How I learned to stop sweating every UI detail and ship fasterMade by the author with Midjourney.I wasted too much time early in my design career sweating the wrong details. Now I ask one question before every UI decision:“Default it, or design it?”This simple heuristic has saved me countless hours and arguments, especially in startup environments where resources are limited and speed matters.Every design project requires you to make hundreds of decisions. Some are big like the overall layout. Others are small like the hover state of a button. Facing too many choices can lead to analysis paralysis, making it hard to move forward.Why this mattersProblems arise when designers spend too much time on lower-value minutia at the expense of big, strategic decisions: projects stall, deadlines slip, and teams get frustrated.I’ve been guilty of this more times than I’d like to admit.Looking back, I used to get lost trying to solve details that weren’t immediately relevant. Like, I’d polish edge cases before the core flow was even solid. I thought I was being thorough but really, I was just misallocating energy.Now I try to spot where the real leverage is. Not every moment in the product deserves the same attention. Some things just need to work. Others need to shine.The two pathsWhen you default it, you’re leaning on existing solutions: design systems, platform conventions, or vendor tools. You’re not ignoring the problem, you’re delegating the decision to something (or someone) that’s already solved it well enough.When you design it, you’re choosing to spend the time because you believe that decision has the potential to differentiate. You’re investing creative energy where it can make a meaningful impact.Both paths are valid. The power comes from choosing intentionally.The “Default It” approachThe “Default It” approach is most valuable when you’re getting hung up on a micro-level detail while working on a macro-level project.It’s not that the detail is unimportant, but it’s not the intent of that work. By defaulting micro-level decisions to existing resources, you can expedite macro-level projects.In my experience, many product managers lean toward this approach. “Defaulting it” helps move projects along faster by reducing scope. But if we default every decision, we’re likely to miss opportunities to innovate.The “Design It” approachThe “Design It” approach is most valuable when you need headspace to work in-depth on critical choices that shape outcomes in significant ways.You can make time to “design it” with micro or macro-level work, but each requires your full attention. It can be difficult to toggle between these different points of view, so I find it helpful to scope projects intentionally to focus on one at a time.Designers naturally gravitate toward this approach. It’s where creativity and innovation shine. However, trying to design every small detail can slow projects to a crawl and lead to blown budgets.Finding the right balanceFinding the right balance means negotiating which decisions to default and which to design so your team can focus attention in the right places at the right times.Product managers might push for “defaulting it” to save time and stay on schedule, while designers might advocate for “designing it” to explore creative solutions. This healthy tension can lead to finding the sweet spot for product development.For example, on one product I worked on, we needed to visualize large graph databases. Building a vector-based visualization library from scratch would have given us flexibility, but it wasn’t going to move the needle for our customer experience. We decided to “default” that data viz solution to a third-party vendor whose entire focus was on building that technology. This freed our team to focus on applying those tools to solve our customers’ problems more quickly and effectively.How design systems fit InAs projects grow, certain decisions come up repeatedly. This is where design systems become valuable.A design system is essentially your collection of team approved defaults.While in the early days of a product you might default mostly to external industry standards, over time you’ll encapsulate more of your own decision-making into custom defaults specific to your service.By storing your “defaulted” decisions in a central repository, you reduce the overhead for making solid baseline design choices. This list evolves to reflect updated defaults as new projects demand new solutions, freeing up time to focus on unique challenges.Final thoughts“Default it or design it” helps me triage.It helps my team align. And it helps us ship.By intentionally choosing when to default and when to design, I save time, focus on what’s critical, and direct my creative energy to the most pressing problems.Some moments in a product just need to work. Others need to shine.