partly because the autocomplete feature makes me hate using ChatGPT. And it seems it would be easy to provide an option to turn that off.
Maybe it's my brain that's weird, but when I have a train of thought, and then read the auto-completion of my sentence, I forget what I was thinking and suddenly I can't think of anything other than the (usually incorrect) suggestion.
I feel the same from playing around with VSCode for a short while. All the extra "hints" everywhere, hovering stuff changes the look, the editor itself displaying fucking popups while I'm coding about updates or just "You could activate this extension now". No wonder people find it hard to focus when your code editor is literally trying to pull you out of focus at every turn.
The practical solution: Manually toggle it.
My favorite solution: Start the comment with a curse word.
Mostly I use comments for prompting code, so it's also not very useful for it to be auto-completing comments there.
The one time that it was incredible helpful was when I was writing JSDoc for a library. It was so fast at generating documentation and especially examples, it turned the task from something I would probably never have done due to tedium, to something I knocked over in 20 minutes.
Given that the completion of "What is the history of Fr" is "What is the history of Fringe theatre and its impact on the arts?" and for "What is the history of G" it suggests "What is the history of Glassmaking through the ages?" I'm pretty sure this is a discovery mechanism using a fixed list of safe, quirky topics, rather than a serious attempt at predicting the user's next word.
- unable to convert a conversation to PDF and e.g. print it
- it is not always clear how to stop the generation of text, especially when scrolling; the stop button is in the wrong place
- there is no way to delete the discussion below a certain point
- there is no way to store preferences (such as: don't put comments in code)
- there is no way to point at a word and tell ChatGPT that it made a mistake there
There is by using custom instructions in settings.
Using voice with Gemini on my phone I've found it to be nearly useless:
- it decides I've stopped speaking when there is a small pause whilst I think of the rest my sentence
- I use too many "ums" and "ers", or even "wait, no I meant..." and so it ends up a useless transcription
- because I know of these "problems" I end up making even more mistakes in a perverse anxiety feedback loop of trying to get it correct first time and failing miserably
It doesn’t appear to be trying to. This is the success criteria of a discovery feature.
I've been using ChatGPT for quite some time, maybe I wouldn't say it's bad, but I also wouldn't say it's exceptionally good or even good. It's a fairly standard chat UI with nothing special going on, and considering the features, even a bit bloated when you look at resource usage.
Just curious what makes you "love" the ChatGPT UI/UX, and what those parts are?
It got put there because we are in the middle of a hype cycle where everything must use an LLM, and the 'tech leads' pushing it have the ear of the decision makers. Any criticism is parried with a 'Oh, this is fixed in the next version of (whatever LLM). They are adding a step that allows them to reason about their own output!'.
It's not that everyone believes it will actually improve the product, but it is what the customer wants to see right now. They've read about this revolution, and if their supplier isn't doing something with LLMs right now, they will get left behind. Doing something with an LLM will allow them to hook it into the innovation budget too.
So the zealots have free rein for now.
Yes, the “chat” part of ChatGPT enables a kind of deep and long contextual exploration, but even at the very first response it is already better then what my experience with Google typically is, so I definitely keep creating new chats for whatever I was going to create a new tab to search Google for. I have even mostly stopped talking with the LLM in full sentences - just the keywords just like you would with a search engine.
Please help me understand why you think that is a bad thing.
Could be a good subtitle for the blog post?
I block it with a chrome extension that lets you apply custom styles to a page (also mv3 compatible).
