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Deep Currents: 07.07.2025

Deep Currents: 07.07.2025

Welcome to the July edition of Deep Currents, a monthly curated digest of breakthroughs, product updates, and insightful articles that surfaced over the past month in the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI. These were the things that stood out to me as particularly significant, from the perspective of a design

Summer Reading: AI’s Impact on Identity, Work, and Design

Summer Reading: AI’s Impact on Identity, Work, and Design

Summer in Canada means trading screens for sunshine whenever possible, and I’ve been making the most of the warm weather with three books that explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our world and how we need to adapt. Each offers a different lens on a fundamental question: How will

Stylized image of a bioluminescent jellyfish travelling with the currents along the bottom of the ocean

Deep Currents 06.06.25

Welcome to the latest instalment of Deep Currents, a monthly curated digest of breakthroughs, product updates, and helpful articles that have surfaced in the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI. These were the things that stood out to me as impactful, as a design director in IT trying to stay on

Beyond the Tool: Learning to Play AI

Beyond the Tool: Learning to Play AI

Listen to this post with Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard AI being referred to as a tool over the past few months, but this oversimplification misses the point. The way we talk about artificial intelligence shapes how we

Deep Currents 05.05.25

Deep Currents 05.05.25

Welcome to the third instalment of Deep Currents, a monthly curated digest of breakthroughs, product updates, and helpful articles that have surfaced in the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI. These were the things that stood out to me as impactful, as a design director in IT trying to stay on

Abstract illustration of two people wearing sunglasses with a surreal background featuring random circles and radiating beams of colour.

Vibe Coding Is About to Blow Up (entire industries)

The democratization of software development has been promised for decades. With vibe coding, we might finally be approaching that reality.

Let AI Work While You Take a Break

Let AI Work While You Take a Break

Listen to this post with the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player. This is a guest post by Patricia Rodriguez, a seasoned UX designer and multidisciplinary artist with over 20 years of experience in IT. Patricia is known for their expertise in web and product design and has previously worked

Deep Currents 04.04.25

Deep Currents 04.04.25

Listen to this post with the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player. Welcome to the second instalment of Deep Currents, a monthly curated list of recent breakthroughs, product updates, and helpful articles that have surfaced recently in the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI. These are the stories that stood out

Abstract image of a fifties-style chrome microphone with red and blue waves lines in the background

Hearing Is Believing: Advances in AI Speech Tech

Listen to this post with Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player The sound of a person's voice is profoundly personal. It's as unique as a signature and can even be used to verify someone's identity. So it's both fascinating and disconcerting that

A large school of iridescent orange fish in the deep sea

Deep Currents 03.03.25

Deep Currents is a new format I’m experimenting with to surface timely and exciting developments in generative AI. My goal is to provide a curated list of recent breakthroughs, product updates, and helpful articles that have resonated with me as a design director trying to stay on top of

AI's Reasoning Revolution Explained

Transparent reasoning is making AI a better researcher, teacher, and collaborator.

Illustration of a pink elephant standing in an empty courtroom

The AI Copyright Conundrum

Imagine spending hours crafting the perfect prompt to generate an AI masterpiece, only to discover someone else selling copies of it online. Who actually owns the rights to AI-generated work? A new report from the US Copyright Office attempts to answer this question, but the solutions may not satisfy everyone.

A robot mechanic holding a wrench stands outside a garage

The Agents Are Coming

AI agents are all the rage these days, offering many benefits but also coming with risks.

A weathered light blue android looks off into the distance

Digital Vibes: The Next Frontier of Human-AI Connection

As the AI market matures, personality and usability differences will become key differentiators between competing platforms.

Illustration of two beach chairs by the shore next to a palm tree with clouds gathering over the horizon.

Scattered clouds

As ever more software moves to the cloud, our world is getting more cloudy.

A series of white and black boxes covered with strange symbols

Strange labels: Has tech lost its way with words?

As AI's influence has exploded over the past year, I worry it may be running headlong into a growing and pervasive naming crisis. I'm not talking about the brand names AI companies have chosen for their flagship products—though that’s certainly a topic worth exploring

Illustration of a large, steaming pot of soup on a kitchen counter, flanked by fresh herbs and jars of spices.

Making soup together

Imagine you’ve just walked into in a warm kitchen, and you’re immediately surrounded by the delicious aromas of simmering ingredients. Your nose is drawn to a big pot of steaming hot soup that’s sitting on the stove. Just like that pot of soup, the world of AI

An enormous blank canvas sits on an easel in a bright artist loft

How AI tools are stretching the creative canvas

When I was in my final year of high school, I took art class as one of my electives. Students in the class had to complete several traditional paintings during the school year, using acrylic paint on canvas. These paintings would eventually be displayed in a final year-end art exhibit.

Closeup photo of a blue-tailed skink in the Aruban desert

Happy outcomes

I just got home after a spontaneous 10-day workation in Aruba with Patricia. We were escaping the road reconstruction that has been tormenting us for the past month and a half. We chose Aruba because it’s warm, it’s in the same time zone, there are direct flights from

Infinite bubbles of different sizes, each encompassing a tiny world.

Blowing bubbles

We all live in a bubble of some kind. When we go on vacation, we briefly step out of our usual bubble and enter another. When we attend an event like a party or a wedding where we hardly know anyone, we glimpse other people's bubbles. These moments

A notebook lies open next to a big bowl of spicy dumpling soup

Lunch & learn

I was a blown away this week by Google’s latest “experimental” AI tool called NotebookLM. NotebookLM provides a digital research project space, allowing you to upload documents and add links to online sources, then leverage Google’s AI to help you understand and work through the material. It’s

Illustration of a man reclining by a pool surrounded by tropical plants, reading a book.

Further reading: From problems to purpose

Over the past summer I continued my reading streak, devouring several more books on the subject of AI. I was interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the technology and its impacts, and I needed more perspectives to round things out. The next book I picked up after finishing Ethan

Red and blue game pieces positioned on a 3D topographical map.

Red team go!

Earlier this week I posted about a custom GPT I had created to give AI-generated text a more “human” feel by randomly inserting typos. I called it TypoBot. It seemed like a fun idea at the time - a way to make AI text feel more authentic, maybe even a

Photo of an android sitting at a desk with a laptop in a bright sun-filled room, surrounded by tropical house-plants.

Mistakes are a sign of humanity

I was working on a blog post recently and asked my partner to read an early draft. She asked me if I had used AI to help me write it. I sheepishly admitted that I hadn’t. She suspected as much because of ghe typos she found, which AI woukd

Imagine, dream, create: AI image tools in 2024

For me, one of the most exhilarating forms of generative AI (GenAI) is image generation. These fantastic algorithms, trained on vast collections of digital images scraped from the internet and powered by immense cloud computing data centers, can magically generate almost any type of image you can imagine, eliciting delight