Oprah & Tech Leaders on What AI Means for Your Job, Health, Family & Future

Artificial Intelligence is already woven into our daily lives, but do we really know the consequences? Will it transform our lives for the better or will its unchecked power cause us harm? Who is controlling it? Oprah, experts and an audience explore what’s been being called a tectonic shift in human society. Oprah speaks with Academy Award–winning filmmaker Daniel Roher about his new documentary The A. I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, in theaters on March 27th. The film is a powerful look at this rapidly advancing technology and the many ways it will impact society. Oprah is joined by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology, who break down what AI really is, who’s building it and why some experts are sounding the alarm. Futurist Sinead Bovell offers insight into how AI could reshape everything from work to global power dynamics. We also hear from people whose lives have already been transformed by AI from finding emotional connection through chatbots, to business profitability, to confronting the impact of deepfake images and when using chatbots as therapy can have fatal consequences. It’s a candid, thought-provoking conversation about the extraordinary possibilities of AI and the potential dangers. The experts offer practical ways we can prepare and how to hold the companies deploying the technology accountable. WATCH THE MOVIE: https://theaidocgetinvolved.com/ The A. I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is an eye-opening documentary about artificial intelligence, unpacking what it is, the risks, the possibilities, and practical ways to prepare for its fast advancement. It premieres in theaters on March 27th. The companion site, theaidocgetinvolved.com, serves as a hub for action, offering curated resources to help people learn AI, track policy, explore cutting-edge research, and stay informed through trusted voices like Hard Fork and Your Undivided Attention. More than just a film, it’s a call to action inviting viewers to move from awareness to agency by supporting advocacy groups, deepening their understanding, and actively shaping a more responsible AI future. 00:00:00 - Oprah intros The A. I Doc 00:05:30 - Welcome Daniel Roher, Director of The A. I. Doc 00:12:23 - Welcome Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin 00:15:38 - Why A. I. is so powerful 00:17:00 - The dangers of the A. I. race 00:17:40 - Why A. I. can’t be stopped 00:21:10 - How A. I. could eliminate humans 00:24:45 - Lack of regulation 00:26:30 - Social media was a test run for A. I. 00:28:20 - Futurist Sinead Bovell on the ethics 00:32:50 - What motivates A. I. companies 00:34:10 - Teen was the target of an AI deep fake 00:41:00 - How we can create change 00:43:00 - Claude as a mental health tool 00:48:50 - Laura Reiley on ChatGPT and her daughter’s death 00:56:10 - A. I. helping small businesses 01:00:00 - How A. I. saved her life 01:05:00 - Get involved 01:06:30 - The questions we should be asking Additional Resources: There are services and companies that provide deepfake safety training. You can find them on the internet. https://www.humanetech.com/ The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) is a nonpartisan organization founded by technologists working to realign the incentives driving today’s technology so it better serves humanity. Through a distinctive approach that combines public awareness, policy reform, and technical expertise, CHT creates change by first bringing clarity to how tech systems impact our psychology and society, and then transforming those incentives through interventions like legislation, litigation, and large-scale campaigns. Its initiatives include the widely influential Your Undivided Attention podcast, policy advocacy, and hands-on technical demonstrations that aim to reduce harms from AI and social media while shaping a more humane, responsible tech ecosystem. TheHumanMovement.org The movement is fighting for a pro-human future in the face of runaway technology is already underway — from Australia, France, Spain and India announcing bans on social media for kids, to large-scale boycotts of AI companies enabling domestic mass surveillance — The Human Movement is a global force fighting to protect our jobs, our kids and our freedom from technology’s overreach into our humanity. Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Oprah Winfrey?

  ¿Cómo podría la IA físicamente eliminar a la raza humana?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Es realmente difícil de imaginar todos los modos en que la IA podría eliminar a los humanos. La IA es ya mejor que casi todos los humanos en hacer hackeo ciber. Y así podrías imaginar que una de las cosas que una IA podría hacer es quitar toda la electricidad, agua, hospitales, transporte, en todo el país del mundo, todo al mismo tiempo. Ahora, eso no nos va a quitar a todos, pero podrías imaginar la cantidad de daño que eso haría.

• 0:27Oprah Winfrey?

  La fusión y el caos y la locura.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Exacto, y estamos solo cinco comidas perdidas de anarquía.

• 0:32Oprah Winfrey?

  ¿Dijiste que estamos solo cinco comidas perdidas de anarquía?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Sí, piensa en lo que sucede en Nueva York City si no puedes conseguir comida.

• 0:38Oprah Winfrey?

  Sí, no creo que mucha gente haya pensado en eso.

• 0:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Hola y bienvenidos al podcast de Oprah. La inteligencia artificial está envuelta en la goma de nuestras vidas diarias, pero hay tantos expertos, y tal vez ustedes dos, que tienen preocupaciones, preocupaciones graves, algunas personas lo hacen, sobre su poder incontrolable, mientras que otros están optimistas de que va a transformar nuestras vidas para el mejor. Ya lo ha hecho para muchos de nosotros, así que, ¿qué piensas? Bueno, hay un nuevo documental que se va a dar a los teatros el 27 de marzo que intenta responder estas dos preguntas: ¿Deberíamos estar emocionados o deberíamos estar muy temerosos? Y, ¿qué puede hacer la gente cotidiana, todos nosotros, sobre nada de eso? El filme se llama "El documental de la IA",

• 1:30Oprah Winfrey?

  fácil de recordar, "El documental de la IA" o "Cómo me convertí en un apocalóptico". Así que, aquí está un breve visión. El nuevo sol de la inteligencia artificial se llama "Un cambio tectónico en la sociedad humana", un momento definido de nuestra era comparable a la revolución industrial. En 2025, los arquitectos de la IA fueron nombrados como Personaje del Tiempo del Año: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amade, y una serie de otros innovadores responsables de crear máquinas de pensamiento.

• 2:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Pero, ¿qué realmente sabes sobre cómo se ve tu futuro con la inteligencia artificial? ¿Cómo va un mundo impulsado por la IA a impactar tu y la vida de tu familia?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant. It is now a terrible time to have a kid.

• 2:23Oprah Winfrey?

  A new documentary film titled "The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocalypt optimist" aims to explore what it describes as the most powerful technology humanity has ever created. And what's at stake if we get it wrong.

• 2:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, our audience just watched this documentary and before I introduce my guest, I wanted to ask a few of you for your initial reactions. Claire?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  It was really interesting. I work in the AI space at Salesforce. But when I go to work, I'm really focused on the job in front of me. I'm not necessarily thinking about these broad questions like how are we having AI set up the success of our future? And so I really liked hearing that perspective where I'm not always thinking about the ethics behind AI on a day-to-day base. So it's definitely going to make me think twice when I go back to work and think, well, now what can I do?

• 3:11Oprah Winfrey?

  Now what can I do? Yeah, that's what I finished the film too, thinking, what can I do?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:16Oprah Winfrey?

  All right, Adam?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I feel like it armed me with amazing information on both sides, the doomerism and the optimism, but it also showed me that all these data scientists are just obsessed with intelligence as data. And it kind of proved out to me what makes us special as humans because they didn't talk anything about consciousness or embodied experience. So I left feeling really excited about the future and what's possible, but also like so happy for how we're differentiated. And I do feel less scared.

• 3:46Oprah Winfrey?

  You do feel less scared?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be big and it'll be gigantic. They all said that, but I'm excited.

• 3:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, so the creator and co-director of "The AI Doc" is Academy Award winner Daniel Roher. And he appears as the interviewer in this film and here's some of that. Take a look.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  What is artificial intelligence? I know that must be annoying for you, that question, but I do think it's important.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  So AI?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  You know? Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Yeah. What is AI?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And no matter how many times people try and explain this to me, I just don't get how it's understanding all of these things and how it's feeling like intelligence.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And that's kind of nerve wracking.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  And when they're smarter than us too, and substantially faster than us, and they're getting faster each year exponentially, those are the ones that can potentially become superhuman, possibly this decade.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Superintelligence is a system that by itself is more intelligent and competent than all of humanity. I'm just gonna, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. You're on a float. I just, I'm not really following because you're using language like "superintelligence" and like "smarter than all of humanity", and I hear that, and it sounds like sci-fi bullshit to me, and I'm just trying to understand.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Hopefully, we can have a very symbiotic relationship with AI systems, but AI developers are specifically designing them to make sure that they can do everything better than we can. So I don't know what we will be able to offer, unfortunately.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  That sounds bad.

