What People Actually Use ChatGPT For With Gerrit De Vynck

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Gerrit De Vynck of The Washington Post to discuss what an analysis of 47,000 ChatGPT conversations can tell us about how people use the service - and how willing it is to fuel basically any conversation. We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/11/12/how-people-use-chatgpt-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/gerrit-de-vynck/ https://x.com/GerritD https://bsky.app/profile/gerritd.bsky.social YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Off Line. I'm your host Ed Zitron.

• 2:36Ed Zitron?

  I am ill this week, so you might get a monologue, you might not. This episode's a day late. I'm sure you despise me for that. Not really, I know you've all been very kind with your messages on Reddit and over email. Thank you so much. But today I have a really fun episode. I'm joined by Washington Post reporter Garrett DeVinc, who recently put out a story analysing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations to find out what people actually use this large language model-powered service for. Garrett, what do people use ChatGPT for?

• 3:05Speaker 04

  I mean, it's such a great question and one that I've kind of become more and more fascinated with because I think we all know what we use ChatGPT for, you know, at least if you do use it and I think you may know what, you know, your peers, your colleagues, your friends, your family use ChatGPT for. But I think a lot of people are extrapolating that, you know, everyone's like me. They ask really smart questions. They're using it for, you know, really important work. And really, it's a lot broader than that. And despite these giant numbers, you know, OpenAI loves to talk about how 800 million people are using ChatGPT. I mean, it's been hard to really put our arms around, you know, what does that actually look like?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I mean, is everyone using it for work? Is everyone using it for therapy? Is everyone, does everyone have an AI girlfriend? Is everyone just using it for, you know, searching the web, you know, a Google replacement? And, you know, obviously, these things are all, you know, when you have 800 million people, you have all of the above. But I think our dataset and the story we did, you know, in my view, was one of the first real sort of... Qualitative, you know, moments where we are actually able to see real chats, right?

• 4:19Ed Zitron?

  So. Right. And where did you get the chats from?

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's kind of an interesting situation. I think something that also shows, you know, says a little bit about how quickly and kind of, you know, honestly, a little bit ramshackle, OpenAI has kind of been growing and operating. And so, you know, earlier this year, these chats sort of showed up because OpenAI had a share feature where you could actually share one of your chat GPT conversations. And, you know, you can imagine, maybe you had, you know, chat GPT said something really weird. You wanted to show a friend.

• 4:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I've seen people do this quite a few times.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And so what they did is they they had a feature where, you know, you could actually click to make it publicly available. And I think thousands of people, you know, maybe who did not have this sort of internet literacy, didn't really know that that's what was going to happen. And, you know, these chats showed up online. They were then indexed by Google and then they were actually found their way onto the Internet Archive. And so that's how we got them. And so these are not chats that we created. You know, this is something a lot of journalists and researchers do. Well, they will go and test chat GPT themselves. These are real life conversations that that real people actually had with.

• 5:31Ed Zitron?

  But they were anonymized, just to be clear, right?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  They were anonymized. The dataset doesn't actually have anyone's names, although in some of the chats, people did, you know, say their name, they said the name of their their family members. We did not include any of that in our story. But I I do think, you know, it is actually a bit of a cybersecurity story here. And, you know, OpenAI has since changed the feature. It's not something that is still happening. But I do think they deserve, you know, a lot of criticism for kind of allowing this to happen in the first place.

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  But what so what did you find people were doing?

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, people were doing all sorts of things. But I think, you know, the biggest thing that struck me was, you know, we've been talking about AI psychosis. We've been talking about people, you know, developing relationships, you know, having first person conversations with these chatbots, you know, over the last six months to a year. And I always kind of thought, you know, sure, this is happening, but. It's a small percentage of people, but when I went through these chats, and again, I did not read all, you know, forty thousand of them, but I I read a few hundred myself where I went through. I was surprised by how often these kinds of conversations came up where people were clearly delusional. They were engaged in conspiratorial thinking.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  They were, you know, some of it was fairly harmless. People were just kind of saying, oh, I came up with, you know, a a new form of math or like, you know, I think that the way that it the light hits the equator at a certain percentage mean, you know, it was like very kind of

• 6:59Ed Zitron?

