AI Apocalypse... Now?

**Tommy Vietor** (0:20)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Tommy Vietor.
It's a very weird time in artificial intelligence news right now. I'm kind of a Luddite or a Luddite Jason at this point in my life. And every day I log on and I feel like I'm learning about some terrifying new cyber hack or some technology that is going to change maybe my life, maybe humanity as we know it. I don't know.
Then you got your do-mers, you get your optimists. I don't know what to believe. And so I brought on someone much smarter than me, my friend Casey Newton. He's the editor of Platformer. He's the co-host of the excellent podcast Hard Fork. And Casey and his co-host Kevin Ruiz have a new something coming very soon. We're teasing it mysteriously because that's what we do here at Pod Save America. Casey, great to see you.

**Casey Newton** (1:07)
It is great to be here, Tommy. Thanks so much for having me.

**Tommy Vietor** (1:10)
Thank you for doing this because it's so complicated, it's so hard to follow. Thank God for your show. But let's just do some big picture level setting and then we'll get to some specific stuff.
I think people are understandably very cynical about a claim that a new technology is going to change the world. You and I just lived through the blockchain revolution. I know that has changed my life in really meaningful ways. Bitcoin, etc. It sounds like marketing half the time, it sounds like hype.
It's even more head spinning with AI because you've got one group of people saying, life is we know what will soon be unrecognizable. Then another, I think, albeit smaller group is saying, large language models are stochastic parrots that predict speech and regurgitate stolen information from the Internet. Casey, help us level set. Where are you on the real to hype kind of continuum?

**Casey Newton** (2:01)
Yes. I mean, this is a case where everyone is a little bit right. And I think that all of these groups deserve at least some attention being paid to them. You know, I try to approach my job as somebody who just candidly, my bias is that I like technology. I think technology has been beneficial to human beings. I think we should keep investing in it and see what else we can come up with. But I also know that the recent history of technology is that we build things that may look very shiny or inconsequential on the surface and then turn out to be quite harmful. And so what I'm trying to figure out is basically what is happening in real time. Where do we need to be paying attention now to try to solve the harms that are already being created? And then I also want to ring a few alarm bells about what I'm seeing and some of the risks that I think might be waiting for us even within the next year.

**Tommy Vietor** (2:56)
Yeah, well, if you want to follow this in real time, I highly recommend you subscribe to Platformer, Casey's site. It's excellent. It's worth the money. Also, if you like democracy, please subscribe to what we're doing here at Kirk and Media. Go to kirkand.com/friends. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get bonus material, you get ad-free episodes. You don't have to hear me and Lovett doing the same ads over and over again.
You get bonus content. It's great, so check it out. All right, so the other kind of baffling thing about AI is it can be literally brilliant, right? I mean, it can solve problems that mathematicians have been trying to figure out for decades, and then it can be unbelievably dumb. I want to play for you one example, and then we'll talk about it.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:36)
I just wanted to double check which month in the year is spelled with an X. That would be December. It's got that X right in the middle, like a little holiday surprise. Okay, perfect. If you've got any other questions, big or small, I'm here to help.

**Casey Newton** (3:51)
Just to confirm, you're sure that it's December has an X in it?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:56)
I should have been more careful. I misspoke earlier. December doesn't actually have an X. The month you're thinking of is October. Thanks for asking again. Oh, okay.

**Casey Newton** (4:04)
Clarity is perfect. Spell it, please.
Sure.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:09)
October is spelled O-C-T-O-B-E-R.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:13)
There's that X sound, but it's actually just a C and a T. Okay, then which one has an X?
That's going to be February.

**Tommy Vietor** (4:23)
That is a hilarious Instagram account user. I don't know how to describe it. It's husk.irl. Highly recommend. There's hilarious shit over there. He's using the kind of voice feature on OpenAI or ChatGBT. Casey, how do we explain that one?