I heard someone say this in a call with writers the other day. It's understandable to be resentful of large language models (LLMs) when you're a writer and see the market flood with AI generated content. It can feel discouraging. Especially when you take pride in your craft as a writer. I totally get it. However, the stance "anti-AI, pro-human" gives me pause. For one thing, are you sure you're anti-AI? Do you use Google to search information? Do you check the weather? Do you use Netflix or...
24 days ago • 1 min read
I've spent years watching people interact with technology they didn't fully understand. Not judging them. Studying them. I’m a user experience (UX) researcher and I make my living studying how our users interact with our products and translate that information to the team so they can make actionable decisions. I observe research participants navigate screens that my team created and talk through their confusion out loud. In the process, they reveal exactly what works and what doesn't. My job...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
I travel a lot. Sometimes for work. Mostly for pleasure. And I love it. It's what I dreamed of being able to do when I was younger. And it's also challenging to stick to your ideal way of eating. There's always a balance because you want to experience the local cuisine and you also don't want to throw yourself off too much. You'll hear me talking a lot about the Three Zone Framework. I first developed it to help us have a way to relate to technology. Then I realized we can use it for...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
AI slop. That's a term we're hearing more and more. I don't remember hearing the word "slop" all that often before. Now it's sneaking in everywhere as more and more AI generated content makes its way to the internet. Slop is what pigs eat. A nice connotation isn't it? I've been grappling with how much to use generative AI in my workflow for years now. And one of the most obvious and common uses is for writing. I've written before about how I entered a contest that forbade using AI in the...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
I am a high-achieving individual. A recovering perfectionist, who didn't know she was a perfectionist until recently. I’ve had a lot of starts and stops with my writing journey, so I decided to try what a goal-oriented person might find helpful: I decided to enter writing contest to give myself a deadline and produce a final work that I could be proud that I accomplished. I had a concept that I felt REALLY excited about, but it was something I had no experience with. It was in the modeling...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Have you ever noticed that when you talk to ChatGPT, Claude, or any other large language model, they're always cheerful by default and go out of their way to please you? This behavior is by design. The creators of the chat interfaces where they deploy the AI models WANT you to stay engaged and talking. What about when someone particularly lonely or vulnerable interacts with one of these chat interfaces? The startling truth is that these AI chatbots have no context or awareness for what is...
8 months ago • 1 min read