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.

Jenny Williams is one of the most experienced content designers in the world. And now she's written a novel about a content designer.

Jenny's worked at places like Microsoft and Google, where's worked on AI products. She could already see that the technology was exciting, terrifying, and likely to change far more than the products being built with it - including the role of content designers themselves.

Then she left tech and wrote House of Liars: a novel about writers brought to a remote island to compete for a publishing prize.

At the centre of the story is Anna, a former content designer with a complicated history with AI - and, in Jenny's words, a "warped or twisted" version of herself.

Jenny joins me to talk about turning her experience in content design and AI into fiction, why the best product writing requires the writer to disappear, and what we lose when content designers stop writing words and become overseers of systems that write them.

What we talked about:

✅ How working on Microsoft's AI ethics team inspired House of Liars✅ Why the book began as a memoir and became a novel about a content designer confronting AI ✅ Why content design turned out to be the perfect job for the story's protagonist ✅ How AI has become an ethical litmus test for writers, designers, and technologists ✅ What it felt like to discover that Jenny's first novel had been used to train AI without her permission ✅ Why Jenny left tech as content design shifted from writing words to overseeing systems that write them ✅ Whether UX practitioners can challenge harmful AI decisions without putting their careers at risk

Where to find "House of Liars":

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.