I’m at Figma’s annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Their annual event has really grown since the first one I attended almost a decade ago. Rough estimate is about 10,000 attendees, but I did not count them all.
The announcements they released were fine and expected, but not really what I was interested in. The obvious one was to compete with Webflow and Framer on designer portfolios and other website projects. They also had a few others, but few moved the needle for me. I had a chance to talk one of their PMs and made a passionate plea for more B2B enterprise application features.
One thing I was thinking was related to AI. They have a prompt in Figma to rewrite text or generate images and the AI would do the task. It made me realize how terrible that flow really is.
Why AI communication sucks
The whole idea of a prompt is to give the AI something to start with. When I (a human) am given a prompt, or when I prompt others, a very specific thing happens next. Unfortunately, It never happens with AI.
Example prompts I might get:
- From son, “What computer should I buy?”
- From mentee, “Help me with my case study presentation”
- From a PM, “We should put a button here!”
After each of these prompts, I (The non-artificial intelligence) starts asking questions.
- What do you want to do with it?
- What job are you applying to?
- What is the button for?
These are clarification questions. If I just make assumptions and fill in the gaps I will most likely be wrong.
When you assume you make an ass out of u and me. I have no idea when I first heard this, maybe when I was 12. The message though is clear. Assumptions lead to bad decisions.
What if AI, rather than immediately spitting out a tremendous amount of text for any prompt actually asked you some clarifying questions. It could even ask me how many questions it could ask before it got annoying. Sometimes, maybe zero is correct, but I imagine people would give it 2-3 questions before getting frustrated.
We want AI to be smart. We want it to give good answers. It should learn from humans that clarifying questions is a key part of communication. I wonder if/when this might happen.
Otherwise, I’m exhausted from being around so many people. #introvertProblems
Whatya think?