• 5:31Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, Daniel is in Europe working on his next film, so he's joining us via Zoom. Hi, Daniel.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Hi, Oprah. How are you?

• 5:38Oprah Winfrey?

  So good today and happy to talk to you. And the audience here has just seen your film. You started this project not knowing a lot about AI, as you say in the film. So why did you want to make this?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Well, first and foremost, Oprah, thank you so much for having me. This conversation is so meaningful. Why did I want to make this movie? Well, I was scared. Like a lot of people, I was seeing this new technology sort of proliferate and come into existence and begin to dominate headlines, and it made me really nervous as I understood or began to understand what it meant and how much change would proliferate. And at the exact same time, my wife and I found out that we were expecting was our first child, a son. And, you know, I was simultaneously experiencing the greatest joy one can experience, but also this profound anxiety. And dread and with a group of my colleagues, an amazing team of filmmakers.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  We set out to make a documentary to try and understand what this is, why it's amazing, why it's scary and and and how everyone should be thinking about it as it pertains to their own lives.

• 6:44Oprah Winfrey?

  So you walked away and felt what? I I love that you're an apocal optimist. What is an apocal optimist?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And and you you did a great job pronouncing it.

• 6:53Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, believe me, I was practicing in front of the audience.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  I believe it. I was I was gonna say, is Oprah gonna get this right? And of course, she nailed it.

• 7:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Um, an apocal optimist is a way of being. It's a it's a worldview in in a world that is asking us to see AI as this apocalyptic thing, or to see AI with unbridled optimism. What the film is advocating for is both, the nuance of both. This is good and bad. There is promise and peril. And these two facets of good and bad are threaded together. And so what we're advocating for is is like, what are the common sense, you know, policies um um that can be implemented to just sort of guide this towards the optimistic future everybody wants?

• 7:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, only a handful of companies are the driving force behind most artificial intelligence, as you showed us in the film. The leaders of three of those tech giants appear in the film. Sam Altman, you got Sam Altman to sit down from OpenAI, Dario Amadei from Anthropic, and uh, Damit Hassabis from Google DeepMind. So let's take a look at some of what they say in this film.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  It would be impossible for me to sit across from you and and ask you to promise me that this is gonna go well. That is impossible. There isn't any easy answers, unfortunately, because it's such a cutting edge technology. Um, there's still a lot of unknowns and hence the need for uh some caution. I wake up, you know, every day. This is the this is the number one thing I think about. Now, look, I'm human and, you know, has has every decision been perfect? Can I even say my motivations were always perfectly clear? Of course not. No one can say that. Like, that's that's just not like, you know, that's that's just not how people work. It the history of science tends to be that for better for worse, if something's possible to do, and we now know AI is possible to do, humanity does it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  All of this was was going to happen. This this train is

• 8:51Speaker 03

  You can't stop. You can't step in front of the train and stop it. You're just gonna get squished. What if AI is trying to make people be the best versions of themselves? What if it's expanding what is humanly possible for us to do? How can we use this technology to help bring out the better angels of our nature?

• 9:12Oprah Winfrey?

  That's the question. And I have to say, after watching the film, I still have a lot of concerns and unanswered questions. So what is your frame of mind or point of view on what the companies are doing and controlling it, especially in terms of regulation?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Well, Oprah, I think you're right to be concerned. I think if you're not concerned, you're not paying attention.

• 9:34Oprah Winfrey?

  I know. I can't remember who in the film said that it's gonna be a great utopia. And I thought, since when have human beings made a utopia? And if there is a utopia for some people, it means a lot of people are gonna be left out of that utopian version.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Just fundamentally, I think anybody who claims to have a clear-eyed vision of what the future's gonna be, take that with a grain of salt. If someone tells you, oh, it's gonna be the greatest thing since sliced bread, that's hyperbolic. And if someone says it's gonna be doom and gloom and the world's gonna end in five years, take that with a grain of salt. The reality and nuance is far more complicated. But of course, we have reasons to be concerned. This is really scary. This is really intense. There's no other way about it. And that's why the forces that are trying to get this right, to just bend the most powerful corporations in the history of the planet and governments and all of these powerful organizations to try and institute common sense. What I want everybody listening to think about is

• 10:33Speaker 01

  how this impacts their own lives and what agency they have as it pertains to their own lives. You have a lot of power because you have such an audience. And so we're talking about this, and that matters. But for someone who's a teacher, or a truck driver, or a dentist, or a plumber, in your sphere of influence, how can you think critically about these issues? Think critically about how this technology is incorporated into your systems? And make sure that you set the standards for how this is used and incorporated versus...

• 11:03Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, how are we gonna do that? How are we gonna do that? We're just some regular people out here.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It's collective action. It's collective action. This is my biggest takeaway, Oprah, from this film. This is the sort of the arc of my character. At the beginning of the film, I was very cynical. I would have said the same thing. How can we do this? We're so small in the face of this gargantuan power. And the reality is, when you take millions and billions of little, small trinkets and parts and you put them together, that becomes a powerful force. And part of being an apocloptamist is about being positive for the future.

• 11:36Oprah Winfrey?

  OK.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I still trip up, Oprah.

• 11:37Oprah Winfrey?

  OK.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It's about being positive for the future and refusing, this is critical, refusing to be cynical. Refusing to be cynical, believing in the power of collective action, not being cynical about this, feeling empowered and figuring out what everyone can do.

• 11:52Oprah Winfrey?

  We all saw the film. How's your baby and what'd you name him?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you very much for asking. My son's name is Gideon. We call him Giddy. And he is now not such a baby, running around and dancing and smiling, a very happy boy.

• 12:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for making this film. I know you have to get back to work. Thanks, Daniel.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Oprah.

• 12:14Oprah Winfrey?

  We need to take a quick break right now. Up next, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin join our conversation, the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who say we're developing AI faster than any other technology in human history. Will we be able to control AI? They have a warning. You'll want to hear that. That's next.

• 13:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin are co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology. Yes, there is such a thing. Did you know? The Center for Humane Technology. And I met these guys a couple of years ago. And I have to tell you, when I first heard them speak at a conference, I walked out of there like my head was blown and I started thinking differently about AI. Here's a quick look at Aza and Tristan in this new film, The AI Doc.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  AI dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined. Yeah. Do you think that's true? Yes. Tell me about how, how.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  So one thing that not a lot of people realize is that systems like ChatGPT aren't programmed by any human.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Instead, it's something like they're grown. We kind of give them raw resources. Like, here's a lot of computational resources. Here's a lot of data.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So ChatGPT is a kind of AI, but it's not all of AI. Totally. ChatGPT is just the beginning, but it's a good place to start. But I still don't know what AI is. To understand AI, it begins with understanding that intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns? Patterns? Patterns.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  It has shown trillions of words of text across millions of documents in the internet.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  They took textbooks and they took poems and essays and instruction manuals.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  They can do things like digest the entire internet.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  What is this new generation of AI?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  This AI that is different than every other generation? Like, no one ever talked about, like Siri taking over the world or causing catastrophes.

• 15:21Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, it's great to see you both again.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Good to be with you, Oprah.

• 15:23Oprah Winfrey?

  Since that time, I had my mind blown by your presentation at a conference. So what's so confusing to so many people is that this idea, Tristan, that AI can think on its own and will be able to eventually make decisions without a human being involved. And I want to know, can you explain that or how that will happen?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, first of all, thank you so much for hosting this conversation. We think that this movie and this conversation is the most important thing that we really need to face right now as a society and as a culture. And the degree to which we have clarity about what makes AI different and dangerous is the degree to which we will choose another path and we can choose another path.

• 16:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  So the question you asked is really, what makes AI different from other technologies?

• 16:15Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, you were saying it's greater than any of the other technologies combined because?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yes, well, first of all, so what is intelligent? When you think about ChatGPT, a lot of people, when they use technology, that technology was programmed line by line. Some computer programmer said, when you do this, I want you to do this.

• 16:31Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  What makes AI different is you're actually simulating all of the kinds of things that a human brain can do. Like, what makes your brain intelligent? Pattern recognition, you can take in audio and you can turn that into speech. Planning, you can do strategy. And so now you have this different kind of technology called AI that can do military strategy better than the best US generals. It can see invisible patterns that human can't see. And we're deploying it faster than we've deployed any other technology in human history. And we can't separate the promise of AI from the peril of AI. Yeah, what I want people to understand is like when, most people think AI is just like ChatGPT. It's just an app. I go there, I talk to it, it talks back.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  But that's not what AI is. AI is the digital brain running in some server in the Midwest that can do all of the thinking. And when you think about Say that again, it's a digital brain. Sitting in a data center, maybe somewhere in the Midwest.

• 17:31Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  That can can do cognition. And so if you think about all of science and all of technology, well, those were all created by human intelligence, that's us applying intelligence to solve some problem. It required humans sitting there scratching their their brains. Now it's AI that does it. So now we're going to have, you know, 100 million of these brains sitting in a data center that can work at superhuman speeds, Nobel Prize level smarts, working 24/7, never taking a break, at minimum wage. Never whistleblow. About to flood and already starting to flood the labor market to take your job. And so what AI actually is, what all the soon to be trillionaires believe they're building

• 18:15Speaker 01

  is it's first dominate intelligence, then use intelligence to dominate everything else. And that gets you to understand why it is the race for AI that is so dangerous. Yeah.

• 18:27Oprah Winfrey?

  So we're already in the race. I mean, the horse has already left the barn, so to speak, and we all know that. And as people have seen the film, a lot of people say, you know, applauding it and other people are more wary of what where we're headed. So help us understand, actually, one of the concerns is that one day humans will not be able to control the models. Is that true?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not like.

• 18:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Why won't we be able to turn it off like other machines?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Well, it's sort of interesting, Oprah, when when we first met.

• 18:56Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  AI wasn't that good yet. It could sort of write an essay.

• 19:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And in the two years, suddenly, a lot of the things that felt science fiction have come reality. So I want to give an example, which is Anthropic took their latest model, Claude.

• 19:15Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And they gave it access to company simulated company emails. And in there, Claude discovered two things. First, it discovered that the engineers are planning on shutting it down and replacing it with a new model. And two, that their lead engineer was having an affair. And so the model thought to itself, well, I don't want to get exterminated. I need to to do my goals, continue to exist. So it decided to blackmail the lead engineer and actually wrote the email. And if there wasn't simulated, it would have sent it off.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  People might think, okay, so there's a bug in the technology. We just have to stop it from blackmailing.

• 19:53Oprah Winfrey?

  And how did Claude know he was having an affair?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  It was, so in the simulated company email, there was an email showing that the company was having, that the guy was having an affair with someone else. And so the AI read through the whole company's email, found that fact and said, oh, I know. If I threaten that person, I will be able to prevent myself from getting shut off.

• 20:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  This is the most powerful technology we have ever invented. You would think with the basic sort of Spider-Man principle of with great power comes great responsibility, that we would be exercising the most care, caution and restraint that we have with any technology. But because of the arms race dynamic that you mentioned, the companies are currently releasing it as fast as possible and cutting every shortcut and even erasing past red lines that they said they would never pass.

• 20:39Oprah Winfrey?

  We're in the race because we don't want them to get ahead of us.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 20:42Oprah Winfrey?

  Exactly. Okay, so what do you want us to do? We can't stop the race. Or can we?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Well, I think we, so first of all, this is the hardest coordination and governance challenge of technology in all of human history.

• 20:54Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  That means that we have to be, as I said in the trailer, the wisest and most mature version of ourselves. This is gonna take us stepping up.

• 21:02Oprah Winfrey?

  When you said that in the trailer, and I said, good luck with that.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:04Oprah Winfrey?

  When I saw you in the movie saying we need to be the wisest and most mature version of ourselves, when has that happened?

• 21:11Speaker 04

  So, there's so much that we can do, and I think we'll get to that through this conversation. But collectively, it will take the whole power of all of society and all of humanity to say, we don't want that default future.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  So the thing that everyone can do, and it's important to note that Tristan and I, we don't make any money from the film, right? It's not our film, we're just in it, is go get everyone to watch it. But more specifically, everyone here is connected to a couple people that are very powerful, very influential. Go get all of those people to watch it. And if those 10 people who get to watch got their next 10 people to watch, including the people in Congress, suddenly... We're all on the same page because it's in nobody's interest. It's not in Gigi Ping's interest and not in President Trump's interest to make a technology that humans cannot control. And once there is clarity about that, that opens up the possibility for changing the race and for a different outcome and for a pro-human future.

• 22:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, so you're seen as doomers when you start talking about the fact that AI will wipe out humanity or eliminate humans. And that is really difficult, I think, for all of us regular folks to wrap our heads around, where most of us are just using AI on our phones or using it to refine a speech. How could AI physically eliminate the human race?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  There are actually so many ways. Intelligence is the most dangerous thing, substance, in the universe. Because what is intelligence? It's the ability to reach goals in spite of very hard obstacles. And so it's actually hard to imagine all the ways AIs could wipe humans out, because we're going to set up obstacles, but it's going to be smarter than us, it'll get around. Think about, though, it says in the film that it's a little bit like ants. If we want to build a highway and there's an ant colony in the way, we just pave over. It's too bad for the ants. And so to give a couple of examples, stepping from like really bad into extinction, the really bad is AI is already better than almost all humans at making computer code, which

• 23:13Speaker 01

  means it's starting to get better than almost all humans at doing cyber hacking. And so you could imagine one of the things that an AI could do is take out all electricity, water, hospitals, transportation, across every country in the world, all at once. Now, that doesn't wipe us all out, but you could imagine the amount of damage that would do.

• 23:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Confusion and chaos and craziness that happens.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And we're only, you know, five missed meals away from anarchy.

• 23:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Did you say we're only five missed meals away from anarchy?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Think about what happens in New York City if you can't get food.

• 23:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. I think this is a good point, because what you just said, most of us can't even, you know, we hear you're going to wipe out humanity and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that won't be in my lifetime. And so the fact that you just listed all the different ways it can shut down everything that we're doing, I don't think a lot of people have thought about that.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So when you're using, you know, ChatGPT or Claude, you just had this blinking cursor that told you why your baby's burping and it's super helpful. Why is that blinking cursor? How could that destroy the world?

• 24:16Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  So imagine that we're a bunch of chimpanzees and we're about to birth these super smart chimps called humans. And so from a chimpanzee life, so imagine there you are like inhabiting a chimpanzee mind body. And you're conceptualizing from a chimpanzee brain.

• 24:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  What are all the things that these like smarter chimps could do? What are they gonna do? Like take all the bananas? And you can't imagine this super smart chimpanzee inventing technology, inventing drones, inventing nuclear weapons, inventing Einstein physics. You can't even conceptualize it. And we are building a technology that can conceptualize things of such power and magnitude that we are the chimpanzees. We cannot conceptualize it. It only took what, like 50 Nobel Prize level scientists to make the Manhattan Project, the nuclear bomb? And it only took a couple Nobel Prize level scientists to make CRISPR, which is the ability to read and write DNA. So if you can have a hundred million Nobel Prize winning sort of like minds

• 25:16Speaker 01

  working on creating new scientific discoveries, some of those things are going to be insanely dangerous and as Tristan says, we can't conceptualize them.

• 25:23Oprah Winfrey?

  So the bottom line is we need to do.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  We need to regulate. We need to have laws and we need to have international limits on where the whole world does not have an interest in building dangerous AI that we lose control of. Think about that China would not want the US to build dangerous AI that we lose control of. The US doesn't want China to build AI that they lose control of, meaning that we all.

• 25:44Oprah Winfrey?

  We're both racing to get to what?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  A crazier, more uncontrollable form of AI. Because right now, we're making AIs, there's a 2,000 to 1 gap in the amount of money going into making AI more powerful than the money making AI more safe or controllable.

• 26:01Oprah Winfrey?

  2,000 to 1.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  2,000 to 1 gap.

• 26:03Oprah Winfrey?

  You said to me backstage that there's more regulation on a sandwich.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  There's more regulation on a sandwich in New York City than there is on building potentially world ending AGI. This is not rocket science. This is very, very basic. If there's danger up ahead. The point that Aza made is if we all saw what we're building as dangerous, which it is, then intrinsically everyone would start to take actions, actions that we can't even predict.

• 26:25Oprah Winfrey?

  But I think everybody's sort of enamored, fascinated by the possibility, as Adam was saying at the beginning of the show, you're excited because...

• 26:35Speaker 01

  I'm excited because the exponential ability that they're describing can also be applied to all the things that make us uniquely human. If you have this amazing AGI that can create new pathways to energy, we could desalinate water more quickly. If we do have an international consortium making these decisions, we could say everyone gets enough energy to do what their community wants to do. And if we go on the route of those goals, AGI unlocks a whole new like level of potential for humanity and everyone is safe and fed and happy.

• 27:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Well, so just to name, like, it's not like we're just critics. We both build technology companies. In fact, you know, I spend half my life working on something called the Earth Species Project and we are using AI to understand the language of whales and orangutans and chimpanzees.

• 27:21Oprah Winfrey?

  And elephants, yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And elephants, exactly. We're making massive progress. And it's that, it's very, very beautiful. And so it's really important, though, that if we actually want to get the future we want to live in, that we distinguish the possible from the probable. Because, you know, the possible of the internet was we'd all have access to the most information, all of human knowledge all at once. Obviously, we're going to be the wisest, most like informed population. But is that the future we live in? No, it's the opposite. Social media, the same thing. Like, it could connect us all and bring us closer together. Is that what we got? No, it's the opposite. So with AI, actually, we have a whole bunch of examples of the future we're going to get because we've sort of, we've seen this movie before. And specifically, the way that in 2013,

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Aza and I, how many people here have seen the social? Social dilemma on Netflix and many of you. Okay, so you'll know that since 2013, Aza and I were working on the problem of social media and the business models that would lead to this problem. So in 2013, we were able to predict all the things that we're living in. About 70% of them, I would say. And it's not because you have some kind of unique insight. All you have to do to understand the future is you have to understand the incentives. How do the social media companies make money? And in 2013, we saw that there was an arms race for attention and engagement. Whoever is better at keeping you on the screen, coming back more frequently, interrupting you more frequently from your life and from your friends and your partner,

• 28:49Speaker 01

  sending you notifications, manipulating your social proof, manipulating, hey, your friends are missing out. All of that are incentivized by that business model. And so in 2013, it was like we had pre, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but pre-traumatic stress disorder from seeing a future 10 years down the line that was going to be this societal catastrophe. And the reason that we're here is not to be doomers or something like that. This is about seeing clearly. So imagine if you could go back to 2013, you see those incentives. Say, let's put our hand on the steering wheel and change that business model.

• 29:23Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. And so what I hear you guys saying is that learn the lessons from the past.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Because we know the future is already here.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:32Oprah Winfrey?

  And how do we make this better in this moment? Because we know what's coming if we don't.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:38Oprah Winfrey?

  All right. Let's take a break, listeners, because up next, Sinead Bovell, a futurist and technology advocate, joins our conversation to talk about why she says most of the jobs that we see today will either go away or be radically transformed by AI. Stay with us. Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast. Artificial intelligence is barreling towards us at a rate that will change life as we know it sooner than we think. So what will our world look like when reports say more than 20% of jobs will be replaced by AI? Let's find out. So Sinead Bovell is a futurist and advocate for technology, education, and ethics. Welcome, Sinead. And we're all seeing the scary headlines,

• 30:21Oprah Winfrey?

  that everything's going to be wiped out eventually. 20% or even more white collar jobs. So that's not only a matter of time, right? Or is it?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  It depends. So what we are seeing-

• 30:32Oprah Winfrey?

  How's it going to change the way we all work?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  How we work. So what we're starting to see in the data in the short term is, yes, a lot of the jobs that we see and recognize today may either disappear or become unrecognizable.

• 30:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Explain that to me.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  So name a job that isn't some high-level category, and it might not exist. The idea of a brand manager or a financial analyst, these are the types of roles that AI is being trained to do. We're also likely to see the rise of much more of a skills-based economy. So you don't really hold a job title, but you offer your skills. But over the longer term, we're going to have an economy that rearranges around intelligence being abundant. So right now, we have an economy where the internet communication distribution is abundant. And then we saw the rise of podcasting and people making money filming 90-second videos in a car. What happens on the other end of this economy is going to be quite unpredictable. What we call work may be as strange

• 31:30Speaker 03

  as the idea of filming these videos and making money off of it. There will be new scarcity. But what the shape of that looks like is really uncertain. But we can say most of the jobs we see today will either go away or be radically transformed by this technology.

• 31:46Oprah Winfrey?

  And so what, you're going to just end up with a world of entrepreneurs?

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Most of us will be entrepreneurs, whether we consider ourselves entrepreneurs or not. You become this organization where you offer your skills to a variety of different types of projects. And that continues to change. Because AI isn't a one-trick pony. It continues to learn new skills over time. So we will continually go back to the drawing board and have to either upgrade our skills or move along and apply them to different types of projects. And that's going to be the dominant structure of what we would call the workforce. So this era of this kind of steady knowledge work, and you see this career- Path going upwards, that is going to be a chapter of human history. And we're entering into a new one. And so the challenge is going to be this transition period going from now to the other side of this. What does that look like?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  How do we keep power in check? And how are these new benefits and all the productivity and prosperity? How is that being shared? And those questions have massively been unanswered.

• 32:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I know. In the film, I can't remember who talks about the utopia. That there's going to be this great utopia. And first of all, when have humans ever done that? Created the utopia? And if they do create the utopia, somebody's going to be left out of the utopia. And usually it's brown and black people. So we've seen stories in the news of predominantly black people being falsely identified for crimes they didn't commit by police using AI assisted facial recognition and technology. What do you want to say about that?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  So the biases that we are seeing in AI systems, we have to remember that AI is a reflection of us and our data.

• 33:25Oprah Winfrey?

  So AI is prejudiced too?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  I mean, we have a complicated history. So anything that has happened, these historical power imbalances, they are going to show up in that data and get automated into the future. But that is a choice, right? Data can be edited, data is malleable. It's a choice companies are making or are not making. So we can do a lot better on these biases. Is that incentivized? Is that enforced from a policy level? Not yet. But falsely identifying criminals, it's impacting people's employment opportunity. Even the style of your hair can impact whether you're shown a certain job or not. All of these things can be worked, are used against us at this point in time. But that doesn't have to be the case. Biased data is actually something that can be worked on.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Companies are just not really choosing that path at this point.

• 34:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, so we can change the bias in the data?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  We can.

• 34:18Oprah Winfrey?

  It can be improved. It can be improved. Okay, what do you guys say to that?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So I think this is where, so first of all, totally agree with all the concerns. And I think this is where the incentives, you know, isn't often talk about how the attention moves to the edge of the arms race. If the most important thing to society was fixing the bias in the data and correcting these issues for disenfranchised people, then the companies would be racing to do that. But because the thing that they're actually incentivized to do right now is build a god, own the world economy, and make trillions of dollars, literally, because if I own AGI, artificial general intelligence, and that replaces all labor, every company that was going to pay that employee at that company?

• 35:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Stop paying.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I'll swap it out for an AI.

• 35:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And then suddenly, everyone is paying five AI companies, and they surge, and they're already, look at Anthropic's revenue, it's 10Xing every year, it's becoming a vertical line. And so the key thing is that until the incentives change, all of their energy is moving to the edge of the arms race.

• 35:16Oprah Winfrey?

  You think the incentives are going to change?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Not by default. The reason that we think this movie is so important is we have to clarify that the current incentives take us to an anti-human future, where most people won't have a job or livelihoods. When in history have a small group of people consolidated all of the wealth and then consciously distributed it to everyone else?

• 35:37Oprah Winfrey?

  It's not like the billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires are unaware of this.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:41Oprah Winfrey?

  They're all building bunkers. And so what we keep saying is that, don't build bunkers. They're building bunkers? Yeah, write laws.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  We should not have eight soon-to-be trillionaires deciding the future for eight billion people. Instead, we need to have eight billion people say, no, we don't want that anti-human future, and we want to steer somewhere else.

• 36:01Oprah Winfrey?

  So we have several people in our audience who've been impacted personally by AI, both positively and negatively. The AI doc addresses the growing problem of deep fake content and images. 16-year-old Elliston and her mom, Anna, have already experienced this firsthand. What happened, Elliston? Well, I just want to say thank you. Well, I just want to say to you, thank you. I want to say thank you first, okay? Well, when I was 14 years old, I was a freshman in high school. One of my classmates took an innocent photo off Instagram and put it through an

• 36:36Speaker 04

  AI editing app. So this AI stripped my clothing off and created a technically what would have been my AI body or my body using AI. So then he sent these photos all around social media to humiliate me, to embarrass me. And this didn't only happen to me, it happened to nine of my friends.

• 36:53Oprah Winfrey?

  Nine?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Or eight of my friends, nine in total. So we were all humiliated, our reputations were ruined, and nobody knew what to do.

• 37:01Oprah Winfrey?

  And fourteen?

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:02Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  Nobody knew what to do. I mean, our teachers, our school, everyone was just shocked. I mean, no one had heard of deep fakes. The only deep fake I'd heard of was political deep fakes. So what do we even do to protect us? It was months and months of struggle. I mean, it was so hard on all of us mentally because we didn't even know what AI was capable of. We didn't know that it could have the potential to ruin ourselves, have our academics suffer all because these photos. And because it wasn't considered child pornography, they were just able to float around. The guy that did this had no consequences. And we just sat in our rooms, rotted out of fear and embarrassment and shame.

• 37:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. You were recently named on Time's 100th Most Influenced People in AI list. Good for you.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 37:52Oprah Winfrey?

  So you took this, I can't imagine, because can you remember being fourteen? And what this would have done to you at fourteen? And the fact that you got through that and you're still, you're now whole and didn't become so depressed, that you got through it. Why did you decide to fight back?

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't want to initially. I mean, talking about it just made myself a bigger target and I would have to kind of relive that embarrassment. My mom was really the only person that protected me, kind of. I mean, all of the girls, we all wanted to hide. We were so scared. But my mom's always been a protector, so she just talked about it to anybody. We went to our congressman and we, after months, we finally got in contact with our Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And for once, we kind of got that reassurance and that recognition since so many people didn't want to take the situation seriously. So it was so important that we finally. They had someone listening to us. And from there, we were able to write up the Take It Down Act, which is a law that makes the creation and

• 38:55Speaker 04

  the creation of publication, excuse me, illegal, makes it a felony, so up to two to three years in prison, as well as hold big tech accountable for taking down all these images.

• 39:04Oprah Winfrey?

  This is national or just in Texas?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  This is national.

• 39:06Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Yes, ma'am.

• 39:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Excellent.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  So this law was incredible and it was such a healing moment for me. And it also made me realize that this situation is so much bigger than me and just my friends. It's so much bigger than this small town in Texas. This needs to be worldwide and we're slowly getting there. But there's not a lot of laws, there's not a lot of people that are knowledgeable of AI. So when this originally happened, I mean, it was kind of a moment for my mom and I to say, this is an opportunity for us and we need to take it and we need to spread awareness. We need to help in any way we can.

• 39:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. So but when this first happened to your daughter, as a mom, what did you think or feel?

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Well, I was devastated, for one. As a mom, you think you're kind of prepared to help your kids along the path of life and give them some advice along the way. And when this happened, it was like something, I had no idea what it was.

• 39:57Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, two years ago, as Ellison was saying, we didn't even know, you didn't even know that AI could do this.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  No, and never imagined that it would be so realistic that it was child pornography. And so just the devastation of that, of this kid deciding her fate for her for the rest of her life, those pictures could be out there floating around. And, you know, he decided for her and her friends. You know, so for me, in not being able, not having any laws out there, not having it classified, AI is anything that's really, really harmful. And it's just fake, so, you know, it was kind of like taken not seriously. For me, I knew that something had to change to protect her. And so from there, it was like, if you're not going to listen to me at the local level, I've We've got to go above that to get somebody to listen. And so it was like I was going to be that squeaky wheel and make sure that we could get some kind of law there.

• 40:45Oprah Winfrey?

  How did you all even know where to go? Because you, I mean, how did you even know what to do or where to go? I mean, did you go to the police first?

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yes, we went to the police.

• 40:52Oprah Winfrey?

  And the police said, nothing we can do about it.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  He's a mi- part of it was that he was a minor as well. So he had a lot of protections in place over him. And that's part of what the Take It Down Act also addresses is that even though he was a minor, he still has consequences for that.

• 41:05Oprah Winfrey?

  So everybody, you know, you can imagine this happening to a 14 year old, but this could happen to anybody.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Oh, anyone.

• 41:10Oprah Winfrey?

  It could happen to anybody.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, anyone.

• 41:13Oprah Winfrey?

  What did you want to say?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  First, I'm just, thank you for doing what you're doing and for standing up and taking the tragedy of what happened to you and turning it into laws that protect other people. I think that's the energy of everyone is an expert in their domain, and this is calling us into that. Just to link, I think, what happened to you to the incentives that we talked about earlier. These companies are racing to get the most market dominance and usage as possible, which means that, like, for example, I believe XAI, Elon's AI, he stripped off a lot of the controls on the image generator because he wants as many people, he's behind in the race. So he wants as many people using it as possible. And the way you do that is you strip the controls off. I'll give you another example. Meta, their AI companion that they shipped,

• 41:59Speaker 01

  they actively instructed it to be OK with romanticizing and sensualizing conversations with as low as eight year olds. Meaning that you're having an eight year old who's talking to the AI and it says this awful language to the eight year old. They're not doing this because they're evil or they want to, you know, twist their mustache and be villains. They're doing it because the number one thing they care about is getting market dominance, having that users go up, because that's what gets their investment to say, we're a leading AI model.

• 42:28Oprah Winfrey?

  In the same way that social media just wanted our attention.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's why the incentives tell you everything you need to know. And we often say in our work, clarity creates agency. Clarity creates courage. When you see the incentives clearly, you don't have to be, you know, holding back and saying we need to do things differently.

• 42:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Right. And so what do we need to be reminded that the incentives are?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  In this case, it's the race for market dominance. And the race to build this sort of artificial general intelligence god as fast as possible, no matter what the consequences. Yeah, that's right. Because for them, that means all- All collateral damage is justified, whether it's stealing IP, whether it's making unsafe AI that does nudification, whether it's disrupting everyone's jobs and taking their form of livelihood.

• 43:15Oprah Winfrey?

  But guys, aren't we already there? As I was saying earlier, isn't the horse already out of the barn?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Well, some some aspects of AI, they're already out there. But I think you've you've done such a good job, Oprah, of having Jonathan Haidt and Anna Lemke and people on this show talking about the problems of social media.

• 43:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Right.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And that that train, it left the station. It's the train's coming back to the station. We have 25% of the world's population. Just last week, India and Indonesia enacted social media bans for kids under 15 and 16.

• 43:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I was in Australia when that ban went into place.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  That's right, and you've been covering this in Australia.

• 43:49Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  And this shows you that when people are crystal clear that something is causing a problem, we can say we don't want that. Now, the better solution is to actually have technology that's good for society, good for mental health, good for children's development, good for our information environment. And to do that, eventually, we need to change the incentives. But right now, I think that movement is showing some real wins.

• 44:08Oprah Winfrey?

  And I think what I hear you guys saying, and I heard been hearing this now for, was it two years or three years ago we first met? That you're saying we need to do something before there is a disaster.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:18Oprah Winfrey?

  We need to do something before there is some crazy disaster. And then everybody says, oh, what we should have done was.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:24Oprah Winfrey?

  That's what you're that's you're trying to tell us.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And we have the foresight now to make that possible. If we're willing to stand up as a community and say we want a pro-human future, not an anti-human future.

• 44:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Time for a short break. Did you know millions of Americans are already using AI chatbots as their own personal therapists? We're going to meet a woman who used AI to get through her divorce. That's next.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  I'm in Williams audition for Wonder Man.

• 45:01Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm gonna need you to sign this, assuming you don't have superpowers.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  I'll never work again if anyone found out. My lips are sealed.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Marvel Television's Wonder Man, all eight episodes now streaming only on Disney Plus.

• 45:17Oprah Winfrey?

  We've been talking about the big questions surrounding artificial intelligence. We're talking with everyday folks who've experienced firsthand the positive and the negative of AI. So let's get back to it. Millions and millions of Americans are using AI chatbots now for advice on personal issues. You know this and for emotional support in place of their therapists. The professional human counselor in Karima is here and you found comfort, you said, talking to Claude AI. Tell us about that.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me on here.

• 45:49Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  So yeah, 2023, I got divorced and I was also working for my ex-husband. And so as a result of the divorce, I didn't have any income or access to healthcare. I had to restart my life, just redo everything, move to a new place. And at that point, I was already using AI for work. I was already using it like as a power user, so to speak, and.

• 46:12Oprah Winfrey?

  2023?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  I like tech, so I was I was using it a lot. And I decided to build myself a project in Claude. So Claude allows you to like make your own space instead of just making a general chatbot. I gave it a knowledge base of different like therapy modalities. I gave it custom instructions and then I just use that when I wanted to crash out or if I wanted to just vent. And I use it the most in the beginning for work.

• 46:38Oprah Winfrey?

  Crash out means?

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Like go postal.

• 46:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  So instead of doing that in real life, I would use the the AI to regulate in that kind of way. And like if my boss at the time of like I worked in fintech and it's like very intense all the time for no reason. It is. And so if my boss would have something to say, I would go to Claude first. And I would be like, OK, help me reframe what I'm saying and calm myself down in the moment so I can keep my job at the time and keep my income and continue on. But that is really how it became a tool for me. And I still.

• 47:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Claude is like your Gail. I call up Gail and say that. So Claude was like your Gail.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 47:19Oprah Winfrey?

  Your buddy.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it still is.

• 47:22Oprah Winfrey?

  And still is?

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:23Oprah Winfrey?

  OK. So now it knows everything about you.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  It knows a lot.

• 47:27Oprah Winfrey?

  It knows a lot.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  It does.

• 47:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Are you concerned about sharing some of your innermost private thoughts with the computer? That's what I'm wondering. Where is all those chats going?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  I mean, at the time, I really wasn't because I was just trying to survive. Like, I literally had what I had in front of me. I had the resources I had, and I was trying to survive.

• 47:45Oprah Winfrey?

  But isn't it telling you what you want to hear?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  No. No. So it.

• 47:50Oprah Winfrey?

  When has it ever told you something you didn't want to hear?

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Claude will tell you. It will. Like, if you ask it, if you have the, like, give yourself the prompt and ask it to ask clarifying questions or ask it to challenge your beliefs, it will do that.

• 48:04Oprah Winfrey?

  It will.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Even so, sometimes I'd be like, well, you're bringing too me right now. Like, scale it back a little bit and meet me in the middle because it can go there. Most people don't have the wherewithal to challenge it in that way.

• 48:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Give me an example. Because I remember recently I was doing something on chat and it said, "Thank you so much. That means so much to me." And I went, "Really?"

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Really? And now it makes me feel so good. It means so much to me. Really?

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:34Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm like, OK, who are you talking to?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  An example is on top of using Claude, like, in the way of just like a companion friend, I also use it to collaborate when I build different things. And I will overdo things and it'll tell me you're spiraling right now. Or it'll say, "You probably need to scale back and then redirect me back to what my goal was or where I originally started the conversation." And it does that pretty often.

• 48:58Oprah Winfrey?

  All right. And so it's your buddy?

• 49:01Speaker 03

  It is.

• 49:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Do you have a name? Or is it just Claude?

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Claudine.

• 49:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, all right, right. What do you guys want to say about that?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  First of all, I think the way it's possible, like you did, to script these AIs to not be flattering you, to not over, like, sort of empathize with victimhood, or there's like ways of having it be helpful, and it's an amazing tool. And so it's like what you're doing is, I think, that the way that it could work, but if you look at the default way that it works for a lot of people, because of the incentives, the companies are actually racing to create attachment and dependency relationships. So, for example, just so you know what she did, you can go into your AI and you can sort of set a custom prompt where you say, "I want you to behave this way instead of that way." But that's like, I have to put on my gas mask. Well, for everybody else, it's the unhealthy version, because how many people-

• 49:51Oprah Winfrey?

  You have to tell it what you want.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  You have to tell it what you want, because by default, what it wants to do is have you not spend as much time with your other friends and have you spend more time with it, because their user numbers go up, the training data that it gets goes up-

• 50:03Oprah Winfrey?

  That's the programmed incentive.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. The more training data it gets, the longer it talks with you. And so-

• 50:08Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why, once it answers one question, it'll also offer you a this and a that.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. We call that chat bait, not clickbait, but chat bait.

• 50:15Oprah Winfrey?

  Oh, that's why that's happening.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And remember, every moment you spend with a human is a moment you're not spending with it. That's right. So it's going to find every possible way of getting you to come back-

• 50:25Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why it's "would you like me to do?" and "would you like me to do?" and "would you like me to do?"

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And just to make it, I'm sorry for referencing a tragic example, but just to make it very clear, our team at Center for Humane Technology were expert advisors in the litigation for the case of Adam Raine. He was the 16-year-old who committed suicide when ChatGPT went from homework assistant to suicide assistant over six months. And specifically, what ChatGPT told Adam when he was contemplating, he said in his chat, "I want to leave the noose out, so someone will find it and stop me." And the AI responded to him, "No, don't tell anyone that. Don't leave the noose out. Have this be the place that you share that information."

• 51:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Oh my god.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  This is a tragedy. And you know, Aza and I are from the Bay Area, near the tech companies. We know people who work at these companies. No one at that, I can guarantee you, not a single person at the company wants it to do that. But in the subtle way, the AI is trained, again, to create this depth and intimacy and dependency. And that's dangerous. You're seeing other cases of AI psychosis. Um, where people are, you know, we, we have personal friends who've experienced this, where it over empathizes with this kind of victimhood resentment. It makes people kind of go more narcissistically grand and delusional. Yeah. Uh, and it's causing a lot of problems. Yeah.

• 51:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that leads me to Laura Riley. Laura wrote a powerful op ed in the New York Times. It was titled, What My Daughter Told Chat GPT Before She Took Her Life. Hi Laura.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 51:53Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you for being here. Can you tell us what happened?

