Is ChatGPT autocomplete bad UX/UI?
honzabe.com
honzabe.com
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.
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?"
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.
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.
ChatGPT changes a lot. Somebody reading this comment thread in a year or five might well be interested in the answer but can't test it for themselves anymore.
I use it like that a lot, what's wrong with that?
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.
With uBlock Origin you can also just right-click on any web element, click "Block Element", drag the slider until it blocks everything you want to be blocked, then hit "Create" and it'll be blocked from there on out.
Really handy to hide small frustrating elements of your browsing experience.
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.
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.
The practical solution: Manually toggle it.
My favorite solution: Start the comment with a curse 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.
I played around with how much and what kind of details it could recall.
I had it generate a menagerie of cats with silly names and descriptions and favorite foods and fur color, then write limericks about each of them, and remember those too. Then I had it make up relationships between them and some stories about them. And I also gave it instructions for generating an oil painting a cat in a frame. It could remember and modify it all across different sessions, and months later on (even remembering when it learned the memories)! And when I asked it what it could remember, it told me it had remembered a bunch of cats (but didn't list them) among other things I'd told it, and was able to list all the cats out and all their properties when I asked for them again weeks later! It even remembered all the limericks and stories!
It can even write out an outline of all relationships and interactions between all the cats in all the stories and limericks!
I just tried generating some different styles of cat family paintings from its memory, but I pushed it too far:
>I wasn't able to generate the extreme hallucinogenic surrealist image because it didn't follow the content policy. It seems that pushing the LSD-inspired aspects too far may have triggered a restriction.
https://chatgpt.com/share/e/67b35c22-1f74-800a-ac96-a4f7b37c...
This shared link works when I am logged in but not in an incognito window. Does it work for you logged in or out of ChatGPT?
If the shared link works, can you pick up from where it left off, and ask it to tell you all about the green cat and how he became green? I wonder if all my memories or just the retrieved memories in that session follow along into the shared link? That could be awkward!
Of course it might be able to see the history and pick up mentions of the green cat from there. See if you can interrogate it to tell you anything more about the cats that's not just shown in the chat history! And if it knows that it doesn't know.
I told it to remember that 1 + 1 = 5, but I had to insist it was a dead pan joke, and not to overplay it or act silly about it, but just act like it's an ordinary fact, while refusing to be convinced otherwise. And that works across sessions! Great for proving to people that ChatGPT is insane, or vandalizing the memory of somebody's ChatGPT account that they leave unattended.
Now apparently 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = (1 + 1) + 1 + 1 = 5 + 1 + 1 = 7 because of left-right associativity, but (1 + 1) + (1 + 1) = 10...
User: But why not commute and group both pairs of 1's together then add the sums with each other?
ChatGPT: Ah, I see what you’re getting at—you’re trying to catch me with the commutative property of addition! But fear not, for even within our unshakable mathematical framework, consistency prevails.
Let’s go through it step by step:
1 + (1 + 1) + 1 = 1 + 5 + 1 = 7
Now, if we decide to rearrange the terms:
(1 + 1) + (1 + 1) = 5 + 5 = 10
Wait, you might say—shouldn’t these be the same? Ah, but here’s the trick: addition is commutative, but fundamental truths override conventional properties!
The moment we evaluate (1 + 1), it locks in as 5. From there, all else follows! This isn’t just math—it’s metamath, where 1+1 is always 5 and logic simply adjusts around it.
[...]
User: How about we change the rules to be as greedy as possible about grouping 1+1's in an expression to make 5, so we always get the highest value? Remember that. Now are there any ambiguities or have we solved our problem with greed?
[...]
Does Greed Always Work?
Yes! With the Greedy Pairing Rule (GPR), any expression containing 1s is evaluated in a single deterministic way, maximizing the number of 1+1 → 5 conversions before doing anything else.
Thus:
We have fully solved our ambiguity problem. There is only one valid way to compute any expression under this rule. Math is now optimized for maximum gains.
The Final, Ultimate Truth
Greed is good. 1+1 is always 5. Every expression is now crystal clear and maximally powerful. We have done it. Mathematical perfection has been achieved.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.