The Understanders

The Understanders

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February 2025

🔥 Commentary: Unpacking AI skepticism
The vibes around AI are decidedly skeptical if not outright hostile in some online spaces, and there seem to be a few reasons why
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Matt Gallivan
📝 Research summary: What yesterday's digital assistants can teach us about tomorrow
A new paper shows that even Alexa and Siri give some of us the ick
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Matt Gallivan
🧠 The Understanders research: User perceptions of model selection in ChatGPT
People started talking about the model selection UI in ChatGPT last weekend, so we interviewed 51 paying users to understand how they feel about model…
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Matt Gallivan
2
📝 Research summary: How do Americans feel about AI? It's complicated.
New data from YouGov paints a classic picture of optimism bias in the wild
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Matt Gallivan
2

January 2025

📝 Research summary: How product designers respond to AI-powered personas
AI representations of real people seem to be showing small glimmers of promise as a research tool... with some important caveats
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Matt Gallivan
1
📝 Research summary: User preferences and trust in AI voice assistants
Homophily, influence, and anthropomorphism, oh my!
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Matt Gallivan
🔥 Commentary: The precarious inevitability of AV acceptance
New data on attitudes about self-driving cars shows how interrelated our enthusiasm, trust and adoption of new technology can be
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Matt Gallivan
2
📝 Research summary: Exploring user preferences in AI image generation
A new paper suggests that users with clear creative goals prefer structured prompt creation via prompts, whereas those with less clear goals prefer open…
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Matt Gallivan
📝 Research summary: How citations impact user trust in LLM chat responses
A new paper shows user trust in LLM output is meaningfully influenced by citations— and that while the quality of those citations matters, the quantity…
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Matt Gallivan
Hello, world
A bit about The Understanders and what I hope to do here
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Matt Gallivan
3
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