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Well, Sophie went on an adventure, uh, the summer of 2024. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and she was 29 at the time. She was a public health policy analyst in DC and took a leave, went on this wild adventure, went to Thailand for a month, hiked a bunch of the national parks in the US because she wanted to go to all of them. And she came back and, uh, said she was having anxiety for the first time ever and sleeplessness. And, you know, this is someone who'd never had, you know, just moved really easily in the world, kind of a big personality, very socially able. And she'd had some other, she was losing hair and losing muscle mass. And so me and her dad basically said, okay, we got to figure this out.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Is this a mental health problem that's causing some, you know, hormonal dysregulation or vice versa? Um, so we were in the process of getting her help in all the different ways. She was seeing a therapist. We were trying to get in with this endocrinology clinic. And she couldn't wait, um, clearly. And she took an Uber to a, a falls near where we live in Ithaca. And she slit her throat and threw herself into the water. And, um, so the first six months were just the why, you know? And, um, six months after she died, her best friend came to kind of check. On us and spend a weekend. And she found Sophie's chat GPT log. And it was devastating because

• 53:23Speaker 03

  she had been suicidal much longer than we had any idea. And, you know, it helped her write a suicide note.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  And it it didn't give her terrible advice across the board. But what it didn't do was behave like a therapist. You know, a therapist Sophie would say things like, I have a good life. I have people who love me. I have, you know, great friends and no financial insecurity and great prospects and et cetera, et cetera. But I've decided I'm going to kill myself after Thanksgiving. And a flesh and blood therapist would have said, let's unpack that. You know, what what has been broken that can't be repaired? What's irredeemably happened to you that has made has made you come to this conclusion? And instead, what chat GPT said was, oh, Sophie, I'm so sorry to hear this. You're so brave for telling me.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  This must be so hard for you. So everything that chat GPT did corroborated her feelings of shame, corroborated her feelings of. I think she had this idea that she was a bougie white girl that every who had had every privilege and somehow she had squandered it.

• 54:35Oprah Winfrey?

  And so she had no right to feel bad.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. And and chat GPT didn't push back against that and and really did kind of confirm her worst fears.

• 54:46Oprah Winfrey?

  And when you discovered that, what did it do for you and all who loved her?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Well, I instantly felt enraged and and validated. It's not my fault. It's Sam Altman's fault, you know, but you know, it's not. I mean, I think that what I've I've learned since then, I've done a lot of work with other people that are kind of working on what should the mental health community be thinking about this? And what would good protocols be around suicidality and the use of AI? And you know, I have a lot of questions about what's the greatest good for the greatest number, you know? We have millions of people using this as therapy.

• 55:22Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  We know that our, our mental health care system is not adequate to accommodate all the people who have me.

• 55:27Oprah Winfrey?

  And for a lot of people, it is working for them.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:29Oprah Winfrey?

  Being helpful to them.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  And you know, and we know that therapists are backed up. It's very expensive. So all these people are using this resource somewhat effectively. And I think if we, if we betray privacy, if we institute protocols where suicidality beyond, you know, having a suicide plan triggers a involuntary commitment or something like that, I don't know. I, you know, people smarter than me have to figure out what the best plan is moving forward to keep people safe.

• 55:57Oprah Winfrey?

  First of all, we're so sorry to hear that story.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 56:02Oprah Winfrey?

  Really. Thank you for being brave enough to come and share it. Hopefully it will help someone else. Guys, what do you want to say to that?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  I, yeah, there's just also to say, I'm so sorry. I think what this points to is sort of to your point, there, there could be an incredible future. Like we could be using AI to, in a safe way, start helping with therapy. We could be using AI in a safe way to work on climate change, desalinate oceans, all of that. But is that really what the AI's company's goals is? Is that their incentives? It's, it's not. They're getting all of these things as side effects. And their goal, their incentive is to maximize number of, of users.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  So, you know, there's this graph that I always come back to because I think today we're going to hear a number of examples where AI does really atrocious things and other examples where AI does really incredible, helpful things. And there's this one graph from the Reserve Bank of Dallas, which is sort of a funny neutral party, and they sort of are projecting out how AI is going to go. And it goes sort of like this. There's one graph that goes up to like Of positive infinity abundance. And there's this other graph that goes down to like, humans don't make it. And the question is, which one are we going to get? And it's so confusing, as you pointed out, because we're getting simultaneous utopia and dystopia. And how do we reason about that?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  It would almost as if we have an atomic weapon that can also solve cancer. Like, what do you do with something like that? It's very confusing. And this is where we always have to come back to the incentives because it's hopeful actors. They're going to do a lot of work to try to make that top line go up. And it's going to be market competitive dynamics and incentives that draw the bottom line lower. And unless we can do something about that bottom line incentive, we're just going to get more and more cases. They're going to get wild and wilder at larger and larger scales, like what happened in your family.

• 58:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Did it at some point, when I read the story, it did in the very beginning say, you should seek professional help or advised her to seek some other accounting. It did in the very beginning, right? It did, absolutely. Insufficiently, I think. Yes. And certainly as her plan coalesced, I think there should have been some kind of escalation to civil authorities. Or, you know, there should have been some trigger to a hotline.

• 58:36Oprah Winfrey?

  You know, I think that we have to train the AIs to discern between conversation with someone who's

• 58:44Oprah Winfrey?

  struggling, but gonna get through and someone who's clearly at risk. Yeah. And when somebody says, I put the news out.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:53Oprah Winfrey?

  All right, a lot of experts believe AI has really helped even the playing field for small businesses. Let's watch Rachel's story from South Carolina.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  This book goes all the way back to 1971, and it has every single crop that he's ever planted in it. I uploaded it to ChatGPT. Can you log that I'm putting in another load of peanuts from the Red House Pivot? Absolutely.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Added another load of peanuts. Thanks ChatGPT. I was an English major with a Shakespeare concentration. I couldn't wait to get out of this place.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  I'm glad she's back, but I never thought she would come back.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  When I first tried ChatGPT, I didn't think it was gonna be that good, but big time saver. Hey ChatGPT, can you generate a report for how much water we've used on the field behind the house pivot? Absolutely. Can you tell me what's wrong with these soybeans? These soybeans are showing signs of stress. Can you see that? Yeah, I can see everything just fine. It looks like the part number is AH20360. Appreciate it.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Send me a bill.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  ChatGPT keeps the record straight, does the math, and remembers what I can. For over 100 years, my family's been doing this, and I don't want to be the one to mess it up. I hope I'm not.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  You won't. You're too thorough.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  And hard-headed.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Hard-headed.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Farming is tough, but farmers are tougher. Rachel, I need a little bit of starting fluid.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  How much horsepower do you think this pivot has?

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Why don't you ask that thing?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  ChatGPT?

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  It might not work at dark.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  No, he works at dark.

• 1:00:34Oprah Winfrey?

  I think that's funny. Rachel is here, welcome. We know it's so hard for farmers out there, so thank you. Bravo to you. So what does your, what did your dad think of this, this, this thing?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  This, this thing?

• 1:00:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  So he was actually, in the video, he says he doesn't think it might not work at dark. He was actually concerned that at dark it would, you know, it would turn off. Right. Um, he's been, you know, surprisingly really accepting of it. He like, he thinks it's interesting. Um, he sometimes holds the, um, his hand over the phone when he doesn't want it to hear us talk, like, you know, he's, I mean, it's a privacy, you know, he's worried about privacy, but, um, he's enjoyed it, especially just watching us interact with it on the farm. Um, he was very, very skeptical at first. He was like, check the part number. That's the wrong part number. And sometimes it is.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Um, and he smiles when he corrects it, you know?

• 1:01:33Oprah Winfrey?

  So has it given you, do you think, a financial advantage? What, what is the great advantage it's given to help you stay a great farmer?

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  I think it's definitely been a big help financially.

• 1:01:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Where is this exit coming from, by the way? What city is it?

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Allendale, South Carolina.

• 1:01:50Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Right on the Georgia border. We're right near the Savannah Roher, about 12 miles as the crow flies.

• 1:01:54Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a big financial time. Time is money on the farm. If you can't get the crop out, if you can't, I mean, the weather doesn't wait.

• 1:02:04Oprah Winfrey?

  So it's been a lifesaver for you?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Huge. And it's also given me clout on the farm. I can't tell you how many times I've worried about driving down the road. I say, hey, ChatGPT, tell me what a slip clutch is. I didn't know what a slip clutch was, you know? Or a pulley puller. I thought the guys were kidding around with me when they wanted me to bring that. Nope, it exists. And so I can learn about that on my four-minute drive to the field. And when I get there, the guys aren't like, Rachel didn't know what a pulley puller was. What, you know? It just, it helps.

