AI and Design

Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields. All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

AI and Design is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 35 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts AI and Design, a arts show with 35 episodes published.

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  Episode #36

  AI Sychophancy with Steve Rathje

  Sep 30, 202658 minS1

  This week Dan and Nik sit down with Steve Rathje, a new HCII colleague who runs CMU's Psychology of Technology Lab, to talk about what sycophantic AI does to the people using it. Steve's team randomly assigned people to chat with bots that were flattering, disagreeable, or neutral. People liked the flatterers, shrugged at the neutral ones, and hated the bots that pushed back. For designers, the news is mixed. Validation drives enjoyment, but cherry-picked facts do the persuading, so pairing a little warmth with opposing evidence makes disagreement easier to take (at some cost to its persuasive punch). The bad news: across six studies from three research teams, teaching people about sycophancy through warnings, videos, or quizzes made the chatbot seem less trustworthy but no less persuasive. That puts the little "AI can make mistakes" disclaimer in an unflattering light. We also cover AI dark patterns, whether the right dose of sycophancy depends on the task, and Dan's random idea of a group chat of dueling AI personalities. Plus, Nik explains Jev and the new class of fast, cheap "System One" decision models, and we look at pieces from Microsoft and DoorDash design teams on why AI evals should measure what users experience as well as what models get right. LINKS Jev decision model touted as quicker, cheaper LLM alternative (TechTarget) https://www.techtarget.com/it-infrastructure/news/366650696/Jev-decision-model-touted-as-quicker-cheaper-LLM-alternative Putting the user back into AI Evaluation (Microsoft Design) https://microsoft.design/articles/putting-the-user-back-into-ai-evaluation/ Building AI Evals: Who Gets to Decide What’s Good? (Doordash Design) https://medium.com/design-doordash/building-ai-evals-who-gets-to-decide-whats-good-39671385f50d Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (Rathje et al.) https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vmyek_v1/ Observing sycophantic AI validate others reduces its appeal but not its persuasiveness (Ye, Kraut & Rathje) https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25166v1 Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we're doing about it (OpenAI) https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter (Fogg & Nass, 1997) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581996901044 Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective (Chan & Sengupta, 2010) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122 On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 (Salvi et al., Nature Human Behaviour) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02194-6 @Grok Is This True? LLM-Powered Fact-Checking on Social Media (Renault, Mosleh & Rand) https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/85quw_v1 Steve Rathje's website https://stevenrathje.com/ Steve Psychology on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@stevepsychology

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  Episode #35

  Google CC, Controlling Image Generators, and Planning with Agents

  Sep 22, 202631 minS1

  This week we talk about Google's new CC agent for managing family tasks, some techniques to control image generators when you want to constrain certain elements, and a deep article on planning with AI agents. Show Notes https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/googles-new-cc-is-an-ai-agent-that-helps-families-run-their-households/ https://trpevski.com/blog/image-model-decide-everything https://maggieappleton.com/planning-agents Mai Lee Chang, Alicia (Hyun Jin) Lee, Nara Han, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Samantha Reig, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, Neeta M Khanuja, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Aaron Steinfeld. 2024. Dynamic Agent Affiliation: Who Should the AI Agent Work for in the Older Adult's Care Network? In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1774–1788. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661500 ShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humans ShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/ Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26

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  Episode #34

  Apple's Siri AI and Audio Intelligence, Project Solaris, Miro Sale, AI Tool Building

  Sep 16, 202650 minS1

  In this episode, Dan and Nik unpack Apple's big announcements from its latest event, starting with Siri AI: now a dedicated app with personal context indexing, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, launching in beta with iOS 27 . They dig into the promise and limitations of Apple-only app integration, the EU regulatory lockout, and what daily usage caps signal about Apple's services ambitions. The conversation gets more charged around Audio Intelligence, Apple's new always-on listening features for the Apple Watch, including live audio rewind and Siri Recap summaries of real-world conversations. Dan and Nik wrestle with the surveillance implications, the absence of any on-device indicator, and whether this crosses a line — particularly in two-party consent states like Pennsylvania and California. The back half covers Runway's Project Solaris, a generative UI concept that uses its video model to render fully interactive, pixel-based interfaces with no underlying code. Dan sees echoes of Microsoft's Bob-era skeuomorphism and questions whether it misunderstands fifty years of HCI; Nik finds more to like in its challenge to the sameness of modern app design. They then turn to the surprise sale of Miro to Bending Spoons for $1.36 billion — a 90% haircut from its 2021 peak valuation — and what it means when a profitable, hundred-million-user company gets absorbed into a portfolio known for maintaining but not advancing its acquisitions. The episode closes with a discussion of Benedict Evans' essay "AI, Tools and Transformation," which argues that the Silicon Valley vision of everyone rolling their own SaaS tools misunderstands how most people think about their work. LINKS Introducing Solaris https://runway.com/news/research/introducing-solaris Bending Spoons to buy collaboration tools maker Miro for $1.36B, 90% less than its 2022 valuation https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/bending-spoons-to-buy-collaboration-tools-maker-miro-for-1-36b-90-less-than-its-2022-valuation/ AI, Tools and Transformation (Benedict Evans) https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/9/3/ai-tools-and-transformation

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  Episode #33

  Episode 33: Mobbin MCP, Perplexity Computer, Design Ledgers

  Sep 2, 202635 minS1

  This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new speaking engagements you can join coming up. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to AI and Design 01:11 Upcoming Speaking Engagements 04:44 Mobbin's MCP Release 11:34 Perplexity and NVIDIA's Local AI Agent 23:54 The Concept of Design Ledgers Show Notes https://mobbin.com/mcp https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/perplexity-partners-with-nvidia-to-launch-portable-computer-a-fully-local-ai-agent-with-zero-token-costs https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/the-ledger-of-design Dan's Speaking Engagements ShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humans ShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/ Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26 Chicago Camps' Leadership by Design: https://chicagocamps.org/event/leadership-by-design-2026/

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  Episode #33

  Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit

  Aug 25, 202639 minS1

  Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter. This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters. LINKS Measuring Time Savings From Figma Make https://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/ Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddi https://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17b Target Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growth https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shah EasyCircuit https://easycircuit.app/ Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/

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