Original publication: Linkedin blog post

This is a fragment of a draft essay I wrote for a project proposal for the master’s degree in design and innovation at the Universidad Del Norte in the city of Barranquilla. I share with you the ideas written here about artificial intelligence, user experience design, interactivity, and productivity. And my point of view on the adoption of technology in the environment of institutions.

The irruption that we are living in the year 2023 with the emergence and popularization of artificial intelligence services and technologies has disrupted society in various areas, from the collective amazement and democratization of artificial intelligence tools to the media rejection as is the movement marked with the label in social networks as #noaiart. Beyond the ephemeral social movements, the popularization of Artificial Intelligence manages to position products in the collective imagination, and especially of all those who seek the creation of lucrative businesses based on software technology, of invisible and avant-garde machines. And this positioning is fundamental for the development of the industry.

Artificial intelligence services open to the public are nothing new. For years, companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have been offering services based on artificial intelligence that were only used and explored by experts in the field. This made products and innovations difficult to explain to those who were not familiar with this complex language. Especially where industries have low digitization or companies where there are academic, educational, or even gaps generated by the lack of updated knowledge. While other industries are much further ahead such as data processing and analysis, cybersecurity and especially digital marketing which is entirely based on decision trees that are abstract or invisible to their users and customers, but have been able to develop interfaces that, although complex are clear enough to be operated and exploited.

The emergence and popularization of new artificial intelligence services based on “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” class linguistic processing models, such as chatGPT or the new search engine Chat Bing; or the artificial intelligences that generate images through texts (called Promt) such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or Dalle2, have managed to explain to a public that was unaware of the implications and capabilities of artificial intelligence the immense power and a new transgression to trades that seemed to belong only to humans, such as the generation of graphics and natural language, both generated in a “creative” and highly complex way.

Is artificial intelligence a threat or an evolutionary tool? The answer is that it is both. And the real danger is not in the technology itself or the potential jobs that may be replaced or eliminated, but in the slowness of human organizations to adopt, exploit or teach it for use by a workforce to advance the country in terms of competitiveness and economic growth.

It is well known by the general culture that politics is always far behind science, as well as public opinion that only finds out when technology becomes of daily use or entertainment, even if this means its use without understanding the technology that is based on or drives it. Even users are often unwary and unaware of the effects these technologies can have on their lives.

This dynamic of supply, use and ignorance generates a swirling environment through the same mechanisms by which culture feeds back on itself and ends up generating those new occupations that seem not to be understood by the industry in general. Just think of the confusion that is generated when defining new positions and that even in their study and maturation begin to diversify into increasingly specialized roles. Two notable and easy to explain examples are the role of “Community Manager”, which began as the one who managed the networks and today is diversified into roles such as network strategist, crisis manager, social data analyst, social network monitor, content generator, etc. And the role of graphic designer has diversified even more when entering the digital world, where before it was only called “web designer” and now there are so many aspects that it is impossible to name them all in this essay, such as user experience designer, interface designer, post designer, user experience researcher, etc. Today the networks are full of the new positions that are being generated from the new language IAs such as “prompt engineer” or “IA artist”.

To return. Politics is slow, society is slow, therefore, it is not a clever idea to expect these mechanisms to be the ones that dictate the agitated and accelerated technological advancement. Instead, industry and the market are the places where man advances, since they are capable of disrupting culture and therefore society. And this is where design comes in as a mediating tool, democratizing and therefore facilitating the potential of technology for industry, even non-experts.

To tie the above ideas to a single statement: What is happening now, is not the revolution of Artificial Intelligences, but rather of user experience design. That is, it is not about the generative models, but about the interface that allows using these tools through text. I repeat my favorite word of the digital transformation, the democratization of technology through intuitive and usable interfaces.

Design, as the creator of the necessary interface between artifact and man, starts by facilitating to the point of making intuitive those concepts that might otherwise be too complex for a public. This being so, there is a gap between the fields of education and industry that needs to be filled, to achieve the rapid adoption of new concepts derived from the accelerated advancement that opens new paths to innovation. Is the design process capable of bringing companies and universities closer together to accelerate the adoption of recent technologies based on artificial intelligence of linguistic processing for industry development? What are the necessary interfaces that can increase the adoption of innovative technologies in the industry exponentially? Is the contemporary educational process capable of meeting this need? Is it possible to make education massive and at the same time economical for the budgets of the companies of the country and the northern coast of Colombia?