AI Is Reshaping Content Creation and Digital Interaction

This UX Roundup explores several key shifts in the digital landscape, from creative AI applications to fundamental changes in how we find information and interact with technology.

UX Roundup for November 10, 2025. (Seedream 4)

AI Powered Music A Creative Exploration

I recently experimented with AI's creative potential by remaking my opera about direct manipulation into two completely different modern music genres:

• Jazz song about direct manipulation
• Rock song about direct manipulation

This project was an opportunity to explore what Richard Wagner called a “gesamtkunstwerk,” or a “total work of art,” where different media forms are combined into a single, immersive experience. While today we might call it a multimedia production, the core idea of synthesizing art forms remains powerful.

For the jazz video, I focused on character consistency. I took an avatar from a previous explainer video about transformative AI economics and used Seedream 4 to adapt its outfit and setting. The workflow began with Grok Imagine for its rapid avatar creation, which is ideal for the creative exploration of design possibilities.

Moody avatar design by Grok Imagine 0.8, used for both the Transformative AI explainer and the jazz song.

Starting with a portrait-oriented image from Grok, I used Seedream 4 to outpaint the scene into a landscape format suitable for video. Seedream’s 4K image generation provides enough resolution to crop for close-up shots without losing quality.

Outpaint by Seedream 4.

Using Seedream’s character consistency features, I successfully transported the same character into a new nightclub environment with a slightly modified outfit. This process highlights a key challenge in AI video creation: maintaining continuity. Since the AI often has to invent parts of an avatar's appearance (like shoes in a full-body shot), small inconsistencies can arise. While I embrace these imperfections for the joy of creating, future AI improvements will likely solve these continuity issues.

Reimagining the avatar in a new setting using Seedream 4.

This project required a combination of nine different AI models, demonstrating that the best results come from leveraging the unique strengths of multiple tools. The progress in AI music and video is remarkable when comparing my jazz video from January 2025 with the one from October 2025. While the music has evolved, the leap in animation quality is even more significant.

The Politeness Gap How We Talk to AI vs Humans

Recent research from Amazon based on 13,000 customer service messages reveals a fascinating insight: people are 14.5% more polite and 5.3% more grammatically correct when speaking with human agents compared to AI chatbots.

This makes sense—when interacting with AI, we tend to skip social niceties and get straight to the point. The study also found that training chatbots on a mix of human-directed and AI-directed messages improved their ability to understand user intent by 2.9%. This underscores a crucial point: AI models should be trained on data that reflects how users actually interact with AI, not just on historical human-to-human communication data.

Cutting Through the Noise Why Subscriptions Outshine Social Media

I've observed that on social media, my most insightful work rarely gets the most attention. Viral content often wins, but it's not always the most valuable. For those who want to receive my best work without relying on algorithms, the most reliable method is to subscribe to my email newsletter.

The End of an Era AI Answers Overtake Traditional Search

Two years ago, I wrote about how AI answers offer superior usability compared to traditional search engines and advised websites to pivot their strategy away from SEO. That advice is more relevant than ever today.

The traffic firehose from search engines is drying up, signaling a need for a new content strategy.

My current guidance is more nuanced but follows the same principle. I recommend reading these articles on surviving without search traffic:

• From PageRank to DeepRank: Attracting AI-Driven Traffic to Digital Properties
• GEO Guidelines: How to Get Quoted by AI Through Generative Engine Optimization

Recent data confirms this trend. Google is now actively shifting users to AI answers, trading its legacy search advertising dollars for AI advertising pennies—a necessary move for survival. For website owners, the message is clear: even Google doesn't believe in the future of traditional search.

Search is quietly being buried as AI rises to take its place.

Though Google's current AI user experience architecture is confusing, its market position allows it to weather these growing pains. I expect improvements in 2026 as it solidifies its AI-first approach.

A McKinsey survey found that AI is the most preferred source of information for 44% of Americans, compared to just 31% for traditional search. This trend is only accelerating.

This shift is causing a traffic bloodbath for websites. The Italian federation of newspaper publishers reported an 80% reduction in clicks after Google introduced AI Overviews. My own analytics for www.uxtigers.com show that for every 207 times AI services scraped my content in October 2025, I received only one human visitor from those services—a click-through rate of just 0.5%.

The evidence is overwhelming: users are turning to AI for direct answers, eliminating the need to click through to websites. Companies that fail to adapt their customer acquisition strategies will face an existential threat. It's time to prepare now.