Nobody Wants Your News App, They Want to Understand the World | Jeremy Gilbert on Rendered by Robots
What is it we really want to do, not how do we adapt to the technologies we use?
Jeremy Gilbert, Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern and Director of the Knight Lab, joins Spencer Striker and Alessandra El Chanti to discuss why we need to stop automating yesterday's tasks and start designing for what people actually need.
In this conversation, we explore human-centered design and the discipline of cutting past the habitual to get to the desirable. Jeremy walks us through what he calls the Kodak trap, showing how Google, Xerox, and news organizations all made the same mistake of confusing the product with what people actually want. People don't want search engines, they want answers. People don't want news apps, they want to understand the world.
From there, we get into the two ends of what news consumers are really after: hyper-personalization on one side and parasocial connection on the other. This leads to a frank discussion about filter bubbles and AI media literacy, where the facts across sources are often similar but the framing can be radically different. We touch on the dead internet theory and the strange loop of AI creating content for AI to read.
Jeremy makes a sharp distinction around intellectual ownership, arguing that if you're not constantly evaluating AI outputs, it's not your work. We talk about why journalists now need to think entrepreneurially and build personal brands, and then pivot to education, where Jeremy describes the one-room schoolhouse as an ideal we can finally pursue at scale using AI.
He introduces the zone of proximal development, the sweet spot where learning is hard enough to stretch you but not so hard you give up. He shares his approach to the iterative assignment, where students don't turn in the final AI output but document each step of the process. And he closes with a five-year prediction: chatbots are a demo, not a destination, and soon nobody will want to go to one.
Referenced: The Knight Lab at Northwestern University. Particle News. Nataliya Kosmyna's MIT study "Your Brain on ChatGPT." Khan Academy. Hard Fork podcast. The Innovator's Dilemma.
Links:
Knight Lab: knightlab.northwestern.edu
Host: spencerstriker.com
About the Series
Rendered by Robots: AI & the Future of Design Edu explores how AI is transforming the way we teach, create, and imagine media production education. It’s a podcast for educators, creators, and students navigating the AI revolution with clear eyes and curious minds.
CREDITS: Creator & Host — Spencer Striker, PhD | Co-Host & Director — Alessandra El Chanti, MFA | Featured Guest — Clay Shirky, Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education at NYU | Editor, Sound Design & Motion Graphics — Kyle Trueblood | Producer — Adam Sullivan | Camera & Sound — Yunting "Unity" Zhan, Qinbei "Bissy" Li | Project Manager — Aimelyn Geronimo | Special Thanks — Miriam Sherin (Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education); Alumnae Award for Curriculum Innovation (Northwestern University Office of the Provost); Marwan M. Kraidy, PhD (NU-Q Office of the Dean); S. Venus Jin, PhD (Artificial Intelligence and Media Lab | AIM-LAB); Nisar Keshvani (NU-Q Communications and Public Affairs); Rami Al-Badry, Floyd Yarmuth, Ihsan Yahya (NU-Q Production & Digital Media Services) 🔖 #ClayShirky #AIEducation #HigherEd #FutureOfLearning #IdentityFormation #EdTech #GenerativeAI #NYU
