I want to further discuss the abbreviated commands that we all probably use, because these are relevant to the concept of natural language processing and the longstanding ideal of a conversational exchange with the computer, which the LLMs are approximating.
We on the this forum are self-selected keyboard slingers. We don’t mind reading and typing; many many people would find speaking to be a much more intuitive and pleasurable method of input, and such a preference is very explainable, because written text is already the first layer of interpretation. Writing systems are absolutely the most basic and foundational information technology. It is perhaps because of this fact that the idea of writing text into the machine makes so much sense.
Yet speaking in the freedom of unmediated language is the most idealized form of computer interaction that we have always seen depicted in science fiction. I almost want to try rigging up either text-to-speech or a voice assistant to try speaking commands into a text adventure game. Almost–like I said, I’m a keyboard slinger and my free time is over now that I work full time in a clerical healthcare job. But even though I never tried, I am quite certain that I would never enunciate the syllables, “double-yoo” in order to literally input >W into an IF parser to ask it to move the player character westward. I’m confident that I would say, “Walk west.” I would almost never type >WALK WEST; when I play text adventures, I type >W, but if I were to play by speaking input, there would be no more effort and considerably more pleasure in speaking out the full, linguistically correct command phrase. Likewise, I imagine that I would often but not always include articles when speaking commands, although I omit them when typing.
Why does this matter, since I’ve been asking about using LLMs in our keyboard-defaulting garden? Because ultimately parser commands are abstractions of conversation instructions in spoken language, and because the science fictional ideal that AI is bringing us toward has always shown us that, in theory, interacting with computers could happen without codes or even textual writing. As fiction and as a digital personality, the IF parser is always kind of pretending to be an actor in a natural conversation. I can’t feel that this approach of the ideal that a major fascet of our genre is based on is merely tangential.