because we shouldn’t be humanizing AI while depersonalizing the actual people who use stuff, according to MIT Technology Review.
As a consumer and a low skilled worker I think the solution to call the rich “dinner”.
There is a little difference between a user and an abuser.
could you explain how this is related? i’m not very good at communication, sorry.
Recently, I met with a founder who cringed when his colleague used the word “humans” instead of “users.” He wasn’t sure why.
Yeah because it sounds super weird. Who says “humans” instead of “people”.
- “my app has 2000 users” - yes
- “2000 people use my app” - yes
- “2000 humans use my app” - you’re definitely an alien
Either way what a stupid article. The AI angle pretty much makes me dismiss it outright because I refuse to let AI dictate anything I do except for adding AI crawlers to my website’s robots.txt. And then you’ve got the corporate focus which is also really strange since that’s not the only place where there’s “users”. Open-source software also has users (and developers, so if you want to replace “users” with “people”, does that mean developers are not people?) and I would be insulted if someone implied I “depersonalize” the people who use my software by calling them users. It’s just a descriptive word and this article and everyone quoted here seems like they’re trying to pull a bad connotation to the word out of thin air.
It posits that üser" makes designers think of users one-dimentionally and ignore the many things they could think of. Now, there hasn’t been any studies on this yet, so it’s unsubstantiated (especially since UX has worked for decades now), but I nonetheless found the angle iintriguing.
Skimming the article, the suggestion seems to be to use “people” or “humans” rather than “users” This is idiotic on the face of it: “user” refers specifically to a person who is interacting with a computer, not just any person. There are, y’know, still human beings in this world who have never encountered a computer. Some of them never will. There’s no wifi on North Sentinel Island, but the inhabitants are definitely humans and people.
Nah… The current terms are quite OK.
We should also keep “client” and “server”, “master” and “slave” etc. Their meanings are technical and therefore do not need any hypocritical arguments.
no captcha annoyance
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/19/1090872/ai-users-people-terms/
The authors only other article was two years ago about psychedelics…
And from as far as I could make it I to this one, it sounds like she’s been on them continuously.
It’s just such a stupid thing to get upset and write about.
Are you claiming that the many UXers cited within the article, including the one who invented the term, have been on psychedlics as well? Sure, it’s a small issue, but that doesn’t negate it.
UXers
…
why use more char when few char do trick
Exact same number of characters (5), and “UXers” requires pressing the shift key while “users” doesn’t. So it’s a fail from the typing efficiency point of view.
I think they mean UX, as in user experience. So, a UXer is someone who works in that field.
UXers aren’t users. I’m talking about the designers
Excuse me, “UXers” is not the preferred term any more. You should be using “HXers”, as per the article.
In my opinion, replacing “users” with “humans” feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace “women” with “females”.
They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.
Firstly the article doesn’t advocate for using “humans” instead; in fact, it devotes half of the two sentences for the term to guess why that term would be off-putting. The article includes suggestions of “people” and “interactors”. Secondly I posted this solely because I found its arguments interesting. I’m neutral on the term, same as “master”.
I’m pretty sure the article is paywalled, which is why I used an archive link. Also, archive.today is notorious for using an endless captcha against people who use a Cloudflare DNS because archive.today wants to redirect you to a server with capacity based on approximate IP location. I should’ve used web.archive but only archive.today is supported by this really convenient extension to get an archive link.
I saw no paywall, maybe thanks to some uBO config
I’d attribute it to the bypass paywalls extension, which was taken down from GitHub last week
i’m not using it
None of these companies would ever ever ever want to replace the ‘user’ metric with a ‘human’ metric.
Infinite growth requires infinite well, growth, and tossing out ANY portion of their MAU number would tank all of them immediately.
And, of course, they know this, and they know the MAU number is a giant pile of lies, so uh, good luck with changing terminology?
I like the human-centred language, strange as it feels on the tongue. I wonder if it might help frame development a bit better in place of ‘user’ or ‘customer’ — aside from the more real distinction between humans and AI we’re all going to have to get used to in design.
So no job titles, as we’re all humans. What do you do for a living? Human stuff.
