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Micro UX - Week 3

Brief: Design a way for a person to pass as a ‘generative AI’ in an everyday setting.

Methods:

Team: Tanya Singh, Akriti Goel, Jakob Prufer, Ruoxi Song, Changlin Hou, myself

 

Week three began our research-intense phase, firstly conducting directed storytelling interviews with friends and family.


The intention of using directed storytelling was to gather an understanding of the general understanding and interactions with AI.


Clips from directed storytelling.. Recordings by author and Tanya Singh.


The key insights we gained were:

  • Artificial Intelligence is understood to mimic human intelligence

  • It is easy to be dependent on generative AI, which can influence decision making

  • Most people envision the positive advancement of AI but they feel it cannot have the human attributes.

  • Quick, repetitive, menial tasks are viewed as generative AI accomplishable tasks.

  • People do not want AI to make decisions for them or influence their way of thinking


With this in mind, we focussed our next piece of research more intensely on sound AI’s, designing a short set of questions for a 2-minute interaction with people at Granary Square. Our plan was to offer a cookie in exchange for a couple minutes of time answering questions.


In-person survey. Images by author and by Ruoxi Song.


The outcomes of this survey gave us an interesting set of responses, where most people used Siri or Alexa, but for task-based items, and couldn’t imagine a further use of this, particularly outside the home.

  • Respondents use a voice assistant in a home setting

  • They do not want to give human attributes to AI

  • Voice Assistants cannot replace the companionship that humans provide

  • Respondents only see voice assistant as a tool


We paired this with an online survey with the same questions, which granted us over 40no responses.


The key insights from the survey were:

  • It was a split opinion on whether AI should have social skills, and whether they treat it as a human.

  • Some people want AI to have social skills was so it will be respectful. This is a human attribute we are taught when speaking to others, especially strangers.

  • Some people don't want AI to have social skills to maintain a distinction between humans and AI.

  • The top reasons why people could or would use 'AI assistants' were not actually AI - just task based machine learning.

  • People found the likelihood of becoming dependent possible, because it is easy, accurate and convenient, so we would stop using our brains. However others would still use it and weren’t concerned about dependency at all.


This week we also had a call with R/GA, which was a great opportunity to show them our creativity in research and the insights we were gaining. Andre was encouraging and interested in our research methods.


Our presentation feedback included notes about where the line was between 'creepy' and 'normal' AI interactions, particularly in an intimate setting such as the home. Alastair, as always, was encouraging thought experiences into the darker side of things, and encouraging us to continue along the path we were going to fully complete our research, something we were already keen to do.



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