Tools in the age of prompting
We’ve amassed the power of big data and crunched through the majority of written human history to gain the ability that lets us expand little sentences into fully fledged and almost functional things. These things may be simply a mix of software, audio, visual, and textual content, but it is still an amazing feat, harnessing the power of linguistic expression.
Linguistical expression is one of the, if not the most important, skills to master at the moment. As humans, we have tokenised and quantified our perceptions and thoughts through words, and fed said tokenisation into a computer, which has, in turn, gained the ability to tokenise the tokenisation and mimic human thought to such an extent that we can see tangible improvements and capabilities stemming from what is basically linguistic inference performed by LLMs. This is still such a groundbreaking event to me, seeing the tangible effect of language, being more than just something impactful upon the human brain.
I do believe that everything has a tangible effect, even though it may not be apparent at first. We as humans work through heavy abstraction for survival, so seeing the underlying workings of everything isn’t our top priority.
Regardless, the best tool that we can have right now is something that lets us think, lets us detail things linguistically, and orchestrate a great visualisation in the mind of a reader, or in this case, within the context of a given LLM.
This was lingering in the back of my head for a while, the power of the written word and the pipeline of thought to tokenised thought. And I believe it is a task that mainly bottlenecks modern technology that involves humans, and unlike what most people think, humans are essential for this technology to exist (well, currently… ). All said and done, tokenised data is useless without a human to acknowledge/understand and consume it, bringing value to it, which it had in the first place. However, as the main bottleneck is the articulation and the rate at which humans are able to start with their internal tokenisation, a tool can be of great help to start assist with the prompt/idea generation stage, not just the stage of prompt to execution.
Yes, it is possible to simply prompt an existing SOTA model about an idea and have it interactively ask questions to refine any given idea, but something more structured, visual and laid out will have a bigger impact on most individuals. Because when it comes to humans, there is more than just chunks of text that leave an impression. And that is the main thing that is yet to improve in the field of AI, the UI in which it can interact with the regular user that is captivating and indulging, and I believe this is why there isn’t as big of a widespread adoption of the technology by the layman.
So, to try to tackle this problem myself, I ventured into aistudio.google.com, where I found that google had somewhat done what I was looking for, something called the Proactive Co-Creator, but it’s mainly focusing on the image, story and video prompting assistance. It lacked the touch of thought generation and refinement that I was looking for.
So, as there is plenty of vibe coding present within the google ecosystem, I laid out my requirements after great introspection, and let google take the wheel to spin up a version of it that best suited my requirements. And with it, I gained a tool that is indispensable in almost all branches in which I have vested interests.
My version of the Proactive Co-Creator as an Idea section, where I can still use the amazing Mind Map and Clarify section as normal, but now can explore a given idea as different variations and expand it in ways that work as a very inquisitive friend who is dissecting your output.
The default versions of Clarify and mind map are still quite effective when used alone by themselves, it really makes you think about what you are thinking, in a very metacognitive way that breaks down abstractions and helps the discovery of fundamentals.
I use this tool alongside targeted reading that helps me textualise my ideas, such as The Art of Description: World into Word. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Description-Mark-Doty/dp/1555975631.
As a human in this worldwide chain of information consumption and creation economy, the best that can be done to improve efficiency using modern technology is to focus on the root which dictated all that we have right now, idea generation.
