Every time one talks to AI, we talk to a sphere or a blob. Occasionally, we talk to an animated audio track.
But why?
Are we trying to affirm some blob quality in AI? What is inherent to the technology that is blob-like?
We’ve invented something that can speak, reason, write poetry, and impersonate a philosophy professor, but we represent it as a pulsating lump of digital pudding?
And why have so many designers independently arrived at approximately the same pudding?
Do we desire blobs?
Are blobs sexy? Trustworthy? Special?
Do blobs remind us of something?
Are we beholden to some blob god?
Have we watched (and internalized) Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Breathing Sphere too many times?
Childhoods shaped by Blob Skywalker?
Blobbusters? Blob Alone? Blob-man: Into the Blob-Verse?
For nonconformity’s sake, let’s move on! Let’s challenge the gelatinous tyranny of AI interface design!
IT’S TIME TO
GO BLOBLESS.
Because the wizard is here and his name is not Blob!
The avatar can be a dinosaur, a banana, a door, a mixtape, an ear, a knee, a poodle, a lollipop. Look below, here is what I’m thinking —
Every shape here is an emoji, traced in orphs*. Emoji is already a visual language we all read, so the listener doesn’t have to invent one. The AI only has to choose the right word, or in Absurd mode, the wrong one.
Simple.
Maybe I’m wrong. Fine, but let’s try something else!
For the love of all that is not a blob!
*Orphs are the small marks that drift while the AI listens and gather into a drawing of what it heard. I made up the word. It was that or ‘bloblets,’ and we’ve suffered enough.