Better solution: Don't call AI a "user."
Keep it like Tron. Users are explicitly human.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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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/
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.