Patrick Stafford: The Future of AI and Content Design – Episode 26

Patrick Stafford Like most tech professionals, content designers are extremely interested in how AI might affect their work and employment prospects in the future. Patrick Stafford and his colleagues at the UX Content Collective recently conducted research to explore the impact of AI on the future of the profession, as well as the attitudes and opinions of content designers about new AI tools and practices. We talked about: his work as the co-founder and CEO of the UX Content Collective the high-level findings of his recent research on the impacts of AI on content design the coincidental timing of the release of GPT-3 and the wave of layoffs in content design and other tech professions his take on the current content design job market, that it's now a more typical market comparisons of the job market in 2016-18, 2019-21, and and from 2022 through now the decline in corporate training budgets recently his take on working "with" AI as well as "for" AI products the emerging critical role of content designers in ensuring the ethical use of AI his observation that most of the new AI jobs being created are being staffed from within companies, not by hiring outside talent the growing importance stated in many job postings of being familiar with AI tools the main benefit of AI for content designers: the ability to scale the important role of content designers applying best practices and design sensibility to gen AI output how the UX Content Collective curriculum has evolved in response to the arrival of AI the surprising finding in their research that 80% of people either feel the same or more hopeful about the industry after the introduction of LLMs and AI the upcoming revival of his podcast Writers of Silicon Valley Patrick's bio Patrick Stafford is the CEO and cofounder of the UX Writers Collective. He is a former Lead Digital Copywriter for MYOB, the largest accounting software provider in Australia, and has consulted with several businesses on UX content strategy. Connect with Patrick online LinkedIn UX Content Collective The Future of AI and Content Design research report Writers of Silicon Valley podcast (reboot coming soon) Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/ijMMmsWQZKo Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 26. The arrival of GPT-3 and the explosion of interest in generative AI caught many in the content-design profession by surprise. Arriving as it did around the same time that mass layoffs hit the tech industry compounded the anxiety around this new tech. Patrick Stafford and his colleagues at the UX Content Collective recently conducted research to explore the true impact of AI on the profession, as well as the attitudes and opinions of content designers about new AI tools. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 26 of the Content and AI podcast. I'm really happy, today, to welcome to the show, Patrick Stafford. Patrick is the co-founder and CEO at the UX Content Collective, which you hope you've heard of. Anyhow, welcome Patrick. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Patrick: Thanks, Larry. I'm really glad to be talking to you today. It's always a pleasure to speak to you. So yes, as Larry said, I'm the co-founder and CEO of the UX Content Collective. We started in 2019, and we offer a range of courses and workshops related to UX content. So that could be from a broad beginning in UX writing fundamentals to more specialist skills like content ops or even things like systems thinking, which is a workshop we have coming up, and a range of different courses in writing skills and accessibility, localization, a variety of different skills that content designers or content adjacent professionals may get something out of. So that's what we're doing and of course we have a very big interest in AI at the minute, given everything that's going on, and we're starting to delve into that as well. So that's me. Larry: That was sort of the trigger. I always liked talking to you too, but the trigger for this specific conversation was you all just recently did a study on, I can't remember the exact title of it, it was about the impact of AI on our work. And I would love to hear ... I'd love to go through it. I know there's more to it, but you share, in the report, five insights and discoveries that you made. I don't know, maybe walk through the top-level findings of that survey. Patrick: Yeah, sure. And I have to say, Larry, a big round of applause has to go to you for championing this topic, I think, because for a lot of content designers or even just people in content, in general, when generative AI came along, people felt very lost, and they didn't really have an anchor to have to ground them in the future possibilities of what's going on. And so I think your podcast is a great foundation for people who are trying to understand what's happening. So kudos to you. I just want to start that off by saying that. Larry: Thanks. Patrick: So I'll back up a little bit to get the context for why we wanted to do this. So we have been watching generative AI for quite a while. We were publishing blog posts on this in 2019, 2020 before OpenAI made their model accessible to the public. And at that point, we were really sort of just keeping an eye on it saying, "What's going to happen when this releases? It's still a way off, but we need to start thinking about when AI can do some of the work for you, it really forces you to think what is the quote-unquote work that you are actually doing?" And we've encouraged people to a very strategic mindset about their work for a while. Patrick: And so when Open AI released GPT to the world, we were like, "Okay, well, this is something we've been talking about for a while. We kind of have the context for it. We're not taken by surprise here." But we are constantly asking our students, "What are your thoughts on everything that's happening in the industry?" And for a lot of people, they felt very uneasy about AI, and that is partly due to the fact that OpenAI announced the ChatGPT model, or excuse me, the GPT-3 model was the first one they announced to the public when all the layoffs were happening in content. And so you have this mix of things happening at the same time, and there's just a lot of unease. Patrick: But over time, I guess, maybe over the next year, we began speaking with people who are interested in generative AI within the content design community, and starting getting their perspectives, people who are actually working with it. And we just wanted to hear from a lot of people in our student community what they think about AI now that it's been out for a while, now that they've become familiar with it, now that they've probably messed around with it a little bit, now that we've seen a lot of headlines about it, we wanted to actually ... now that things have sort cooled down after the initial rush and burst of energy after everything happened, we wanted to ask people what do you actually see in this day to day? And we asked about 150 people, all content designers or content design adjacent. Patrick: So we do have some people in there who are in long form content writing, but the vast majority are content designers, a few technical writers. Some people focus purely on information architecture, which I know will make you very happy, Larry. But the vast majority describe themselves as UX writers and content designers. And we found that the vast majority, so nearly 100%, have tried language models, and they've tried working with them and playing with them and just experimenting with them. And what was more interesting, though, is that 4/5 of people now use them for work. So 4/5 of content designers now use language models in their work, day to day. Patrick: Now, that doesn't, necessarily, mean they all find them useful, so we drilled down into that and we asked them questions about how useful you find it. And that was one of the other major findings was that 21% find them very useful, and 40% find them somewhat useful. So, I guess, we can talk about some of the other findings, as well, and we will do that, but already, off the bat, right there, to me, that says a lot about where we are in the content design community. 82% of content designers are using them for work, and 60% either find them very useful or somewhat useful. So that actually struck me, because I thought that the number of people who would find them very useful would be lower than that. But I'm not sure what your reaction to that was, but that was certainly mine. I was quite surprised. Larry: Yeah, no. It's interesting to me, because I'm trying to remember what the rapid adoption and appreciation of a technology. I don't know if anything like when ... I'm old. I think of going from word ... from typewriters to word processors, and from word processors to the web, and all these things. Those were more than a year for them to get to those kinds of numbers you're talking about, where 80% are using it, and 60% of those find it really are somewhat useful. Patrick: So that's interesting to me that it's sort of ... and I don't know. Maybe that's just an ... everything is accelerating, and it's like we just happen to see this acceleration. But, hey, I wanted to go back to one thing you said in there, because I think there's ... I want to tease out something, and see if you developed any insight around this from your research. Is it just a coincidence there were already other dynamics going on that were resulting in some layoffs in the UX and the content design world, and the arrival of ChatGPT? I think, whether they're related or not, they're conflated in people's heads. Do you have any thoughts about that? Patrick: I do have thoughts about that, because we ...