“Default it or design it” helps me know the difference.Patrick Morgan is the creator of Unknown Arts and lead product designer at Sublime Security. If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to his newsletter and follow him on LinkedIn for weekly insights.Default it or design it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What worked in The Witcher 3 and what didn't: looking back on a landmark RPG with CD Projekt Red "We learned a lot of lessons down the road." Image credit: CD Projekt Red Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on May 31, 2025 Do you remember what you were doing when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released? It came out on 19th May 2015. I remember because I was inside CD Projekt Red at the time, trying to capture the moment for you - a moment I'm unlikely to replicate there or anywhere else. I recall sitting in the studio's canteen in the small hours of the morning, after a midnight launch event in a mall in Warsaw, chewing on a piece of cold pizza and wondering out loud what would come next for the studio, because at the time, who could know? One era was ending and another was about to begin. Would it bring the fame and fortune CD Projekt Red desired? Today, more than 60 million sales of The Witcher 3 later, we know the answer is yes. The Witcher 3 became a role-playing classic. It delivered one of the most touchable medieval worlds we've explored, a rough place of craggy rocks and craggier faces, of wonky morales and grim realities, of mud and dirtiness. And monsters, though not all were monstrous to look at. It was a world of grey, of superstition and folklore, and in it stood we, a legendary monster hunter, facing seemingly impossible odds. The Witcher 3 took fantasy seriously. But the decade since the game's release has been turbulent for CD Projekt Red. The studio launched its big new sci-fi series in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077, and though the game has now sold more than 30 million copies, making it monetarily a success, it had a nightmarish launch. The PS4 version had to be removed from sale. It brought enormous pressure, growing pains and intense scrutiny to the studio, and CD Projekt Red would spend a further three years patching and updating - and eventually releasing an expansion - before public opinion would mostly turn around. Today the studio returns to safer ground, back to The Witcher world with the new game The Witcher 4, and as we look forward to it we should also look back, to the game that catapulted the studio to fame, and see what has been learnt. The Witcher 3 is at version 4.04 today, a number that represents an enormously long period of post-release support.Watch on YouTube It all began with naivety, as perhaps any ambitious project should. It's easy to forget that 14 years ago, when The Witcher 3 was being conceived, CD Projekt Red had never made an open-world game before. The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 were linear in their approaches. It's also easy to forget that the people making the game were 14 years younger and less experienced. Back then, this was the studio's chance at recognition, so it aimed high in order to be seen. "The Witcher 3 was supposed to be this game that will end all other games," Marcin Blacha, the lead writer of the game, tells me. Simply make an open-world game that's also a story-driven game and release it on all platforms at the same time. How hard could it be? "When I'm thinking about our state of mind back in those days, the only word that comes to my mind is enthusiastic," Blacha says. "It was fantastic because we were so enthusiastic that we were full of courage. We were trying to experiment with stuff and we were not afraid. We were convinced that when we work with passion and love, it will pay off eventually." Every project has to begin somewhere and for Blacha, the person tasked with imagining the story, The Witcher 3 could only begin with Ciri, the daughter-of-sorts to The Witcher's central monster hunter character Geralt. As Blacha says, "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters." It's a decision that would have major repercussions for the rest of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red. Blacha didn't know it then, but Ciri would go on to become the protagonist of The Witcher 4. Had she not been the co-protagonist of The Witcher 3 - for you play as her in several sections during the game - who knows if things would have worked out the same way. It's an understandable progression as it is, though there is still some uncertainty among the audience about Ciri's starring role. But Ciri's inclusion came with complications, because the Ciri we see in the game is not the Ciri described in the books. That Ciri is much closer to the Ciri in the Netflix Witcher TV show, younger and more rebellious in a typical teenager way. She might be an important part of the fiction, then, but that doesn't mean she was especially well liked. "People were thinking that she's annoying," says Blacha, who grew up reading The Witcher books. CD Projekt Red, then, decided to make a Ciri of its own, aging her and making her more "flesh and bone", as Blacha puts it. He fondly recalls a moment in the game's development when reviewing the Ciri sections of the game, and saying aloud to studio director Adam Badowski how much he liked her. "I didn't know that she's going to be the protagonist of the next game," he says, "but I said to Adam Badowski, she's going to be very popular." Once Ciri had been earmarked for inclusion in The Witcher 3, the idea to have her pursued by the phantom-like force of the Wild Hunt - the members of which literally ride horses in the night sky, like Santa Claus' cursed reindeer - came shortly after. CD Projekt Red had introduced the Wild Hunt in The Witcher 2 so it made sense. The outline of the main story was then laid down as a one-page narrative treatment. Then it was expanded to a two-page treatment, a four page treatment, an eight page treatment and so on. At around 10 pages, it already had the White Orchard prologue, almost the entirety of the No Man's Land zone, and a hint of what would happen on Skellige and in Novigrad. When it was around 40 pages long, the quest design team was invited in. CD Projekt Red made their Ciri older than she is in the books. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The quest design team's job is to turn a story into a game, and this was a newly created department for The Witcher 3, created because the old way of writers designing the quests wasn't working any more. "We were struggling a bit with making sure that every written story that we have prepared is also a story that we can play well," Paweł Sasko says. He joined CD Projekt Red to be a part of that quest design team. The quest design team carves up a narrative treatment, paragraph by paragraph, and expands those into playable questlines for the game. "It's basically something between game design and a movie scenario," Sasko says. There's no dialogue, just a description of what will happen, and even a one-paragraph prompt can balloon into a 20-30 page design. Among the paragraphs Sasko was given to adapt was a storyline in No Man's Land concerning a character known as the Bloody Baron. The Bloody Baron storyline is widely acclaimed and has become synonymous with everything Sasko and CD Projekt Red were trying to do with the game. It's a storyline that probes into mature themes like domestic abuse, fatherhood, and love and loss and grief. More importantly, it presents us with a flawed character and allows us time and space to perhaps change our opinion of them. It gives us layers many other games don't go anywhere near. When Sasko first encountered the storyline, there was only an outline. "It said that Geralt meets the Bloody Baron who asks Geralt to hunt a monster and look for his wife and daughter, and for that, he is going to share information about Ciri and tell Geralt where she went. That was pretty much it." And Sasko already knew a few things about what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to show No Man's Land as a Slavic region bathed in superstitions and complex religious beliefs, one that had been ravaged by famine and war. He also knew the tone of the area was horror because this had been outlined by Blacha and the leaders of The Witcher 3 team. Says Blacha: "My opinion is that a successful Witcher game is a mix of everything, so you have a horror line, you have a romance, you have adventure, you have exploration. When we started to think about our hubs, we thought about them in terms of a show, so No Man's Land, the hub with the Bloody Baron, was horror; Skellige was supposed to be an adventure; and Novigrad was supposed to be a big city investigation." But there were key missing pieces then from the Bloody Baron sequence we know today. The botchling, for instance - the monstrous baby the quest revolves around. It didn't exist. It was an idea that came from Sasko after he read a Slavic bestiary. "Yes," he says, "the botchling idea came from me." The Bloody Baron. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red He wanted the botchling to be the conduit through which more mature themes of the story could be approached - something overt to keep you busy while deeper themes sunk in. It's an approach Sasko says he pinched from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, after deconstructing his work. "What he's doing is he's trying to find universal truths about human beings and struggles, but he doesn't tell those stories directly," Sasko says. "So for instance racism: he doesn't talk about that directly but he finds an interesting way how, in his world, he can package that and talk about it. I followed his method and mimicked it." This way the botchling becomes your focus in the quest, as the Baron carries it back to the manor house and you defend him from wraiths, but while you're doing that, you're also talking and learning more about who the Bloody Baron - who Phillip Strenger - is. "I wanted you to feel almost like you're in the shoes of that Bloody Baron," Sasko says. "Peregrination is this path in Christianity you go through when you want to remove your sins, and that's what this is meant to be. He's just trying to do it, and he's going through all of those things to do something good. And I wanted the player to start feeling like, 'Wow, maybe this dude is not so bad.'" It's a quest that leaves a big impression. An email was forwarded to Sasko after the game's release, written by a player who had lost their wife and child as the Baron once had. "And for him," he says, "that moment when Baron was carrying the child was almost like a catharsis, when he was trying so badly to walk that path. And the moment he managed to: he wrote in his letter that he broke down in tears." There's one other very significant moment in The Witcher 3 that Sasko had a large hand in, and it's the Battle of Kaer Morhern, where the 'goodies' - the witchers and the sorceresses, and Ciri - make a stand against the titular menace of the Wild Hunt. Sasko designed this section specifically to emotionally tenderise you, through a series of fast-paced and fraught battles, so that by the time the climactic moment came, you were aptly primed to receive it. The moment being Vesemir's death - the leader of the wolf school of witchers and father figure to Geralt. This, too, was Sasko's idea. "We needed to transition Ciri from being a hunted animal to becoming a hunter," he tells me, and the only event big enough and with enough inherent propulsion was Vesemir's death. Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt, breaks Vesemir's neck. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red But for all of the successful moments in the game there are those that didn't work. To the team that made the game, and to the players, there are things that clearly stand out. Such as Geralt's witcher senses, which allow him to see scent trails and footsteps and clues in the world around him. Geralt's detective mode, in other words. Sasko laughs as he cringes about it now. "We've overdone the witcher senses so much, oh my god," he says. "At the time when we were starting this, we were like, 'We don't have it in the game; we have to use it to make you feel like a witcher.' But then at the end, especially in the expansions, we tried to decrease it so it doesn't feel so overloaded." He'd even turn it down by a further 10 to 20 per cent, he says. There were all of the question marks dotted across the map, luring us to places to find meagre hidden treasure rewards. "I think we all scratch our heads about what we were thinking when trying to build this," Sasko tells me. "I guess it just came from fear - from fear that the player will feel that the world is empty." This was the first time CD Projekt Red had really the player's hand go, remember, and not controlled where in the world you would be. Shallow gameplay is a criticism many people have, especially in the game's repetitive combat, and again, this is something Sasko and the team are well aware of. "We don't feel that the gameplay in Witcher 3 was deep enough," he says. "It was for the times okay, but nowadays when you play it, even though the story still holds really well, you can see that the gameplay is a bit rusty." Also, the cutscenes could have been paced better and had less exposition in them, and the game in general could have dumped fewer concepts on you at once. Cognitive overload, Sasko calls it. "In every second sentence you have a new concept introduced, a new country mentioned, a new politician..." It was too much. More broadly, he would also have liked the open-world to be more closely connected to the game's story, rather than be, mostly, a pretty backdrop. "It's like in the theatre when you have beautiful decorations at the back made of cardboard and paper, and not much happens to them except an actor pulls a rope and it starts to rain or something." he says. It's to do with how the main story influences the world and vice versa, and he thinks the studio can be better at it. Ciri and Geralt look at a coin purse in The Witcher 3. This is, coincidentally, the same tavern you begin the game in, with Vesemir, and the same tavern you meet Master Mirror in. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red One conversation that surprises me, when looking back on The Witcher 3, is a conversation about popularity, because it's easy to forget now - with the intense scrutiny the studio seems always to be under - that when development began, not many people knew about CD Projekt Red. The combined sales of both Witcher games in 2013 were only 5 million. Poland knew about it - the Witcher fiction originated there and CD Projekt Red is Polish - and Germany knew about it, and some of the rest of Europe knew about it. But in North America, it was relatively unknown. That's a large part of the reason why the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 was made at all, to begin knocking on that door. And The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red hoped, would kick that door open. "We knew that we wanted to play in the major league," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communications and PR, stealing a quote from Cyberpunk character Jackie. That's why The Witcher 3 was revealed via a Game Informer cover story in early 2013, because that was deemed the way to do things there - the way to win US hearts, Platkow-Gilewski tells me. And it didn't take long for interest to swell. When Platkow-Gilewski joined CD Projekt Red to help launch the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 in 2012, he was handing out flyers at Gamescom with company co-founder Michał Kicinski, just to fill presentations for the game. By the time The Witcher 3 was being shown at Gamescom, a few years later, queues were three to four hours long. People would wait all day to play. "We had to learn how to deal with popularity during the campaign," Platkow-Gilewski says. Those game shows were crucial for spreading the word about The Witcher 3 and seeing first-hand the impact the game was having on players and press. "Nothing can beat a good show where you meet with people who are there to see their favourite games just slightly before the rest of the world," he says. "They're investing their time, money, effort, and you feel this support, sometimes love, to the IP you're working on, and it boosts energy the way which you can't compare with anything else. These human to human interactions are unique." He says the studio's leader Adam Badowski would refer to these showings as fuel that would propel development for the next year or so, which is why CD Projekt Red always tried to gather as many developers as possible for them, to feel the energy. It was precisely these in-person events that Platkow-Gilewski says CD Projekt Red lacked in the lead up to Cyberpunk's launch, after Covid shut the world down. The company did what it could by pivoting to online events instead - the world-first playtest of Cyberpunk was done online via stream-play software called Parsec; I was a part of it - and talked to fans through trailers, but it was much harder to gauge feedback this way. "It's easy to just go with the flow and way harder to manage expectations," Platkow-Gilewski says, so expectations spiralled. "For me the biggest lesson learned is to always check