Big Questions and Small Minds: Conversational Interfaces, Evolution, and Language

Abstract

Evolutionary studies have shown the systematic appearance of cognitive resource-allocation strategies that ignore relatively probable outliers while presenting strong divestiture aversion. Combined with humanity’s lack of prior experience distinguishing intelligence from intelligent appearance, this helps explain both the persistent repetition of superficial questions about computational creativity and a decline in users’ ability to exploit image-generating systems. The paper argues that conversational interfaces encourage an implicit perception of intelligence that prevents users from drawing on computational visual production, explicit modelling, iterative development, and software engineering, and concludes with heuristics for developing distinctive visual languages.