These 2 presentations take a deep look at users. The first considers how AI can build empathy for users, and the other critiques the extreme usability of the ChatGPT interface.
AI for Empathy? AI-Generated Personas and Teaching Design Thinking
Emma Kostopolus
I will discuss how I use AI-generated personas in my Technical Writing and Editing class, typically populated by students in Engineering Technologies and Interdisciplinary Studies, two very disparate contexts. I’ll work through the differences seen when students work with AI personas versus personas that they themselves generate, and report on how students appear to use the personas in crafting their midterm project, a recommendation report specifically intended for university stakeholders.
Artificial Interfaces, Artificial Ideologies: A Visual Rhetorical Analysis of ChatGPT
Eric York
This presentation reports on a visual rhetorical analysis of ChatGPT’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), including main interface elements and primary user flows, to reveal and trace the ideologies constructed and perpetuated in the product design. I explain how the UI and UX of ChatGPT relies on technical communication concepts of clarity and simplicity (Kostelnick and Roberts, 1998) to create and perpetuate a corrosive design philosophy, the most extreme example of extreme usability (Dilger, 2006) that undermines both literacy and design, and I discuss the pedagogical and programmatic implications of this finding, arguing for embodied rhetorics that can provide means of resistance and a both/and way to accommodate the rapid changes AI will usher in.