reality versus expectations, and with Cyberpunk, it was really hard to control and we didn't know how to do it." It makes me wonder what the studio will do now with The Witcher 4, because the game show sector of the industry still hasn't bounced back, and I doubt - having seen the effect Covid has had on shows from the inside of an events company - whether it ever will. "Gamescom is growing," Platkow-Gilewski says somewhat optimistically. "Gamescom is back on track." But I don't know if it really is. Michał Platkow-Gilewski cites this moment as one of his favourite from the Witcher 3 journey. The crew were at the game show PAX in front of a huge live audience and the dialogue audio wouldn't play. Thankfully, they had Doug Cockle, the English language voice actor of Geralt, with them on the panel, so he live improvised the lines. Watch on YouTube Something else I'm surprised to hear from him is mention of The Witcher 3's rocky launch, because 10 years later - and in comparison to Cyberpunk's - that's not how I remember it. But Platkow-Gilewski remembers it differently. "When we released Witcher 3, the reception was not great," he says. "Reviews were amazing but there was, at least in my memories, no common consensus that this is a huge game which will maybe define some, to some extent, the genre." I do remember the strain on some faces around the studio at launch, though. I also remember a tense conversation about the perceived graphics downgrade in the game, where people unfavourably compared footage of Witcher 3 at launch, with footage from a marketing gameplay trailer released years before it. There were also a number of bugs in the game's code and its performance was unoptimised. "We knew things were far from being perfect," Platkow-Gilewski says. But the studio worked hard in the years after launch to patch and update the game - The Witcher 3 is now on version 4.04, which is extraordinary for a single-player game - and they released showcase expansions for it. Some of Marcin Blacha's favourite work is in those expansions, he tells me, especially the horror storylines of Hearts of Stone, many of which he wrote. That expansion's villain, Master Mirror, is also widely regarded as one of the best in the game, disguised as he is as a plain-looking and unassuming person who happens to have incredible and undefinable power. It's not until deep into the expansion you begin to uncover his devilish identity, and it's this subtle way of presenting a villain, and never over explaining his threat, that makes Master Mirror so memorable. He's gathered such a following that some people have concocted elaborate theories about him. Lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk tells me about one theory whereby someone discovered you can see Master Mirror's face on many other background characters in the game, which you can, and that they believed it was a deliberate tactic used by CD Projekt Red to underline Master Mirror's devilish power. Remember, there was a neat trick with Master Mirror in that you had already met him at the beginning of The Witcher 3 base game, long before the expansion was ever developed, in a tavern in White Orchard. If CD Projekt Red could foreshadow him as far back as that, the theory went, then it could easily put his face on other characters in the game to achieve a similar 'did you see it?' effect. The real villain in the Hearts of Stone expansion, Gaunter O'Dimm. Better known to many as Master Mirror. There's a reason why he has such a plain-looking face... | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The truth is far more mundane. Other characters in the game do have Master Mirror's face, but only because his face is duplicated across the game in order to fill it out. CD Projekt Red didn't know when it made the original Witcher 3 game that this villager would turn into anyone special. There was a tentative plan but it was very tentative, so this villager got a very villager face. "We just got a request for a tertiary unimportant character," says Mileniczuk. "We had like 30-40 faces for the entire game so we just slapped a random face on him." He laughs. And by the time Hearts of Stone development came around, the face - the identity - had stuck. Expansions were an important part of cementing public opinion around The Witcher 3, then, as they were for cementing public opinion around Cyberpunk. They've become something of a golden bullet for the studio, a way to creatively unleash an already trained team and leave a much more positive memory in our heads. Exactly what went wrong with Cyberpunk and how CD Projekt Red set about correcting it is a whole other story Chris Tapsell told recently on the site, so I don't want to delve into specifics here. Suffice to say it was a hard time for the studio and many hard lessons had to be learned. "The pressure was huge," Platkow-Gilewski says, "because from underdogs we went to a company which will, for sure, deliver the best experience in the world." But while much of the rhetoric around Cyberpunk concerns the launch, there's a lot about the game itself that highlights how much progress the studio made, in terms of making open-world role-playing games. One of my favourite examples is how characters in Cyberpunk walk and talk rather than speak to you while rooted to the spot. It might seem like a small thing but it has a transformative and freeing effect on conversations, allowing the game to walk you places while you talk, and stage dialogue in a variety of cool ways. There's a lot to admire about the density of detail in the