Designing a more honest ChatGPT
A story about AI ethics and good business decisions in tech*.
Role: Fictional Product Manager for ChatGPT | Scope: Discovery, business case, and roadmap planning
Prototype vibecoded on Claude Code and live on Vercel.AT A GLANCEStarted from an ethical worry about hallucinations and found the commercial argument: churn in the Plus tier.
User wellbeing = good business
Evidence from churned users
Three guerrilla interviews with ex-Plus subscribers, synthesised into a persona and one decisive insight.
An honesty-focused feature set and a three-phase plan with success metrics tied to churn, NPS and adoption.
Four features, phased roadmap
I started with the stories that worried me most
INTRODUCTIONThis project was inspired from reading reports of people experiencing symptoms of psychosis (such as paranoia or delusions) after long conversations with AI chatbots like ChatGPT (see: AI-induced psychosis). I care deeply about mental health and I’m fascinated by new technology. So I decided to play pretend: if I were an actual Product Manager for ChatGPT, what would it take for me to secure the resources needed to tackle this problem?
As a designer, I would ground my ideas in user research. But in this new role as Product Manager, I needed to think in business terms.
Could I frame an ethical problem as a business problem?
All LLMs hallucinate and chatbots are designed for engagement.
THE PROBLEMAt the time, the research on chatbot’s behaviour was pointing towards 2 main culprits of AI-induced psychosis:
Sycophancy: AI chatbot’s tendency to affirm or validate users' individual beliefs (i.e: validating doubts, fuelling anger, urging impulsive actions, or reinforcing negative emotions)
Hallucinations: a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact.
So, sycophancy sets the direction and hallucinations provide the content.
It is important to note that these are not bugs. This is designed behaviour. All LLMs hallucinate and chatbots are designed for engagement. The way we read their “personality” affects how we experience and trust the product. These are just two ways that these products have been designed so that users trust and keep coming back to them.
Thanks to the original webinar blueprint, colleagues could adapt it and Inspiratorio scaled into a service hub (ecosystem), annually running 10 sync and asynchronous services for narrative training tailored to diverse learning needs.
Holding an international, remote team together
I began as the only person designing and delivering, then grew into managing four people plus vendors, negotiating scope across Puentes' other platforms, reporting to both the founder and the Programs Director.
The team was split: leadership in Madrid, operations scattered across Latin America, some with little time-zone overlap. Based in Barcelona, I sat in the gap, generating shared context and linking the people each delivery needed, so a fragmented setup still reached users as one coherent thing. Artefacts such as blueprints and project briefs helped create context based on my colleagues needs, facilitating their work.
THE DESIGN, PART 2Designing for a sense of belonging
“While you can’t design a feeling - feelings are personal- you can learn to recognise how and when those feelings arise and then design all sorts of things that positively influence those feelings: rituals that bring us together, spaces that keep us calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, systems that make us feel respected, communications that create understanding”
SUSIE WISE (DESIGNER, AUTHOR OF "DESIGN FOR BELONGING")
The power of aesthetics to influence our state of mind
Remember our users’ emotional starting point? Fatigued from hard realities and old strategies that no longer worked. Sensing that doing things differently felt risky.
From my work at OYE I recognised this as apocalyptic fatigue, climate activist Per Espen Stoknes’ term for the freeze doom produces. We know from neuroscience that fear stifles creativity and innovation. We simply can’t think our way out of fear-based states. We need to feel safe. And once we feel safe, we can start playing and creating. And if you want to create change, you have to create something new.
With that in mind, I borrowed from Ingrid Fetell-Lee’s Aesthetics of Joy framework to define the aesthetic concept for Inspiratorio in a way that would reliably spark safety, invoke play, and nudge users from their default critical mode into a kinder, more collaborative, creative state. This aesthetic concept was later translated by a creative agency into the branding you now see at Inspiratorio.
Energy
Lifts mood, enlivens spaces.
→ Bright colours
Play
Sparks safety, creativity and exploration.
→ Rounded shapes, DIY vibes.
Celebration
Amplifies shared joy.
→ Song, dance, fireworks.
“Belonging happens when people feel safe, seen, and accepted”
CHRISTINE WONG YAP (SOCIAL PRACTICE ARTIST)Puentes taught me about belonging
Belonging is something that has to be felt. You can state it all you want, but you have to walk the talk for it to actually work. This is why, apart from staging the services, I designed guidelines for the relationships and interactions between people at Inspiratorio (host-to-participant, host-to-expert, participant-to-participant, etc.).
For example, users had to trust that they could enter as themselves, without shedding what made them different. A host colleague created a video to share at the beginning of every webinar stating that cameras are optional, chat is available, and accessibility services are available, and, as a bonus, reminding us that distractions are normal, since we're all probably connecting from home with pets, children, or other family nearby.
Why belonging?
My hope was simple: that if people this different could feel they belonged at Inspiratorio, their faith in the kindness of humankind might be rekindled, enough to keep them open to learning, experimenting, and staying in the fight. Defending human rights is tough work.
So, what happens when a designer is hired to coordinate, not just design?
LESSONS LEARNEDFour things came out of this role that I'd bring to the next:
I don't just keep the work moving; I design how it feels. Like any good project manager, I can get a team and its vendors to deliver on time and on scope. What I add is a service designer's eye: at Inspiratorio I didn't just make the platform work, I designed how it felt, so delivery produced an experience people trusted, not just services that shipped.
I treat the team as users. I design the internal tools, context docs, meetings, workflows, as products with people who use them, so coordination makes the work easier instead of adding bureaucracy.
I find my leverage fast. The services and roadmap were set before I arrived, so I focused on what I could move, using what I knew about the audience from OYE plus close observation to add value without waiting for everything to be defined.
I find honest signal with limited resources. A badly researched proof-of-concept can prove the wrong thing, so I treat measurement as worth doing even when it has to be lightweight, guarding against biases that mislead. I know how to get a real sense of user needs and perceptions with what's available.
A final, honest note:
I'm grateful for Puentes; it taught me what it takes to build and fund something as ambitious as narrative power for Latin America, and how to lead across cultures, languages, and identities. It was also a hard role. As the only person with a design background, I sometimes struggled to make the value of design legible to leadership, and I learned that fighting for that value is part of the job almost everywhere.
The clearest lesson: social impact and user impact are not the same thing. User impact can be mistaken for vanity metrics. It should always be clear it is about making sure you're actually making something that is valuable and desirable for a specific set of individuals, not just something technically feasible. Social impact is the broader, community-level impact. Both should be measured, but differences should be clear.