Ah yes, “synthetic users.” This is being pushed at my job as well. We’re supposed to use AI to design the next feature for our website, then ask AI “users” what they think of it.

That’s not our entire vetting process - it’s supposed to replace someone just writing down an idea and saying “I think this is good.” And I agree that just firing from the hip like that is dumb. We want our product managers to do more research into their ideas before they get greenlit to be built.

The question is whether AI “synthetic users” add anything of value. The team that put this tool into service noted it has a “positivity bias,” aka “you’re absolutely right!” So we feed it an idea we think is good, and it says oh yes it’s very good.

It’s read every customer email we’ve ever received and every user research report ever conducted by our human UX researchers. But it’s still just not that useful. I think AI is very useful for summarization, searching, and collation of information, but this goes beyond that, asking AI to imagine it is a person and then come up with things to say about an entirely novel concept. And AI is not good at that.