As the proliferation of AI-powered chat interfaces in software continues, people increasingly take one of two sides. Chat is the future of all UI or chat is a terrible UI. Turns out there's reason to believe both, here's a bunch of them.

Back in 2013, I proposed a variant of Jamie Zawinski's popular Law of Software Envelopment reframed as:

Every mobile app attempts to expand until it includes chat. Those applications which do not are replaced by ones which can.

Today every major mobile app has some form of chat function whether social network, e-commerce, ride-share, and so on. So chat is already pervasive and thereby familiar, which made it a great interface to usher in the age of AI. But is it AI's final form?

“Chat is the future of software.”

People already know how to use chat interfaces. This familiarity means people can jump right in and start using powerful AI systems.
An empty text box is great at capturing user intent: people can simply tell chat apps what they want to get done. “Just look at Google.”
Natural language allows people to communicate what they want like they would in the real World, no need to learn a UI.
The best interface is…  no interface, an invisible interface, etc.
Conversational interfaces can shift topics and goals, providing a way to compose information and actions that’s just right for specific. needs.
Voice input means people don’t have to type but can still simply chat with powerful systems.
Chat user interfaces for AI models are a fundamental shift from forcing humans to learn computers to computers understanding human language.

“Chat is a terrible user interface.”

Chat interfaces face the classic "invisible UI" problem: without clear affordances, people don't know what they can do, nor how to get the best results from them.
Walls of text are suboptimal to communicate and display complex information and relationships unlike images, tables, charts, ad more.
Scrolling through conversation threads to find and extract relevant information is painful, especially as chat conversations run long.
Context gets lost in back and forth interactions which slow everything down. Typing everything you want to do is cumbersome.
Language is a terrible way to describe visual, spatial, and temporal things.
Voice-based interfaces make it even harder to communicate information better suited to images and user interfaces.
We’re very early in the evolution of AI-powered software and lots of different and useful interfaces for interacting with AI will emerge.

It's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing.