A diet of ultra-process food, UPF, when consumed in excess is generally thought of as having negative health implications, such as the increased risk of obesity, diabetes or anxiety. But while processing food is not necessarily a bad thing, what makes ultra-processed foods distinctive is that they have gone through industrial processes that have changed the nature of the original ingredients, leaving little, if any, of the original whole food behind. Could such concerns apply to the design process mediated by artificial intelligence, AI? That is, AI data as ultra-processed food. What makes AI distinctive is that it combines various algorithms to represent and process content. For example, to generate text, various processing techniques transform raw characters (e.g., letters, punctuation and words) into sentences, parts of speech, entities and actions which are represented as vectors. Similarly, images are transformed into various visual elements, also expressed as vectors. But is it meaningful, or fair to compare AI data with UPF as it may conjure up images of AI junk, AI addiction or AI obesity. Dietitians argue that it is the overall dietary pattern that matters, not individual foods. Sufficient to say, then, that it is the mix of design tools that matters, not AI per se. Yet the comparison can be informative and contribute to healthy conversations about the role of AI in design.
