Greek Gods Explain UX Slogans as AI Research Falls Short

A recent video by UX expert Jakob Nielsen features Greek gods explaining his top 10 UX slogans. The experiment used AI model Seedance 2.5, which was expensive but produced good results, costing around $200 for a month's worth of credits.

Nielsen enlisted the help of Zeus and other Olympian gods to explain how usability looks from Mount Olympus. Each god was depicted in their element with traditional attributes, such as a peacock for Hera and a golden apple for Aphrodite. The hardest challenge was rendering Cerberus, the 3-headed dog guarding the Underworld.

Google has added a feature that lets users designate websites they like, making those sites rank higher in personalized search results. However, the ACM CHI conference research on human-computer interaction has exploded to 1,702 papers, with many being middling student projects. Nielsen notes that user outcomes are often judged by subjective user ratings rather than behavioral observation or task-performance metrics.

Nielsen used AI agents to cut down the 1,702 papers to 55, which was worth the $50 token cost. However, he concludes that academic research studies obsolete AI models, undermining the validity of findings. Only 9% of papers used a frontier-level model like GPT-5.

The CHI 2026 research mostly describes AI as it was in 2024, not as it is now. The research is also dominated by OpenAI models, with 84% of papers using at least one OpenAI model. Nielsen notes that this can mistake vendor quirks for general truths about AI.