Here are the adoption curves for a handful of major technologies in the United States. There are big differences in the speeds at which these technologies were absorbed. Landline telephones took about 86 years to hit 80% adoption.Flush toilets took 96 years to hit 80% adoption.Refrigerators took about 25 years.Microwaves took 17 years.Smartphones took just 12 years.Why these wide differences in adoption speed? Conformability with existing infrastructure. Flush toilets required the build-out of water and sewage utility systems. They also meant adding a new room to the house—the bathroom—and running new water and sewage lines underneath and throughout the house. That’s a lot of systems to line up. By contrast, refrigerators replaced iceboxes, and could fit into existing kitchens without much work. Microwaves could sit on a countertop. Smartphones could slip into your pocket.

In the first approach, the primary interface affordance is an input that directly (for the most part) instructs an AI model(s). In this paradigm, people are authoring prompts that result in text, image, video, etc. generation. These prompts can be sequential, iterative, or un-related. Marquee examples are OpenAI's ChatGPT interface or Midjourney's use of Discord as an input mechanism. Since there are few, if any, UI affordances to guide people these systems need to respond to a very wide range of instructions. Otherwise people get frustrated with their primarily hidden (to the user) limitations.

The second approach doesn't include any UI elements for directly controlling the output of AI models. In other words, there's no input fields for prompt construction. Instead instructions for AI models are created behind the scenes as people go about using application-specific UI elements. People using these systems could be completely unaware an AI model is responsible for the output they see.

The third approach is application specific UI with AI assistance. Here people can construct prompts through a combination of application-specific UI and direct model instructions. These could be additional controls that generate portions of those instructions in the background. Or the ability to directly guide prompt construction through the inclusion or exclusion of content within the application. Examples of this pattern are Microsoft's Copilot suite of products for GitHub, Office, and Windows.

they could be overlays, modals, inline menus and more. What they have in common, however, is that they supplement application specific UIs instead of completely replacing them.

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.