Synthetic Users in an Organic World
Kwame Ferreira at UX Brighton 2024
About this talk
‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ said Walt Whitman. Multimodal models contain all of humanity’s digitised organic reality. From deep web forums to all social, YouTube, product reviews, websites, and scientific publications… all make up a primordial soup we use to recreate ourselves so we can best simulate and predict organic behaviour.
We are creating a digital reflection of humanity, capturing the nuances of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
We can delve into the complexities of human psychology, and understand motivations, biases, and preferences. We are not only using this knowledge to predict future behaviour, and personalise experiences, but also to develop new products and services.
In this talk, Kwame will take us on a three-part journey on how to think about Synthetic Users — where we are and what future is being desired and created. All through the lens of having built Synthetic Users and a few other companies.
About Kwame
Kwame Ferreira is a designer and serial entrepreneur based in Lisbon and San Francisco.
He is the founder of Syntheticusers.com, a global user and market research platform that accelerates and democratizes research within organizations by synthesizing human behavior using frontier models.
Kwame is also the founder of the award-winning Bond-touch.com, a pioneer in emotional wearables that use touch as a language. He created Planet Centric Design methodology at Impossible.com and helped kickstart ventures like Fairphone.com, TheVinylFactory.com (to take a break from digital), Enchufada.com, and many others.
Related reading
Books, research, ideas and people referenced in this talk.
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Projects and resources
- Synthetic Users04:56Synthetic Users is Kwame's company for simulating human behaviour to provide research insight without recruiting users for every study.
- Lookback15:39Lookback is used to record interviews with organic users so their results can be compared with synthetic users in parity tests.
- Waymo22:32Waymo is the autonomous driving service Kwame uses as an example of AI taking the wheel while people still choose how much control to give it.
Books
- Thinking, Fast and Slow10:27Daniel Kahneman's book is used to contrast fast, instinctive thinking with slower, more explanatory reasoning.
Papers and articles
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks12:17Retrieval-augmented generation is described as the way Synthetic Users anchors synthetic people in surveys, support tickets and other uploaded material.
Concepts
- Big Five personality traits12:35The five-factor personality model supplies the personality distribution that Kwame says each synthetic user receives.
