ZDNet: “A principal scientist at Google DeepMind thinks prompting is the wrong user interface for generative AI, not to mention bad for AI researchers. Here’s why…Motivated by the belief that “a well-crafted prompt is essential for obtaining accurate and relevant outputs from LLMs,” aggressive AI users — such as ride-sharing service Uber — have created whole disciplines around the topic. And yet, there is a reasoned argument to be made that prompts are the wrong interface for most users of gen AI, including experts.  “It is my professional opinion that prompting is a poor user interface for generative AI systems, which should be phased out as quickly as possible,” writes Meredith Ringel Morris, principal scientist for Human-AI Interaction for Google’s DeepMind research unit, in the December issue of computer science journal Communications of the ACM. Prompts are not really “natural language interfaces,” Morris points out. They are “pseudo” natural language, in that much of what makes them work is unnatural. “The fact that variations in prompting that would be irrelevant to a human interlocutor (for example, swapping synonyms, minor rephrasings, changes in spacing, punctuation, or spelling) result in major changes in model behavior should give us all pause,” writes Morris, “and serve as a further reminder that prompts are still quite far from being a natural-language interface.” Those variations, she notes, are confusing to the average user, who can’t rely on what comes from a given phrase…”