Surfing Through the AI Apocalypse with Jacob Ward

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:02)
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I'm Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever. Today, I get into the impact of AI over our creativity, our decision making, our choice, our free will, our inherent humanity with the journalist and CNN contributor, Jacob Ward. It's a fascinating discussion. Ward hosts The Rip Current. He's now an independent journalist after years at Big Media. We talk about that. And he has done research for years and years and years, even before ChatGPT came out, about the impact of giving over our brains to machines. It's a great discussion. I know you're going to love it.
Jacob Ward, welcome.

**Jacob Ward** (3:58)
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (4:01)
I mean, I remember listening to a podcast interview you did, I want to say a year ago maybe, and you were saying that you had spent a lot of time surfing because you were depressed about AI. So are you still surfing and are you still depressed about AI?

**Jacob Ward** (4:21)
Yeah, I'm still a little depressed about AI, but both of those things have changed.
I basically spent all of these years from 2016 to 2022 studying AI, reporting on its effects at a time when nobody else was really thinking about it or talking about it, except for this little circle of academics and professionals. Then I put out this book that was all about the ways in which it's going to affect us, and that book did okay, but was sort of ignored. And then 10 months later, Chia GBT came out. And so, and the book was all about the effects that I thought commercial AI might have on us, and it was very speculative. And you think you want to be right when you write a book like that. And it turns out that it kind of sucks, Morra, to be right when you've written a book warning people about something like AI, because then to like watch my thesis come to life absolutely drove me into surfing. That and I lost a job at NBC that I was really excited about. And so I was just in a dark little phase anyway. And as I watched AI really do what I do even more than I was worried it might do, yeah, it drove me right into surfing. I just decided I'm going to really commit myself to this for a while. And so now I'm not surfing as much. I now have a gig with CNN, and I have responsibilities again in my life. And I will say, I'm a little more, I am discouraged in some new ways, but I am encouraged in some new ways. And you're catching me at a moment of a little bit of upbeat.