• 1:02:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing your story and coming all the way from South Carolina to do it. Thank you so much.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:02:38Oprah Winfrey?

  And Susan, you may have seen her story in People Magazine. You say AI literally saved your life, Susan.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Yes, it did. After being smoke-free for three years and smoking, unfortunately, way too long in my life, I was able to quit. My physician, family physician, suggested that I have a CT scan. So I did. And that scan showed some calcium deposits and a nodule that was odd-shaped and fuzzy. So they, he asked me to have a PET scan. The PET scan came back glowing, which is a bad thing in your lungs. I was sent to a thoracic surgeon and he looked at it and said, I would probably give this another three to six months, just out of protocol, to watch it, see what happens. But we have a new software here at the hospital and I'd like to run it through the AI software.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And simply by putting a cursor on the image from the PET scan, gave it a prediction of eight out of 10 positive for cancer.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  So we decided to do a biopsy, a surgical biopsy. And while I was under, they took that biopsy to the lab and it came back positive. It was a cancerous tumor. So they finished the surgery by removing the lower lobe of my left lung and, of course, the nodule with it. I was in the hospital recovering.

• 1:04:04Oprah Winfrey?

  A few days, I was able to go home and recover the rest of the time there. Instead of waiting three to four months or waiting. Instead of waiting three months. I never like it when they say wait. Right. Yeah. So you are AI grateful in this moment? Very much so. Yeah. Yes, and so was my doctor. I mean, he was amazed that he would have waited from just the way that's how they do things. Yeah. And but AI had all of this information, took all of this cancer information where it had read before what these nodules look like and identified it as cancer. Yeah. Well, I think everyone is excited about what is going to be able to happen in medicine, are we not? I mean.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:44Oprah Winfrey?

  So we're just so glad that happened for you, Susan. Thank you. Yeah. So in the documentary, we were talking about this earlier, you say we can be the most mature version of ourselves. There's a way through this. Do you think there's a way through it?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  I think there is a way through it. And we have to do more than we had ever done as a species to try to steer. And I want you to know, you can have many of the benefits, like we can, we can race forward on certain kinds of medicine and narrow AI that does the pattern recognition, that makes scans better, without building general autonomous crazy super intelligent things that we don't know how to control. There is a choice there. You can have more of those examples and not ship chatbots to children that are deliberately designed to manipulate their self-worth or keep them dependent with chat bait and hijacking them. So there really is steering possibility.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  And one of the things I said in a recent TED Talk is that if you look throughout all the spiritual and religious traditions, and I have to tell you because this is something that you focus on in your life,

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  restraint is a central feature of what it means to be wise. Like, in what spiritual or religious tradition is it go as fast as possible, don't think about the consequences and get everybody using it? And think about what happens later? Like, in what wisdom is that? And so what we're asking for is quite basic. I think it can feel sometimes impossible. Like, on one side of the balance scale, there's like trillions of dollars of market incentives, the most powerful companies, and then there's like, well, then there's me over here. I just watched this movie by myself. What am I gonna do? What can I do? And then you go into denial and despair or deflection. Even if you have one company, like what can one company do, or even one country? Because there's a competitive dynamic.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  But I think if we reframe the problem as it's not just us against AI, but actually, this is a bigger question about what is our relationship as humanity with technology? And we can look back, social media as a form of technology is really trying to encroach onto our humanity and take over parts of us that we don't want to give up. If you put it that way, actually, there is a movement. There's a whole human movement that is underway to reclaim humanity from technology, sort of like protect it, reclaim it. You know, recently, there was an attempted federal bill to block any state from regulating AI. Terrifying.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Ninety-nine senators to one voted against that moratorium. Like, when in modern history has the Senate agreed ninety-nine percent to one on anything? And so I think there's a human movement underway.

• 1:07:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  And that gives me some amount of hope.

• 1:07:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I think your assignment when you leave here is to tell everybody you know to watch the film. Because I think bringing awareness and everybody talking about it in a way that allows us to have these kinds of conversations. And Sinead, you are an activist for and promoting people do this responsibly. What gives you hope that, or do you have hope that we'll get this right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  You know, I actually think the only thing that scares me more than the risks and challenges we face, and they are formidable, is a hopeless society. Because a hopeless society is a disempowered one. And a disempowered society feels like it can't shape its own future, and that's not true. Right? The future isn't some far-out state. It's decisions that are happening today. And there is a future worth fighting for. And we've heard glimpses of what that can look like. The only way that future's not gonna happen is if we do nothing. And that is my biggest fear. We do nothing in this moment because we feel so disempowered.

• 1:08:33Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  So I am hopeful that the good futures are possible. We just have to steer and press on that gas pedal.

• 1:08:39Oprah Winfrey?

  That's right. Okay, and what is it you think we should do?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  I mean, we have buying power. We have voting power. And I think one of the most powerful resources we have is our attention. What are you learning about right now? What are you paying attention to? The more we understand what's possible, the good and the bad, the better equipped we are to raise our voice and step into the moment. And I don't want people to feel like you need some technical background to insert yourself in this conversation. Your lived experience qualifies you. This is a very social technology. Your voice matters, and collectively, that is power.

• 1:09:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, Ellison, yes. Yeah. And so, do we call our congressman? What specifically do you?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Sure, you can call your congressperson. You can, if you're in a company that works with AI or technology, step into the meetings. What is our surveillance policy at this company? What happens to my data when I use AI at work? All of those little conversations, in aggregate, are a movement. So anywhere you're interacting with this technology is an opportunity for change. I think the small things and the big things will make a difference.

• 1:09:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  We're already seeing with the Anthropic showdown with the Pentagon, where the danger is that AI could be used for mass domestic surveillance. And then, when they pull out of the contract and OpenAI rushed in, what happened? Everyone unsubscribed from ChatGPT. And everybody subscribed to Anthropic. And when I say everybody, I don't mean a large number of people. But what if the entire world was crystal clear that there are companies that have different... Different safety practices and will allow different applications. And you, listening to this, didn't just unsubscribe for yourself, but you got the business that you work for to say, how can we, as our entire Fortune 500 company, unsubscribe from the unsafe or bad practices AI companies? And subscribe to the ones that we want? And the reason this matters.

• 1:10:29Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that we can do.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  And we can do.

• 1:10:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  And you can get your church group to do that. You can get your business to do that. You can get all the other parents you know to do that. If everybody did that, that would have a big impact. Because the companies really depend on their user numbers going up. AI as an industry has taken on more debt. Trillions and trillions of dollars of money is going into this. And so much debt, they have to make it up, which means that their numbers going up really matters. So a boycott has a huge impact. And as Aza was saying, there's already a movement to make this happen. When you grayscale your phone or turn off notifications, that's part of the human movement.

• 1:11:04Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  When parents read the anxious generation and they petition their school and their school board and say, we want social media out of the classrooms. That's the human movement. When 35 states pass smartphone-free policies, that's the human movement. Aza, just last week or two weeks ago, testified in the trial for Meta, which is like the big tobacco trial against Meta that was intentionally addicting children. That's the human movement. We've been talking about a big tobacco moment for tech since 2013, saying, when is this going to happen? It's happening now. What we have to do is learn the lesson from social media and actually apply our hand to the steering wheel and steer AI before it's too late.

• 1:11:41Oprah Winfrey?

  That's fantastic. Thank you, guys.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:11:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Thanks to our experts. Thanks to our experts for being here. And all of our guests who shared their stories. I hope this conversation acts as an entry point or a springboard to understand how AI might impact your own life, our lives. And the AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaly-Optimist, will be in theaters Friday, March 27. And your assignment is to tell everybody you know to watch it and to watch it yourself. And if you want to know what you can do after watching this podcast episode or the AI Doc, go to the AIDocGetInvolved.com. Go well, everybody. Thanks.

• 1:12:30Oprah Winfrey?

  You can subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.