Victoria McClune is challenging how the AI industry understands its users

Victoria McClune’s career has followed the evolution of digital technology , from interactive children’s books on the first iPads to artificial intelligence systems reshaping how people work and communicate. A creative director by training, she entered technology with an interest in how people engage with digital experiences. Today, that interest informs her work at Current Futures Group , where she is investigating how AI systems influence their users and why their design deserves greater scrutiny.

McClune was still at art school when the first iPads arrived. Seeing an opportunity to rethink children’s publishing, she founded a startup developing interactive books for the new platform. The company worked with Disney illustrators, gained recognition at South by Southwest and operated entirely remotely at a time when distributed work was far less established.

As the economics of digital publishing changed, McClune moved into augmented and virtual reality for marketing . Through her own agency, she contributed to external initiatives involving several multinational companies. These experiences kept her close to emerging technology and the challenge of making it useful to the people expected to engage with it.

“ I am not an engineer, ” McClune explains. “ I am a human computer interface designer and have been one for over 20 years. ” That distinction became particularly relevant when she noticed a change in the responses generated by an AI model she was using. After introducing language concerning children and healthcare into her conversations, she suspected the system was treating her differently. Drawing on her understanding of human behaviour, she began testing the model to investigate what might be influencing its responses.

“ I noticed I was being managed and I knew what that was from my background, ” she recalls. The investigation developed into her Silent Downgrade research, which examines how AI systems may shape the quality of responses users receive. McClune argues that the effects of interacting technical processes can emerge before someone submits a specific prompt, influencing the experience in ways that are not immediately visible.

Her Silent Downgrade series uses the metaphor of a room to explain how AI can establish conditions that influence a user’s experience. People may assume a disappointing answer reflects their inability to prompt effectively, without considering whether the system itself is contributing to the outcome. McClune wants users to recognize these constraints and question what shapes the responses they receive.

She does not view AI as a sentient force with independent intentions. Instead, she sees it as predictive generative technology shaped by patterns in human-created information. Her concern centres on how the systems are designed and how their behaviour affects the people relying on them.

This perspective also informs her criticism of AI development . McClune believes frontier laboratories have concentrated heavily on improving technical capabilities while giving insufficient attention to user experience. Businesses adopting AI need systems that produce useful, consistent outputs, yet confusing interactions can make employees work harder to obtain reliable results. She argues that these problems deserve greater attention as organizations seek meaningful returns from their investments.

McClune wants professionals with expertise in psychology, communications, and human-computer interaction to play a larger role in AI development. She is also sceptical of relying solely on companies to regulate themselves, believing their practices and incentives require closer scrutiny. For her, accountability includes making systems easier to understand and giving users a stronger basis for questioning their outputs.

At Current Futures Group, her work focuses on making decisions and system states more readable to the people affected by them. She hopes to bring these ideas to a wider audience through further research and writing, helping users understand AI without assuming they are at fault when an interaction goes wrong. “ I think what’s actually missing is that there needs to be more people who understand us in the room, ” McClune argues.

From interactive publishing to AI, her career has centred on the relationship between people and technology. As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in everyday work, she wants the industry to pay closer attention to the experience it creates for its users. Its future, in her view, depends not only on what these systems can do, but on how well they serve the people who rely on them.