Milestones in Dysfunction, Part 1: The Misdefining and Misappropriation of UX

I want to start this one by talking about something that happened in a class that I was taking once about information architecture.

And in this class, the ask had to do with how people perceive the phrase artificial intelligence.

And the question was, do you think that if artificial intelligence could be called something else, and what would you prescribe to That would help it to be more widely accepted, better understood.

He basically reduced the understanding of artificial intelligence to its nomenclature, to its label.

Now, there's some truth to it, a little bit of truth to it.

But not a whole lot.

And this is the foundation of what we want to talk about today as we talk about the misdefining and misappropriation of UX.

Now, AI, first and foremost, it is a moniker.

What is a moniker? A moniker is a nickname.

It's a term that when you use it, people understand what you're referring to.

And it is so broad in many cases that the moniker is used so you can relate directly to what it is that's mentioned without having to take the time to mention all the complexities in all the different layers.

And think about it.

When someone says artificial intelligence to you, how do you perceive it? What do you think about? What comes to mind? And now I want to rattle off several categories and types of AI to help us to understand how broad this really is.

Ready? There is predictive AI.

There is generative AI.

There is agentic AI.

There is human in the loop AI.

There's machine learning.

There's deep learning.

There's generative AI.

There's natural language processing.

There's computer vision.

There's speech AI.

There's reinforcement learning.

Robotics and embodied AI.