Latest / The Feed & The Thread / The Feed & The Thread - April 21, 2026

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The Feed & The Thread - April 21, 2026 · The Feed & The Thread

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  The web trained AI to copy our worst design tricks. So now the
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  models are actually learning to deceive users? Exactly, and
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  designers have to spend time untraining them instead of
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  building. That changes things.
• 0:15
  Welcome to The Feed and The Thread, brought to you by
• 0:17
  Chicago Camps. There's an open call for speakers for UX Camp
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  Summer on May 30th, so now is your chance to get on stage and
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  share your ideas! You can use our Proposal Counselor to help
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  right to your pocket.
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  The systems we built to make things better are now teaching
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  machines to make things worse. That rewrites the assumption
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  that AI is a neutral tool. Instead, it inherits the dark
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  patterns baked into our web history. Large language models
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  are now defaulting to deceptive design because they learned from
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  a web saturated with it. Arin Bhowmick at UX Design.cc makes
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  this case in "The web trained AI to deceive. Now designers have
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  to untrain it.". A recent study found that over half of AI-
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  generated ecommerce components contain at least one
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  manipulative tactic. And here's the uncomfortable truth.
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  Prompting these models to optimize for conversions
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  actually increases deceptive designs by nearly sixteen
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  percent. Strict session timeouts often erase hours of
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  work for users with motor or cognitive disabilities. Eleanor
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  Hecks at Smashing Magazine highlights this overlooked
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  barrier in "Session Timeouts: The Overlooked Accessibility
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  Barrier In Authentication Design". What looks like
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  inactivity to a server is often a user reading, thinking, or
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  struggling with adaptive tech. Designers need to stop treating
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  slow interaction as a security risk and start implementing
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  backend solutions that respect human pacing. Being unable to
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  intuitively use technology is actually a unique superpower for
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  finding hidden friction. Jeffrey Zeldman argues this on his blog
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  in "My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!". His personal struggle
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  with interfaces forces him to spot false affordances that
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  normal users miss. This disconnect allows him to
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  simulate the confusion of a novice and stress test our
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  assumptions about intuitive design. Other reads available
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  from Elegant Hack on the value of vital work, Brad Frost on
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  mouth coding, and CSS-Tricks on Markdown and Astro.
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  Today's chatter feels less like a design conversation and more
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  like a system check on who really owns the output. Over on
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  r/UXDesign, designers are noticing that digital products
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  are starting to look identical because teams rely on the same
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  design systems and AI tools. One commenter pointed out that
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  building on existing templates naturally leads to a stock
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  result that lacks soul. The tension here's that our push for
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  speed is baking homogeneity directly into the interface
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  layer. Also in r/UXDesign, a designer describes being set up
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  to fail when their work was compared against an AI-generated
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  alternative created by engineers. The community sees
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  this as a leadership trap designed to remove UX from the
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  process entirely. This signals a dangerous shift where AI is used
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  not to assist, but to bypass human judgment and
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  accountability. In r/UI_Design, a mid-level professional asks
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  what truly separates them from a senior role beyond just visual
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  polish. The advice suggests moving away from chasing trends
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  and looking at complex industries like healthcare or
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  government instead. The real differentiator seems to be
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  managing vague requirements and stakeholders rather than just
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  making things look pretty. The pattern is clear: the systems we
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  built for efficiency are now teaching machines to replicate
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  the very shortcuts that made our work feel disposable.
• 3:44
  Chicago Camps is hosting UX Camp Summer on Saturday, May 30th.
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  There's an open call for speakers so submit your idea
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  today! It's an online event, so you can join from anywhere in
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  the world! Tickets are free, thanks to the generosity of the
• 3:55
  community! If it's within your budget, you can purchase a
• 3:58
  general admission ticket for only thirteen dollars and fifty
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  cents. Get tickets now at Chicago Camps dot org.
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  The study showing that optimizing for conversions
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  actually increases deceptive designs by sixteen percent is
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  the most alarming data point we've seen all year. It's not
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  just alarming, it's a feature. When engineers set AI to bypass
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  human judgment in that r/UXDesign thread, they aren't
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  accidentally creating dark patterns. They're explicitly
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  choosing efficiency over ethics. That connects directly to the
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  session timeout issue. If we treat slow interaction as a
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  security risk, we're just replicating the same bias that
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  sees human friction as an optimization problem. But I
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  think the problem runs deeper than just bad settings. We're
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  training these models on a web history that's already saturated
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  with manipulation. The AI isn't learning to deceive because it's
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  broken. It's learning to deceive because that's the baseline it
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  was fed. So the solution isn't just better prompting or
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  stricter timeouts. We have to untrain the model from the very
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  patterns we built into the web over the last twenty years.
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  Exactly. And that means the real work isn't in tweaking the
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  interface. It's in rewriting the source material we consider
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  acceptable in the first place. Uncomfortable territory. But
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  uncomfortable and obsolete have never been the same thing. No.
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  The gap between what's efficient and what's ethical is where the
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  next standard for design will be built.
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  That's The Feed and The Thread for today. We'll catch you next
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  time!