The poet inside AI (Adedayo Agarau)

🎧 Start listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get 20% off workshops and courses at UX Content Collective. For content designers who want to upgrade their thinking, check out Advanced UX Content for Product.  Adedayo Agarau is a poet, a Stanford Wallace Stegner Fellow, and a content designer who has worked on AI search at Google and on Grok at XAI. He came to content design through web writing, a Nigerian fintech startup, a browser company, and an MFA at Iowa - not the path anyone would have predicted, and exactly the kind of path that produces someone worth listening to. We talk about what it actually means to design for a large language model: how personality gets built, why guide rails are a writing problem, why the distinction between an ideal response and just a response is what separates well-designed AI from the rest...and why content designers are the best ones to do this type of work. What we talked about: ✅ How Adedayo discovered poetry through a Nigerian social app  ✅ What it was like contributing to AI-powered Google Search  ✅ Designing voice, tone, and personality for Grok  ✅ Why the X algorithm amplifies shock value and what that does to content designers  ✅ Why AI hype creates both overclaiming and unhealthy skepticism  ✅ What engineers actually want from content designers when building AI systems ✅ The case for treating data as content, not just content as data ✅ Why designing an AI agent is fundamentally the same as writing a character Where to find Adedayo: Website LinkedIn Github Get 20% off workshops and courses at UX Content Collective. For content designers who want to upgrade their thinking, check out Advanced UX Content for Product.