The poet inside AI (Adedayo Agarau)

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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.