/ Professor Richard Harper: The Abstraction between User and LLMs: a discussion of the fundamental problem in interaction with State of the Art AI

Professor Richard Harper: The Abstraction between User and LLMs: a discussion of the fundamental problem in interaction with State of the Art AI

30th October 2024
12:30 pm - 3:00 pm
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102 (Robert Recorde), Computational Foundry

In this presentation, I will outline the importance of abstractions in the interfaces of systems, and sketch the history of their evolution and design. The role of abstractions in HCI is, needless to say, a somewhat abstract topic, and may seem distant from AI and in LLMs in particular. As most of the audience will know, interaction with LLMs typically entails ‘natural interaction’: in this mode, a user says something (or writes) and the LLM responds through a chatbot function.  So why worry about abstractions? I will show you do have to worry, and how ChatGPT (4) and other chatbot-based LLMs are designed around abstractions that have not been thought through. This poor HCI (which it is) leads to misunderstandings about what LLMs do, how their outputs can be used, and what role users have in constructing the processings of the LLMs through their prompts. I will show how the implications of the analysis apply for all AI tools that depend on interaction with users.      

The presentation derives from research reported in Richard’s latest book, The Shape of Thought: Reasoning in the Age of AI, (McGill-Queens Press, Montreal, Forthcoming).  

Biography

Richard Harper is Professor of Computer Science and formerly Director of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University. He is a Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the SIG-CHI Academy of the ACM, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Visiting Professor at the University of Swansea, Wales. His research is primarily in Human Computer Interaction, though it also includes social and philosophical perspectives on the role of computing in society. He has written 19 books, including the ‘Myth of the Paperless Office’ (MIT: 2003); ‘Choice: the sciences of reason in the Twenty First Century’ (Polity: 2016); ‘Trust, Computing and Society’ (Ed. CUP, 2015); and ‘Skyping the Family’ (Ed. Harper, et al,  John Benjamin).‘The Shape of Thought: reasoning in the age of AI’’ will be published in January 2025. Prior to joining Lancaster, he worked at Microsoft Research Cambridge, at Xerox EuroPARC, and at the Digital World Research Centre, at the University of Surrey. He has also worked in various start-ups and research consultancies. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and a ginger cat, his three children having long left home.