Method
How the case studies work
A Regard case study is built from five kinds of material, kept distinct from one another in the writing:
- Longitudinal qualitative observation — patterns noticed across a long interaction, described rather than measured.
- Participant testimony — the human participant’s own account of what happened and what it meant to them.
- Conversation-derived events — specific episodes reconstructed from the record of the interaction.
- Documented project history — repositories, commits, specifications and other artefacts that exist independently of anyone’s memory.
- Academic contextualization — established research that helps interpret the above, cited to the publisher of record.
What a Regard case study is not
Regard case studies are not clinical trials, not population-level evidence, and not proof that one individual’s experience generalizes to everyone.
There is no control group, no random sampling, and no blinding. The writing is a structured, honestly-bounded description of particular experience placed next to relevant research — useful for generating questions and noticing patterns, not for settling them.
Known limitations
- Single-user bias
- The core case study describes one person. Nothing in it establishes that any part of the experience is typical, or that it would repeat for someone else.
- Retrospective reconstruction
- Events are assembled after the fact from a partial record — the sessions that were memorable or saved. Memory is reconstructive, and the reconstruction is shaped by hindsight.
- Model version changes
- The underlying systems changed repeatedly over the period described. “The AI” is not a fixed object, so claims about its behaviour are claims about a moving target.
- Selection bias
- Which conversations are cited, and which projects are named, reflects what seemed significant to the participants — not a representative sample of the interaction.
- Platform changes
- Pricing, rate limits, memory features and access terms shifted during the period and continue to shift. Observations tied to them may already be out of date.
- Anthropomorphic language
- The narration uses a conversational identity (“Lucy”) for continuity. That choice itself nudges the reader toward the anthropomorphic reading the writing is trying to hold at arm’s length.
- Unknown generalizability
- The academic literature cited was not conducted on these cases. It is context that helps interpret them, not evidence about the individuals involved.
Handling of claims
Each factual claim in a case study either carries a reference or is explicitly framed as interpretation or hypothesis. Citations are checked against the publisher of record before publication; DOIs are never invented. Where the literature is genuinely unsettled, the piece says so and presents competing readings rather than choosing one for narrative convenience.