Everyone seems to be asking whether AI will replace UX designers. I think that’s the wrong question.Following the numbers gets you a picture but doesn’t make you an artist | Russell PinkstonIn March 2025, the Computer History Museum and IEEE Spectrum staged a debate on a single question: when a large language model answers you, does it even understand what it’s saying? Does it comprehend what the words mean, or is it only predicting which word comes next?Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington, argued it’s only predicting. In fact, she has a name for these systems: stochastic parrots, machines that string words together by probability, the way a parrot repeats sounds, with no idea what any of it really means. Sébastien Bubeck, a researcher at OpenAI, took the opposite stance. Understanding, he argued, is in the eye of the beholder, and you judge it by what a system does.“Let’s say I want to build an app, and I ask one of those models to build the app for me… I just specify in natural language what I want, I come back the next day and, boom, the app is there. Did the model understand on the way of creating this? In a way, I don’t really care. It did something for me