AI Simulations, The Internet, Preventing Bias, and Building Companies

Weekly Roundup of AI, Technology, and UX

If you haven’t followed us on Tiktok or Twitter, now is a great chance.

Here’s the best from this week in product, UX, AI and technology news. As well as some product applications. Let’s go:

• 🧌 BeFake

• 🌳 AI Simulation

• 🖥️ Internet is Early

• 🧠 Preventing Bias

• 🏗️ Building Companies

• 🗣️ Next, Next Job

News and Useful Reads

Ex-MZ CEO launches BeFake, an AI-based social media app

In direct opposition to “being real” on social media, this new app BeFake fully embraces the fakeness of social media through the use of AI. Regardless of whether this particular app is successful, I feel like it shows which way the wind is blowing for social media and online presence.

BeFake, powered by Alias Technologies’ AI tech, provides users with an engaging platform to amplify their presence on social media by unleashing their imagination. By inputting text prompts, users can transform themselves into captivating, augmented visuals, enabling them to vividly express their authenticity and explore the endless possibilities of their creativity beyond the limitations of the physical world.

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

The authors of this paper and repo used GPT 3.5 to generate a simulated environment complete with people (agents). This is a fascinating use case and assessment. How long before we can use AI to generate realistic simulations?

You can check out the repo here.

This repository accompanies our research paper titled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior." It contains our core simulation module for generative agents—computational agents that simulate believable human behaviors—and their game environment. Below, we document the steps for setting up the simulation environment on your local machine and for replaying the simulation as a demo animation.

The Internet is Still Early

As far as technology is concerned, the internet may not feel new. But in the context of human existence, it is incredibly new. And we’re even earlier in the evolution of AI. The amount of change we’ve experienced is incredible, but we’re probably just at the beginning of it.

The internet is a seething mass of humanity: all of our knowledge and stupidity and joy and hatred shoved into pixels. Our early oracles predicted that the internet would become a digital savior—it would spread democracy and science throughout the world. That, well, that was wrong. What it did instead was spread us, in our excess and folly, everywhere, instantly. 

Preventing product bias: lessons from leaders

Preventing bias in our software products and experiences is a favorite topic of mine. It is critical for product managers and designers to prevent as much bias as possible, but it is easy to have many blind spots.

It’s a product team’s job to make sure that their products are as free from bias as possible. From airbags and crash-test dummies designed by men for men, through to facial recognition systems failing to recognise darker skin tones, we’ve all read about the consequences when bias isn’t properly considered and eliminated.

Podcasts

Founding Companies, Understanding User Problems, and Leading Digital Transformations

After founding several businesses, Peter is now working on the Uber/Shopify for recurring service-based businesses. We discuss the importance of understanding user problems and the benefits of digital transformations in companies and industries. We also discuss the importance of communication in a relationship—from communication within an organization to communication with customers and users. 

Useful Tools and Resources

The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions

I enjoyed this article and framework because it helps us think several moves ahead and then work backwards. It is easy in our careers to only be thinking about our next career move. But what about the next, next move?

Here’s my favorite question to ask:

“What do you want to be your next next job? And why can’t you get it right now?”

And then, of course, you work backward from that. This is the “Next Next Job” framework for thinking about career moves, particularly in the highly chaotic situations that we find ourselves in today where there are many many opportunities across different industries and company stages.