WELCOME
Being Designerly 129 has curated content at the intersection of Design, Tech and Human-AI to help you sharpen the human skills AI can’t fake. This issue contains the MATCH method to build custom AI agents by yours truly, a ChatGPT work prompt pack, jobs and tasks AI can do well, Apple's bottom bars, Resonate ebook, how designers use AI, Perplexity's background assistants, and DC comics says no to GenAI.
FEATURE
From Prompt To Partner: Designing Your Custom AI Assistant
My third article about design and AI for Smashing Magazine shows readers how to turn a well written prompt into a custom AI assistant. You'll learn when you should do that, how to do it (no tech expertise needed) and how you can get the most value from it. You also get the Insight Interpreter CustomGPT if you want to try it before building your own custom agent
smashingmagazine.com
PROMPT
ChatGPT Work Prompt Pack
Check out examples below of ChatGPT use cases and prompts for any work role. Use the Use Cases for Work GPT built by OpenAI to get more ideas for your role, and the other function-specific role guidance in the OpenAI Academy for Work.
openai.com
OBSERVATION
Measuring the performance of AI on real-world tasks
OpenAI presents GDPval, an evaluation of AI performance on 1,320 realistic, economically relevant tasks across 44 knowledge-work occupations in nine major U.S. industries.
Top 5 AI win rate on tasks vs. humans (easy to replace):
- Counter and rental clerks: 81%
- Sales managers: 79%
- Shipping, receiving, and inventory clerks: 76%
- Editors: 75%
- Software developers: 70%
Anything surprised you?
openai.com
The many incarnations of bottom bars in Apple's iOS apps.
LukeW's LinkedIn post shows how bottom bars manifest in Apple's own apps. Save this for when people tell you "Make it like Apple", and ask them "Are you sure?"
linkedin.com
VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Resonate® ebook
A free multimedia version of Nancy Duarte's award-winning book, Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences.
Digital is good, but I'm not getting rid of my papyrus copy!
duarte.com
COLLABORATE
Beyond Automation: How UI/UX Designers Perceive AI as a Creative Partner in the Divergent Thinking Stages
This paper sums up interviews with 19 designers about how they use AI during the messy, idea-heavy parts of design (research, ideation, prototyping). Designers lean on AI to speed up research and content, jumpstart ideas, spin up alternative designs, and make sharper-looking prototypes and copy. They treat AI as a helpful assistant but want to stay in the driver’s seat, with options for customization, more visual interactions, and smoother tool integrations. The study highlights four AI roles in divergent thinking and suggests directions for future tools.
arxiv.org
EXPERIMENT
28-year-old AI billionaire’s advice for teens: ‘Spend all of your time’ doing this and you’ll have a ‘huge advantage’
Teens dreaming of lucrative tech careers should seize on the opportunity to hone their artificial intelligence skills by immersing themselves in the growing number of AI-powered code generation tools, says billionaire Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang. “You just have to figure out how to use the tools maximally.”
cnbc.com
KEEP LEARNING
Why Perplexity's 'background assistants' reveal the future of agentic commerce
Perplexity’s new Background Assistants (launched to Perplexity Max subscribers and rolled out with the Comet browser) mark an important step from AI as a tool toward AI as autonomous agent in commerce. Geoff Gibbins' LinkedIn post outlines a four-level model of AI shopping (advisor → assistant → partner → delegate), explains trust and cultural adoption challenges, and argues businesses must adapt quickly.
How much control are you willing to delegate, and for what?
linkedin.com
CREATIVITY
DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’
DC Comics president and publisher Jim Lee said that the company “will not support AI-generated storytelling or artwork,” assuring fans that its future will remain rooted in human creativity. “Not now, not ever, as long as [SVP, general manager] Anne DePies and I are in charge,” Lee said during his panel at New York Comic Con on Wednesday, likening concerns around AI dominating future creative industries to the Millennium bug scare and NFT hype.
“People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic. We recoil from what feels fake. That’s why human creativity matters,” said Lee. “AI doesn’t dream. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t make art. It aggregates it.”
theverge.com
