UX Roundup: AI Innovations and Career Opportunities
This week's UX news is packed with insights on AI advancements, job opportunities, and cutting-edge tools that are shaping the future of user experience design.
Latent Affordances: Finding the Middle Ground
A new explainer video explores latent affordances as the perfect balance between overly loud design that shows everything and overly quiet design that hides features. This approach helps users discover abundant features without overwhelming them.
AI Censorship Challenges
Creating content with AI isn't always smooth sailing. When trying to generate a Goldilocks clip for the latent affordances video, Google's AI flagged it as violating community standards - showing how AI censorship can sometimes go overboard with even the most innocent content.
Automating Competence: OpenAI's Internal AI Tools
At its recent DevDay, OpenAI showcased internal AI tools that are revolutionizing how companies operate:
- GTM Assistant for helping salespeople close deals
- OpenHouse to help employees locate staff with specific expertise
- Support Agent to resolve customer support tickets
These tools use best-of behavior distillation - capturing how top performers communicate and scaling that behavior across the organization. Instead of teaching generic rules, AI learns from the best human performers and makes their expertise available to everyone.
The Power of Instrumented Feedback Loops
All three OpenAI tools share a unifying architectural idea: instrumented feedback loops. Each system measures its own performance and feeds data back into improvement cycles, creating continuous improvement at machine speed.
This represents a shift from automating jobs to automating competence - turning intangible know-how into tangible systems that can scale expertise across organizations.
Rare Entry-Level Opportunity at LEGO
In a market where entry-level jobs are becoming increasingly rare, LEGO has announced an opening for an entry-level user researcher in Copenhagen, Denmark. The position requires some internship experience in user research and offers the unique benefit of LEGO product discounts.
Copenhagen offers high quality living, though be prepared for cold, wet winters. The LEGO office environment is described as fun and charming, making it an excellent place for junior researchers to learn from experienced colleagues.
Direct Manipulation: The Opera
Experience direct manipulation principles through an AI-generated opera aria. While AI music still has limitations with classical styles, the progress in just one month shows how rapidly these technologies are advancing.
Direct manipulation is a GUI interaction style where users engage with visual objects as if handling physical items, reducing cognitive load and making interfaces more intuitive.
One-Shot Video Creation with NotebookLM
Google's NotebookLM now offers one-shot video creation with its updated "video overviews" feature. Choose your visual style and length, and the AI generates a complete narrated slideshow from your source material with no editorial work needed.
The system effectively extracts key points from lengthy articles, creating 2-minute overviews that capture just 6% of the original word count while maintaining the core message.
Video Model Advancements: Veo 3.1
Google's Veo 3.1 video model offers improved image quality and new features like "ingredients" - visuals you upload to be included in video generation. While character consistency still has limitations, the technology continues to advance rapidly.
HeyGen's $100M Success Story
HeyGen, one of the leading avatar tools, has reached an annual run rate of $100 million, proving that AI avatars are a real business satisfying genuine customer needs. The company went from $1M to $100M in just 29 months, demonstrating the incredible speed of AI company growth.
While not perfect yet, the quality improvements in just 10 months show remarkable execution and progress in the avatar technology space.
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