AI Will Happily Design the Wrong Thing for You

Anton Sten is author of a marvelous new book called Products People Actually Want. The point is not what we make, he argues, but what difference do we make? If you’re not solving a real problem, your solution won’t amount to much.

In an essay, Anton writes that AI hardly created the problem of ill-considered products, but it will certainly accelerate them:

AI is leverage. It amplifies whatever you bring to it.

If you understand your users deeply, AI helps you explore more solutions. If you have good taste, AI helps you iterate faster. If you can communicate clearly, AI helps you refine that communication.

But if you don’t understand the problem you’re solving, AI just helps you build the wrong thing more efficiently. If you have poor judgment, AI amplifies that too.

The future belongs to people who combine human insight with AI capability. Not people who think they can skip the human part.

My book isn’t the antidote to AI. It’s about developing the judgment to use any tool—AI included—in service of building things people actually want. The better you understand users and business fundamentals, the better your AI-assisted work becomes.

AI didn’t create the problem of people building useless products. It just made it easier to build more of them, faster.

(The same thing happened after the invention of the printing press btw. Europe was flooded with bad novels, propaganda misinformation, and the contemporary equivalent of information overload. Democratizing technologies have knock-on effects. The world gets noisier, but considered and thoughtful solutions grow more valuable.)