world, too, and in the greater variety of body shapes and diversity. Plus let's not forget, this is an actual open world rather than a segmented one as The Witcher 3 was. In many ways, the game was a huge step forward for the studio. Cyberpunk wasn't the only very notable thing to happen to the Witcher studio in those 10 years, either. During that time, The Witcher brand changed. Netflix piggybacked the game's popularity and developed a TV series starring Henry Cavill, and with it propelled The Witcher to the wider world. Curiously, CD Projekt Red wasn't invited to help, which was odd given executive producer Tomek Baginski was well known to CD Projekt Red, having directed the intro cinematics for all three Witcher video games. But beyond minor pieces of crossover content, no meaningful collaboration ever occurred. "We had no part in the shows," Pawel Mileniczuk says. "But it's Hollywood: different words. I know how hard it was for Tomek to get in there, to convince them to do the show, and then how limited influence is when the production house sits on something. It's many people, many decision makers, high stakes, big money. Nobody there was thinking about, Hey, let's talk to those dudes from Poland making games. It's a missed opportunity to me but what can I say?" The debut trailer for The Witcher 4.Watch on YouTube Nevertheless, the Netflix show had a surprisingly positive effect on the studio, with sales of The Witcher 3 spiking in 2019 and 2020 when the first season aired. "It was a really amazing year for us sales wise," Platkow-Gilewski says. This not only means more revenue for the studio but also wider understanding; more people are more familiar with The Witcher world now than ever before, which bodes very well for The Witcher 4. Not that it influenced or affected the studio's plans to return to that world, by the way. "We knew already that we wanted to come back to The Witcher," Platkow-Gilewski says. "Some knew that they wanted to tell a Ciri story while we were still working on Witcher 3." But, again, with popularity also comes pressure. "We'll have hopefully millions of people already hooked in from the get-go but with some expectations and visions and dreams which we have to, or may not be able to, fulfil," Platkow-Gilewski adds. You can already sense this pressure in comments threads about the new game. Many people already have their ideas about what a new Witcher game should be. The Witcher 4 might seem like a return to safer ground, then, but the relationship with the audience has changed in the intervening 10 years. "I think people are again with us," Platkow-Gilewski says. "There are some who are way more careful than they used to be; I don't see the hype train. We also learned how to talk about our game, what to show, when to show. But I think people believe again. Not everyone, and maybe it's slightly harder to talk with the whole internet. It's impossible now. It's way more polarised than it used to be. But I believe that we'll have something special for those who love The Witcher." Here we are a decade later, then, looking forward to another Witcher game by CD Projekt Red. But many things have changed. The studio has grown and shuffled people around and the roles of the people I speak to have changed. Marcin Blacha and Pawel Mielniczuk aren't working on The Witcher 4, but on new IP Project Hadar, in addition to their managerial responsibilities, and Pawel Sasko is full-time on Cyberpunk 2. It's only really Michał Platkow-Gilewski who'll do a similar job for The Witcher 4 as on The Witcher 3, although this time with dozens more people to help. But they will all still consult and they're confident in the abilities of The Witcher 4 team. "They really know what they're doing," says Sasko, "they are a very seasoned team." "We learned a lot of lessons down the road," Platkow-Gilewski says, in closing. "I started this interview saying that we had this bliss of ignorance; now we know more, but hopefully we can still be brave. Before, we were launching a rocket and figuring out how to land on the moon. Now, we know the dangers but we are way more experienced, so we'll find a way to navigate through these uncharted territories. We have a map already so hopefully it won't be such a hard trip."

For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests. A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive - and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up. Titled 'Common People', the episode is from series 7 of Black MirrorNetflix The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.A recent article looked at how generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.For a second.And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car? What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn't the best way to get there?Depositphotos Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.An article in the Columbia Journalism Review asked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence. LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look likeDepositphotos ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggested memory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990sPublic Domain I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work. Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication. If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it's pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop. “We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?” Ted Chiang

If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More: