Into It: The Conversation We’re NOT Having About AI

Today we're sharing an episode of Into It: A Vulture Podcast with Sam Sanders AI is making fake Drake/The Weeknd songs, weird images, and there’s a worry that TV and movie scripts could be written by ChatGPT. But it’s also about to dramatically change the way we consume, share, and obsess over pop culture. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, explains to Sam how pretty much everything we search on the internet is mediated by Google… and how AI is about to disrupt it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's your friend Neelai. We've got a little surprise in the Vergecast feed today. My friend Sam Sanders hosts the Intuit Podcast over at Vulture. It's all about culture and entertainment. It is great listening. And he and I got to talking about the internet and how much entertainment writing on the internet is built around people Googling for TV show recaps and Marvel explainers and how that entire ecosystem might change as AI changes search. If you've been listening to the Vergecast, you know I'm obsessed with how AI might change search and how that might change the future of the web. And it was really fun to talk to Sam about all that from his very different perspective. This conversation is almost like a mirror image of the Vergecast. I think you're really going to like it. Okay, here I am on Intuit with Sam Sanders.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Hey, you are listening to Intuit from Vulture and New York Magazine. I'm Sam Sanders, and today we're gonna talk AI. Usually, when it comes to entertainment and pop culture, the AI conversation is all about the content AI can make. The fake Drake songs, the crappy AI images, all the worry over TV and movie scripts written by ChatGPT or whatever. And all of that is important. But when it comes to entertainment, there's another AI conversation we should be having that we are not having yet. And it's all about how the rise of AI is gonna change the way all of us consume pop culture and share it and obsess over it together.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  My friend Neelai Patel over at The Verge, he has been talking with me about this for a while. And this episode, he will talk to you about this as well. It's a really simple idea. Basically, at some point in the near future, AI will end Google's current dominance of the web. Right now, most of us Google search to navigate the internet. And most websites build themselves knowing that you will probably get to them through Google. But what happens once we all stop Googling and start using AI to just like, give us the answers? Without us having to go to a website to find those answers? How does that change our relationship to TV and music and movies and books and video games?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  And how we find out about that stuff? And how we obsess over that stuff? And how we share our ideas about all of that stuff? Neelai says it changes all of that, a lot. So this episode, he will explain. All right, let's get into it.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  So you and I talked at a little conference called South by Southwest, all about how the internet as we know it is about to change in a big, big way. For the last decade or two or even more, the internet was built in the shape that Google formed. You know, we have an internet that is search-based. And so the conversation now is like, if AI is ascendant, what happens to Google? What happens to search? And what happens to internet as we know it? There's another chat that the entertainment field isn't having that is just as important. And this is a conversation about the shape of the internet.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  When Google is no longer dominant and what that means for the creation and consumption of pop culture.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, not even dominant. What happens when Google changes?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, maybe that change will be less dominant, maybe it'll be more dominant. But the thing that we're used to is a world where most of the web is designed to Google's specifications, so Google search can find it. And if Google search changes, what Google wants changes and the web will change. And what's parallel to that, you have all of these places in the culture that Google can't see. Like, Google can't search TikTok. That's pretty wild.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Oh shit.

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  Right? Google can't search Instagram. Google really doesn't show you a lot of like, Substacks. So there's all these pockets of culture that are sort of developing outside of the gaze of Google. And then there's the pockets of culture, like the architecture of information on the web, that is kind of more readable by the Google search robot than it is by human beings. And that thing, when it changes, it'll go from being invisible to most people to being the most visible thing ever. Right? This, this thing you take for granted, I can type a question into Google and I'll get a list of links to websites that will answer the questions. When that changes, just think about all the people you know who do that 100 times a day without thinking about it.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  Think about how many times you do that without thinking about it.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  It me. I can't live my life without Google search.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  And if Google search starts answering the questions itself, if AI starts answering the questions and doesn't send you to a website, all the sort of like, SEO consequences that we see out in the world will change.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Also, just really quick, we should point out, SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you aren't in a newsroom or dealing with websites for a living, you don't know what it means, but basically it means gaming your website and your URLs for prominent play in Google search.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so if you are the lucky person who convinces Google that when people search for chocolate chip cookie recipe, that you should be the first result. You have a business, right? You can put ads in that business. You can sell chocolate chips. You could do whatever. You're gonna get a lot of traffic from people searching for chocolate chip cookie recipes. If you're at the bottom of that list, or heaven forbid, on the second page, you don't have a business. So there's a huge fight to be at the top of those results. And it means when you actually go click on what's at the top of the result for chocolate chip cookie recipe, that page looks bonkers because it's designed to game Google and not necessarily be useful to people.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  And that is, that is 100% why recipe blogs have like 2,000 words of text before the actual recipe.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Explain to our listeners who may not realize it, how much the internet that we know right now is kind of run by Google. When you told this to me, I was like, I had never thought of that, but huh, makes sense. In a nutshell, can you tell us how much of the internet as we know it is shaped by Google and has bent its will towards Google's whims?

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so just think about the experience of using the web. You are opening a browser, which is probably Chrome, which is owned and developed by Google. You are often starting your journey on the web on google.com. Do you know how many people search for the word Facebook to get to Facebook?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  All the aunties.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, Google knows this. They're like, a primary use case for Google is navigational. And so we don't mess with those pages. We don't put featured snippets or have the AI do it. We're like, here's the link to Facebook. So a huge number of people are just getting around the internet, like, in the most basic way by asking Google to help them. Then you land on a webpage, and most webpages that are free are monetized with advertising.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  That Google runs.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  That Google runs. At every point in sort of the chain of technologies that put advertising in front of you on the internet, Google owns a company or a technology that is the one or two player in that marketplace. So...

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Ad tech is a complicated thing, but basically, Google is in prime position to control it end to end. So if you have a website and you've got ads on that website, Google is in your business. They know what's happening. They're the ones providing the targeting. They're the ones serving the ads, the whole thing. That's Google. And then, if you want to get traffic to your website, you can buy ads on Google and people searching for car insurance, the car insurance companies literally buy the keywords. So they show up in search results at the top of the list, or you can play these SEO games. And that means there's an entire industry of people who help optimize websites to show up in search engine rankings. And they're SEO experts. And I would tell you that they are more like

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  a priesthood than a consultancy, right? They interpret what Google says about what it wants the web to be into rules, into design. So if you look at websites, their design of most websites has become the same over time.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  For Google.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  Because it's easier for Google to understand that.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So, yeah. So this is the thing that I realized once you told me this. I think we always imagine that Google is just code that is nonpartisan, unbiased, probably not changing and kind of just works. But in actuality, Google is internet wise, a god who asks its subjects to consistently tweak the way they do things to make it happy.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Google is a company, just like any other. It has employees. The employees have arguments. It makes a lot of money, but it projects this exterior image of just being your friend, the search provider that has slides in the office and a big colorful logo. And you peel one layer off of that and you're like, oh, this is a company that makes a lot of money and has a lot of investors who want the company to make more money. And the thing that makes Google the most money by far is search. It's the entire business. And that business is an advertising business. And I am talking on a Vulture podcast. And if I just ask you to imagine what an advertising business looks like, you already know, right?

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  It's an ad business. It's a, they're trying to get you to buy stuff. And they help companies.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  I'd be reading these HelloFresh ads. I should do.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  And you know, like that piece of it, Google hides that aspect of what they do. They're in the business of helping companies find an audience for their products and then getting you to buy those products.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  We've explained how dominant Google actually is when it comes to internet and how much they bend everything to their will. That's about to change. Allegedly, I keep reading these articles that say, pretty soon, at some point, we won't experience the internet through Google search, we'll experience it through AI and AI search. I want you to tell me at a one-on-one level, what that actually looks like, Neelai.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  So, Google search now, you're looking for a chocolate chip recipe. It finds a bunch of websites with recipes on them. You go to one of those websites. And that's Google search and that is the default way of operating the internet. AI search is, an AI chatbot just tells you a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Right? ChatGPT just tells it to you. Or you say, hey, I'm looking for a TV for my living room. It needs to be about this size. I want these features. And right now, Google search will take you to The Verge, or it'll take you to one of a hundred of our competitors. In the future, an AI is just gonna be like, here's a list. I went and read the internet for you and here's a list of TVs that meet your specs. And that is a big threat to Google, right? Their whole business depends on

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  selling the advertising to be the, you know, the first sponsored result. And then selling the advertising across the whole web when you click on those links. If ChatGPT is just answering questions like that, or Bing, which is powered by ChatGPT, is just answering questions like that and taking market share from Google, this is a big threat to them. It also changes what kinds of questions you might ask the internet, right? If you can now ask these vastly more general purpose questions. Hey, can you write me a resume? Like, you would never type that into Google today.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  Right? But now you might ask a chatbot. So now you're, you're changing your relationship to the computer.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, yeah.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  And so Google I O released a bunch of these features, right? There's a preview of a Google search that is much more AI-driven, that does talk to you just like that. You can ask it follow-up questions, which is really interesting. They're building a generative AI function directly into Gmail and Google Docs. So you can say, hey, write a note to my boss that says he did a good job. This was a demo on stage.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  The whole thing. They're doing the whole thing. And they need to prove that they can do the whole thing. Because the threat to the business, the conventional wisdom, is that they're behind. And these new AI companies like OpenAI, like Stable Diffusion, like these new tools that we're seeing will somehow disrupt Google because they were late.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. This is the question I have for you now. How in the hell was Google late? They're supposed to be smart. They're supposed to be powerful. How did they get caught off guard? It seems like they were caught off guard whenever I read about the rise of AI.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  Google invented a lot of this technology. They're the first to tell you that the T in ChatGPT stands for Transformer, which is technology that was invented at Google that allows for those large language models to just talk to you like a person. They just didn't deploy it because they were scared of being wrong. And this is like a very classic business problem, where the big incumbent has too much to risk, makes too much money. And then the smaller startup can come along and say, hey, this is a little bit crappier, but it's a little more fun. And use this instead, and over time it gets better and it unseats the incumbent. And this happens all of the time in the technology industry. And right now, it looks very much like they're in a cycle of, here's the big, extremely lucrative,

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  kind of getting a little worse search engine because of all the content farms and SEO scams. But we invented the technology and we're afraid of ever getting anything wrong or the AI hallucinating, so we're just going to demo it. And then suddenly ChatGPT shows up and it's like, yeah, this thing will just lie to you. Bing is like, yeah, this thing is definitely going to try to bang you. Like, no hesitation, Bing is like trying to get in your pants, right? And Google's like caught foot footed because they weren't willing to take those risks.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, also, was part of the reason Google was slow on embracing or trying AI was because the company had become so reliant on an ad-heavy business? And it seems like ads work a lot less and make a lot less money when AI is dominant.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's something to that. Again, they did invent all the technologies. Sunil Barchai has been calling Google an AI-first company for seven years. I have watched him give demos of AI chatbots since at least 2015. So it's not that they missed it or they didn't invent it. Again, they invented the underlying technology that is making all this happen. It's they wouldn't turn it into products because of the thing you're talking about. Their existing products were too lucrative.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  And I'll give you just one extremely narrow example. Right now, a Google search, right, they've got to have computers that actually run the search and display the results to you. A Google search costs nothing, right? If you just think about the cost to Google and just like electricity, right? They've optimized this so much over the past 20 years they've been running Google search. You type something into Google and a computer spins its wheels and gives you an answer and this costs like fractions of a penny. I know people who have released AI-based chatbots where every question costs 10 cents.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  What?

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Yep, just 10 cents of computing power. That's how much every query to some specialized AI chatbots will cost. But if you're staring at the market and you're like, we're working on this technology that we think one day will change search forever. And right now, there's no competition to search. So we're just going to keep working on it and try to make it cheaper before we roll it out. Like you, as a rational business person, you would never say, okay, when this user pushes a button, it costs us fractions of a penny. We're going to replace it with a thing that costs us 10 cents without any competitive threat whatsoever. You would just never, you would be a horrible business person if you made that choice without a competitive threat. But now there's the competitive threat. And the competitive threat is from ChatGPT, it's from Microsoft, it's from all these other companies. And Microsoft in particular is very happy to

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  show up and say, yeah, we're just, it'll cost 10 cents, but you'll use us instead of Google. And this is the first time we've taken market share from Google in search. And Google's version of the internet might become Microsoft's version of the internet. Like, what if we all start changing our websites, changing our content, changing our search strategies to tailor, to be better for Microsoft instead of Google?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  All right, time for a break, but you know the drill. We are currently on the Intuit team campaigning for a team pizza party. I have been told by the powers that be, if we get enough ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts and other apps, we'll get some pizza. So I'm asking you to consider rating and reviewing this show on Apple Podcast, following the show, all of these things. I have this big dream. And we'll see if it works out. We'll clear it with legal. Once we hit this benchmark, I want an IRL pizza party and I want it at Chuck E. Cheese. And I want some folks who are listeners to be involved too. I've got dreams, but to get

• 18:17Speaker 02

  there, you gotta help us out. Rate and review. I will thank you with Rat Pizza. Yeah, it'll be great.

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• 19:36Speaker 02

  This is what I really want to get into, and this is what makes it a vulture conversation, because I'm really obsessed in how this shift to AIville and all of the internet, how it affects the creation of popular culture and the consumption of it. Let me give you an example. Beyonce's tour just started this week.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I am going to see her at the end of the month in London because I'm stupid and gave her all my money. But a thing I do every day now is just Google up on Beyonce and that tour. I Google every few hours and see if there's new images. I Google every few hours and see if there's reviews of the concerts already. I Google every few hours and see if there's more talk about whether she'll release the visuals or not. I look online for people who are writing fun stuff about it and online communities talking about it. My entire consumption of Beyonce and her tour and the run up to going to the tour is Google based. And it's this weird way that I'm kind of building my internet community and anticipation.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Around this event. Seriously.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  It's Google based.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Seriously. It's Google. I'm searching. And then if I'm not searching on Google, I'm like searching like on Instagram, but it's search based.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  How does that creation of internet community and anticipation around a piece of pop culture change when it's AI?

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I don't know how to give myself constant Beyonce updates every few hours every day till I see her on tour. When it's AI.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  So I'm surprised that it's search based because I, I think we saw, we all saw this arc with Taylor Swift and her tour and it's all TikTok based, right? Everyone's, everyone's.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I'm 38 years old.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just funny because this is another threat to, to Google's dominance in searches. People are just searching TikTok for stuff all the time. You want to know how to cut an onion? TikTok is actually better at showing you the answer than Google right now because it's just going to show you a hundred videos of people and their weird ways to cut onions. You want to see Taylor Swift played in the rain last night in Nashville? TikTok is going to show you a hundred videos right away. But you know what I mean, right?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  I want to look at that flying glitter horse that Beyonce rode.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  You want to see that? Where are you going to find that right away? You're going to find a hundred videos of that thing on TikTok. You're not going to Google it and then like go to a webpage that probably has embed of a TikTok. So this is already moving.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  I'm already old.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's, it's already moving in this other way. And you're using Instagram. So it's, it's kind of the same vibe, right? It's a more visual, more immediate search experience. But then there's the lore. Right? You, the Bay Hive has, is looking for Easter eggs in this show. They're looking for setlists. They're looking for all this. That is structured data, right?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  I just TikTok searched Beyonce horse.

• 22:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  This is a better experience.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  It's a way better experience, right?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  But you look at, you look at sort of the lore, the world building that everyone wants to do with every kind of property right now, and all of that is targeted at search. Guardians of Galaxy Three is happening.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  This is the thing.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  And.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  It's search.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  It's search. You think about how many entertainment publications or entertainment writers spend hours of productive time, knowing that people are gonna search for the post-credit scene of a Marvel movie, knowing that people are desperate to find out who Taylor is dating today, right? Like, and all of that stuff is search demand driven. And so now people launch properties. Like Marvel knows it has to seed the lore before a movie comes out. So it's available to you.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  And so like, we've built an architecture of information around culture, around entertainment, that you know that people are watching this stuff with a phone in their hand, or the first thing they're gonna do when they're done watching the movie is Google lost, ending explain.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes, exactly. I'm sitting here still stuck on all these Beyonce on the horse videos, and let me tell you, she's, she's one of the four horsewomen of the apocalypse.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  She's got that leg up and she's high in the air.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  And I'm like. She's high in the air. Man, if I was still a church kid, I'd be putting the blessed oil on my phone. But I'm not, and I love it.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  If I'm like, I'm not going that high.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  So even though I'm still searching on Google, the young kids that were searching for Beyonce content on TikTok, they're still using search, right? And I'm even thinking, like, I'm finally at some point gonna finally watch Yellowjackets. And when I finally do that, I'm gonna search to see what Vulture wrote about it. I'm gonna search to see which app, I think it's Showtime, I don't know, how much does that cost? Where do I get to do to find it? I'm gonna search Christina Ricci and see what she's been up to, because she's in the show. I'm gonna Google some recaps. I'm gonna search for funny tweets about this show. My consumption of this thing will be search-based, whether it's Google search, TikTok search, Twitter search.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  What happens when the certification we all do around the pop culture we love becomes AI based? And I kind of want you to give me an example from your world of culture consumption.

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so whenever I'm done watching anything, I just start Googling it. So an episode of Succession is over and I'm already looking for somebody to write a recap of a thing I just watched, to tell me what Easter eggs I missed. And I just find that incredibly delightful. Like it's, it's, it's like I was really enjoyed watching whatever I was watching. Now it's over and I'm going to relive it again and text. I don't know why I do this. I didn't do this before, but now it's just a habit that I have. I think it picked up with Game of Thrones in particular, right? And if you're at the place where you're like.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Beyonce on this horse could be in Game of Thrones. I'm sorry, I'm still watching Beyonce horse.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  I like knowing that I have to compete with literally a glitter horse on TikTok. Like the, I put it in my phone. Like an entire Chinese psyop designed to capture the attention of millions of Americans. And I'm here talking about SEO with you like I stand no chance. Uh, this is horrible. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. No, so just think about that, like, what if you're like, uh, I want to read a recap of, of Succession? And it's already been ingested into Google. The script is already into Google and Google's AI is just going to write you the answer. Is that going to be good? Is that going to, is it going to meet what you want? What if you want to Google?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Well, this is the question, though. Is it going to give you a mashup of 12 shitty recaps?

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, where's it going to come from?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And not the best one.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  Whose labor is going to be compensated for that work? I don't know the answer to that question. Right now, that's the biggest open question is all these AIs are being trained by sort of scraping the open internet and no one got paid for that. They just took it and they ingested it. And you could fall down an entire rabbit hole of like copyright law. But at the end of the day, the experience of using the internet is you're going to, just going to ask the robot for something and it's going to give it back to you. And it might just make it itself. And that's wild. Part of the culture where a lot of what people want, you know, you work in entertainment. Every time I end up writing about a piece of entertainment, if I say I like it or I express an opinion, right, the, the flood of reactions can be very harsh. And if you can just sand off the harsh edges and you're like, here's what happened in the

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Marvel movie, no opinion, the robot wrote it for you. That feedback loop to me feels very dangerous, right?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  It's no longer, it's, well, it feels very isolated. I'm not really in conversation with anybody else on the internet. Like, when I think about my Beyonce searching, I'm seeing the names of the folks who made this. I might interact with them, comment on the article, reply to the tweet. When AI gives me an answer about Beyonce, that's it.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I, the reason I love writing about computers, and I love thinking about computers, is ultimately, computers are a tool of expression. And the thing that they have done for years and years and years is make it easier to create culture, make it easier to distribute culture, make it easier to talk about culture. This is the story of computers in our lives. They make it easier to make art. Right? You look at anything in computing. You look at cameras on our phones, you look at Twitter.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  However much of a mess Twitter is, entire social movements were born on Twitter from people using cameras on their phones and just talking to each other. What was happening in their lives?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  This is the talking to each other. Also, Beyonce update. I've now found the TikToks where people are saying Beyonce on the horse is actually some Book of Revelation imagery and it's like-

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  This is lore, right?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Dark sighted.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  You found the lore.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I found the lore.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  And that lore is gonna get seeded. And one of the things that I love the most is whenever, with Beyonce in particular, you know, she's a very referential artist, right? She picks and chooses what she wants and she really highlights it. And if you're ever in the position of needing to Google it, the example that I think is most famous, right? The Single Ladies video, the Fosse dance.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  Why did so many entertainment writers suddenly have an expert level understanding of Bob Fosse? Like, was that always in the background?

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that's like a combination of they have search and they know there's demand for it, so they're gonna meet the demands, so they're getting, like, all this happened in the background so that when people were searching for these things that they had seen in a Beyonce video.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  There was supply. And so here, Book of Revelations Glitter Horse is gonna become a search term. And a lot of very smart writers are gonna produce Book of Revelations Glitter Horse content. And that is an absolutely bonkers cycle to think about. And what worries me about AI, when I say computers are tools to make culture, that is what they do. And all of the economics of how we think about entertainment and culture, right, go out the window when you drop computers into it. No one actually cares about making money on the internet. They all, we all want to.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  But our most human desire is to make things and show them to each other. And everyone is constantly doing it for free all the time because of computers. And what art is supposed to do is challenge us and push us and all these things. And if you take AI and it's literally a statistical average of everything that happened before.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  There will be no challenging.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  It starts answering the questions. You've now sanded the edges off.

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• 31:03Speaker 02

  So we've been talking about how this will change the way consumers of popular culture consume it and find it and talk about it on the internet. How will this change the way that creators make what they make? If you know that you're launching season two of a show like Yellowjackets into an internet that's ruled by AI and not search and Google search, how do you craft your entire show and your entire rollout of the show differently?

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  You must, right? You have to.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that, you know, the entertainment embargoes that come along with the end of every episode of every show might change. Like, you might want to give that information to Google first so that it can answer the AI questions better about the ending of your show. Just the way that you might seed the architecture of supply and demand for entertainment content might change. And what is really interesting to me is, again, we take it for granted right now. This did not used to be the case. People did not finish an episode of Friends and immediately Google Friends, right?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  That happened now. And that means the shows have all been able to do more intricate world building. They've been able to be more self-referential without as much explanation or exposition. Because the trust from the showrunners is that the audience will do the work. They will do the homework if they need to do the homework. And you start to take that away or change it. And eventually, you might end up in a place where shows have to go back to being a single-shot, self-contained, beginning, middle, and end story. Because you can't depend on the search architecture to deliver everything to you. Or you can't depend on people even using it in that way. If, if the average member of the audience first turns to TikTok to search after a show

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  is over, you've got to provide something very different to the world.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  How worried should I be about this shift as an elder millennial who was pretty used to ingesting pop culture a certain way? How much will I have to relearn how I converse with Beyonce and Yellowjackets and Guardians of the Galaxy in the next few years?

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  My instinct is that we should be excited about it.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Okay, but what if I'm not?

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  And if you're not, you know, you gotta, you can be a boomer like everybody else. You could still use Yahoo on a dial-up line, that's fine. That's good.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  But the reason I say we should be excited about it is, there was a time when Snapchat sent the verge a lot of traffic, right? The idea that there's some big platform tech company in between you and other people, or you and the culture, that is shaping how that culture is made. When I say it's Facebook, people know that's bad. When I say it's Twitter, people recoil, right? You wrote this just to get hate clicks on Twitter, like, everyone knows what I'm talking about. You wrote this to get Google, it's felt very neutral. It's like the thing we all did in the background to pay for the thing we actually wanted to. Something happened there.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  But I think this is what's gonna break that relationship. And I say I think it's gonna happen because the idea that we're gonna ask different questions of our computers and expect our computers to make things for us, as opposed to us using computers to make things, I think all of that desire for human connection is gonna go somewhere else. And maybe there'll be new tech platform companies, and maybe there'll be different algorithms in the way, but I think that's healthy. Like, we've done this for two decades now.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  And it screwed us up.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  And it screwed us up. And I think it's better for us to say, here's what we learned, we're gonna build a new thing now with some of that experience, and some of that, you know, some of that scar tissue, and some of that focus about what we actually want.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I want to, what I really want to give to Intuit listeners is a plea to think about the rise of AI in some bigger ways than a lot of coverage would have us think about it now on the entertainment side.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  As I said earlier, right now, the entertainment industry only thinks of AI in terms of the content it will make and how it might replace people. The fake Drake songs, the shitty images made by AI, scripts written by AI. But what I want this conversation to our listeners is that that won't be the only shift that AI brings. There's going to be a shift in how community around a culture is built and maintained and constructed when AI becomes dominant. The way that we collect ourselves around the Beyonce horse, around Guardians of the Galaxy 3, around whatever boy band we're into, it's going to fundamentally change and that's

• 36:03Speaker 02

  going to change our relationship to the culture we love. And if that is the thing I want people to take from this conversation, what advice or caution would you give our listeners as we enter this brave new world where AI reshapes how we build community around the pop culture we love?

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's that old story about the frog in the water and you turn up the heat and the frog never notices.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I love that story. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  We're in that moment and I think the thing that's really challenging is you can't, the frog doesn't notice it because the change is so gradual, right? This is the moment to say, I see the water. I'm aware of it. I see that, I'm aware of the slight temperature rise and I'm going to make choices about information. I'm going to make choices about how aware I am of how this is happening to me. There's a really great study actually from a division of Google that says young people on the internet encounter information. This is their relationship to the news. They encounter it.

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  I think this is our moment to say, we shouldn't just encounter things. We shouldn't just let algorithms happen to me. So here's this company that, again, I actually quite like this year. I think Sundar Bishai is a very thoughtful human being. And I know lots of Googlers are all very thoughtful. They are sincere in their mission of trying to organize the world's information. But they have shareholders. This is a massive, extremely lucrative business. It is a capitalist enterprise. It prioritizes itself, just like any other company would rationally. And if you're in this ecosystem of information and the temperature is going up and you can't see that, oh, it's Google's kind of turning up the temperature on me. This is that moment to step back and say, how is this?

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  How am I getting, what choices am I making versus what choices are being made for me? And I think that little bit of recognition is what lets you step out of it. It's also, a lot of people who listen to the show make culture. It's what lets you make better, more challenging, more interesting culture. Cause you see the framework that you're in and then you make art about that. And it's actually really hard to describe the internet. And this is the moment where I think we, because it's changing, we can just step outside of it and look at it and say it's there.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like that. What I hear you saying is, pay attention. This shift might be bigger than we think.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  I think that we, the internet's information architecture is about to change because of AI, because search changes, because the glitter horse is easier to find on TikTok. And that change in behavior, that first thing you do on the internet, when that changes, the whole world changes. And I, I think that's good. Yeah, everything's supposed to change. And we've lived in this internet for long enough. This is, and look around.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  But it's, yeah, that's true. Listen, yeah, maybe it's time for a change. Maybe it's time for a change. Okay. Uh, to quote Sister Act Two, y'all better wake up and pay attention.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  I'll, I'll, yeah, actually, I'll end even more swearing. Computers are there to make art. That's, that's what they're for. They're not there to do math. They're there to make art. Use them for that. I think we'll all be better off.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks again to Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. If you want more of this stuff, go find his writing over there at The Verge. I would start with his very good essay called, "What Happens When Google Search Doesn't Have The Answers?"

• 39:52Speaker 02

  All right, Intuit is hosted by me, Sam Sanders. This show is produced by Janay West, Travis Larchuk, Gaby Grossman, Jelani Carter, and Taka Zen. Our fearless editor is Jordana Hoekman. Our engineer is Daniel Turek. Our music is composed by Breakmaster Cylinder, who could never be replaced by AI. And the executive producer of audio at Vox Media is Nishat Kurwa. All right, listeners, we are back Friday with a new episode. Till then, go to TikTok and look up images and videos of Beyonce's Revelation Horse. It's really great. All right, bye.

• 40:38Speaker 03

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