A UX Collective piece asks a direct question the design industry keeps avoiding: has AI tooling quietly replaced the uncomfortable, slow work of actually understanding users before building for them.
The article does not offer a clean answer. That is the point. It frames empathy not as a deliverable or a design phase checkbox, but as a discipline being eroded by speed, synthetic personas, and generated research summaries that feel rigorous but skip the human contact entirely.
Read it for the argument underneath the question, specifically how presence, the act of being physically or attentively with a person before designing for them, is the thing being negotiated away. If your team has replaced user interviews with AI-generated insights in the last 18 months, this one is aimed at you.
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