There are some shockingly bad AI articles being published here and on Medium. Not just bad, dangerous and irresponsible. Here are a couple of pro tips for what NOT to use AI for:

1) Creating Personae

Anyone that suggests that you can generate persona content with AI is just straight up wrong. NEVER DO THIS - it's literally generating fairytales with zero validity. They might sound good but they have no factual basis, and therefore create assumptions that will lead you down the wrong Product path. DO NOT DO THIS. On my planet this would constitute grounds for immediate termination of employment because it is just so unprofessional and irresponsible for a researcher to do

This is exactly what that ridiculous proposition, Synthetic Users, was/is trying to achieve. It cannot succeed because it actively creates fiction, and fiction isn't what is going to move the needle. Fiction is the inverse of insight

Using AI to predict human behavior without a dataset is just dumb and relies on a wholly opaque black box. Are you, as a researcher, really putting your confidence in something you have no vision of? Literally blind faith? It's not a good look for a researcher

2) User Testing

You might be able to prompt some 'expert AI' UI evaluations from an AI service but this is only at a very superficial interaction design level. There are many levels to UX, and interaction design is just one of them. If you think you're user testing your design by getting an AI eval, you're only getting a small subset of the necessary insight from one level. There's also the likelihood that the suggestions may have questionable validity

Nothing can or will beat a human running a user testing session - even unmoderated remote imho. There are such nuances to the insight discovery that a bot will not be able to do these things for a very long time

User testing is not just about usability or interaction design testing. This is a big misconception across our industry. There are massive generative/discovery benefits from user testing that most overlook or unaware of. Outsourcing this to the AI is a massive loss of potential and value

AI will eat Market Research before User Research. It's easy to recruit, distribute and analyse surveys and interviews remotely by a bot. There are a myriad of services gearing up for this right now. AI will have a much harder time eating User Research because user research is about people and behaviour, and there's way too much human intelligence, empathy and contextual awareness needed that AI cannot provide

Those brands that are making their research teams redundant are going to learn a powerful lesson the hard way and will re-hire researchers once that penny has dropped and enough market share has been lost

AI is very much a two-edged sword, even in the hands of an experienced researcher, so in the hands of anyone less experienced has the potential to do great harm.

If you read AI articles, you must validate the author 👍