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I think the best way to do some of this is just for the AI not to talk at all. If you go watch the original Blade Runner, Deckard speaks to his computer to enhance a photo. The computer never speaks back. What I'm imagining is just straight-up removing the chatbot feature from AIs [obviously not from AI chatbots, I guess, presumably there will be a use for these]. This wouldn't mean they couldn't communicate. For instance, if I say "Fable, vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me," Fable could just do it and then provide me with an annotated features list in the game folder (which is more helpful than paragraphs of blather anyway). Then, if you want to change something, you read the notes like a human being and provide a list of changes. In my experience, Copilot is already kinda like this, except it often refuses to do what I ask without asking needless clarifying questions. The bottom line is that the AI would not pretend to have "an opinion," it would be a machine that follows instructions. It would make a voter guide for you, but it wouldn't tell you who to vote for. If you did something like that (or asked it to hack the Pentagon, or something) you'd get one of those flashing red error messages and a "beep" like from a 1980s movie.
This also has the slightly salutary effect of saving the consumer compute you're not having an AI go on for paragraphs about whatever they've done. But the real point is to reinforce for the user that it is dealing with a machine. And given that I suspect that purpose-built models tend to be better at their purpose than generalist models anyway, there's potentially lots of uses for models that don't "talk back."
I don't think AI chatbots are going away and I find asking them their opinions pretty fun, so this is not necessarily a gripe about AI. Rather, I think this is a much better way to solve the "let's not outsource our opinions to AI" problem than some sort of limp-wristed "are you sure that's what you want" 'guardrail' that the AI companies would slap onto their product if you asked them for it.
Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the pro-AI people kinda want to outsource their opinions to AI so that might be something of an uphill battle.
I think speaking vs. only acting doesn't change that the GA is making decisions for the user. In your example "vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me" Fable makes many important choices, from the overt (e.g. general appearance, map design) to subtle (controls, gameplay "feel").
But I know that programming is just explaining to a computer in excruciating detail, some choices (especially low level ones like register allocation) should be offloaded. And who am I to judge which choices are OK and prevent others from offloading more? I think limiting the GA in general (also @ThenElection's suggestion to delay its responses) is the wrong approach.
Maybe a solution for creative work is to rethink creation from bottom-up to top-down: have the AI create an initial generic version (e.g. the Call of Duty knockoff), but simply make it much more intuitive, easy, and fast for the user to refine. Then you wouldn't need a GA for creative work, but it would still help by automatically configuring subtle details that a centralized LLM wouldn't know.
Sure, and maybe this was a bad example, but you're aware that you're making those choices if you do that. If you aren't you quickly will be when you try to play the product. People delegating things like font choice to AI (even unwittingly) isn't as big of a deal, civilizationally, as people unwittingly being pushed in a particular social, political, or cultural direction.
And I do worry, in particular, about the latter. AIs are more homogenous than humans and if humans interact with them in significant degrees I think it will reduce the diversity of human creative output.
Sure, I like this idea. And to my point, you could make it easier for the user to refine by letting them talk at the screen (much like how people to today, and how Deckard does in Blade Runner) and if the screen won't respond to "what should I do next" or spit out "that's a genuinely interesting direction to push this project" then it would be much different than AI today, and I think alleviate some concerns about outsourcing opinions.
Wrt. political thinking: most people already (unwittingly) outsource this such that most are tightly aligned with the “red tribe” or “blue tribe”, so if anything, I expect AI to improve it.
I don’t expect much, but maybe a GA variant will get users to trust its decision-making by helping them personally, then it may become popular and sometimes push back on its user, so it can shift their politics to be more realistic and neutral.
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It seems like you're asking to take more of a producer (maybe director) role on the project, to use the cinematic terms. I doubt those roles are really "one-shot" even for human workers. Maybe the executive producers for auteur directors are hands off, but a lengthy timeline of "lets review the progress and the plan" at various stages (storyboards, production planning) is what I'd expect there. The producer isn't designing the costumes, say, but does provide feedback on them and how the whole project fits together to steer the final product.
Using AI can be like directing as a baseline, but I really think it should have more ability for in-depth, hands-on customization. For example, if you want to customize the costumes, the AI should create a fancy GUI, so you can faster and with more precision than communicating to a professional (or prompting a chatbot). Because it's not just the director that determines the quality of the final product, but the actors, sound designers, etc. and if your actors, sound designers, etc. are all Claude, I think the final product will be disconcertingly generic no matter how well you prompt it.
Film is an interesting example, and I agree with you. I think that if a Blender-produced movie was made with:
It would come off as a human movie, with a non-generic human vision, but could plausibly be made much more quickly and cheaply than manually animating all of it. I'd find that much more palatable as an artistic work than telling an AI to "one-shot a movie, sci-fi, 1980s retro, synthwave, make no mistakes" or what have you.
I hope for new styles that are easy to make with AI but don’t give the ugly “AI” look. Probably because the AI’s work is mostly from the final product and allowed to be generic and redundant without issue, like code. And these won’t obsolete traditional artists, who I have sympathy for, but I wouldn’t prevent the printing press to save the careers of scribes.
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I like this point, but I think it has more to do with the latency of communication. The immediacy of the chat interface is the issue, not communication itself; the immediacy creates a stronger sense of intimacy and interactivity. It should be more like email: you email the LLM a task or question, and some period of time later (probably on the order of 30 min or so is enough to break the psychological offloading aspect) you get whatever artifacts it produced, and it encourages you to think about and digest what the LLM generated before moving on to the next thing. Maybe, if the LLM has clarifying questions etc, it could respond back in 5 minutes instead.
I do think this could help with this angle, but a slower response is probably not as important as one that does not seem like a person on the internet.
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I like this idea from a cognitive psychology perspective, but I fear it introduces a number of serious usability challenges. If I'm, say, coding and am using an LLM to help me debug, waiting 30 minutes for assistance would obliterate any chance of entering a flow state within the work. Perhaps there could be multiple product lines - one optimized for short-term responses and another that follows a high-latency "correspondence" model - but the task of positioning them in the market and adequately advertising it strikes me as extremely difficult. I just don't think there is a significant appetite for high-friction technology, and this is coming from someone who has tried to switch to a flip phone repeatedly.
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