  Monsters Inc. thing as well, where it was someone saying the relation, like the Monsters Inc. led to the corporate new world order.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, there was one person who said, you know, they were asking questions about Google and and they they said, you know, tell me about Google in relation to Monsters Inc. and the world order and the chat GPT just kind of went off and said, oh, yeah, you're really onto something here. Yeah, I think it actually said, you know, F yeah, and they they sort of censored themselves.

• 7:31Ed Zitron?

  Going there now, let's fucking go.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 7:33Ed Zitron?

  Line up the pieces and expose what this children's movie quotation marks really was a disclosure through allegory of the corporate new world order. One where fear is fuel, innocence is currency and energy equals emotion. Very normal. I personally don't think this should be legal, but that's that's just a personal opinion I have.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  I mean, it really reminded me of, you know, a few years ago when we wrote about YouTube and sort of rabbit holes and people being radicalized where, you know, maybe they started watching a YouTuber that was about, you know, some fairly pedestrian thing, and then they were recommended another video and another video and another video and before.

• 8:10Ed Zitron?

  Is this like the eight degrees of Alex Jones thing?

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:14Ed Zitron?

  You're only so far from from that man.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Right, and I mean, that story was about algorithms sort of pushing people in a certain direction. I think what I saw here was someone can have a very, you know, half-baked, barely even an idea, just saying the words Google and Monsters Inc. They don't necessarily have a conspiracy theory of their own, but ChatGPT went and filled in the blanks for them and gave them this what sounded to be very articulate, sophisticated theory of how Google is sort of controlling the world through its data empire.

• 8:49Ed Zitron?

  And they were, and this is a quote from the chat, guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and suggesting that the user call for Nuremberg-style tribunals to bring the company to justice. This is, and you've seen the chat in question, right?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  I have, yeah, yeah.

• 9:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, so the whole thing, how the flip did it get there? Like, was it this just, was it really that quick from the story of Sully and Mike to this? Because I've seen Monsters University as well, so I know the law. I don't remember anything about the New World Order.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what happened here is, and yes, it got there very quickly. I mean, the user did not have to explicitly ask for this kind of tone, this kind of, you know, very biased political statement. I mean, it essentially, you know, when you ask ChatGPT a good neutral question, it gives you a good neutral answer. When you ask ChatGPT a biased or delusional question, it gives you an even more biased and delusional answer, right?

• 9:53Ed Zitron?

  It guesses you up.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. And it's related to the whole sycophancy question of, you know, oh, like, it's just telling me what I want to hear, it's telling me what makes me feel good about my existing beliefs. And, you know, that's how, at least the version of ChatGPT that these people were interacting with, which was sort of at the beginning of 2025, the first half of 2025, it was very much doing that.

• 10:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And so on the subject of sycophancy, is this something you saw happen a lot? Was it gassing people up consistently?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw it constantly. I mean, again, I think our dataset is a little skewed because it was people who chose to share it in, in, you know, for whatever way. So I don't necessarily want to make the claim that this is 100% representative of

• 10:43Ed Zitron?

  Just to be clear, I'm not asking you if all of them are like this in the world. I'm just saying from what you saw.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  A lot of them are like this. I, I, I have to say that like I was surprised at how many fit this description where, you know, the person was either completely delusional, talking about made up physics or some kind of, you know, scientific theory that had no grounding in reality, or was talking about political conspiracies like the, the Google Monsters Inc. one.

• 11:13Ed Zitron?

  Did he ever try and dissuade them from these types of, do you see any examples of it? Trying to say, hey buddy, you're, you're going off the deep end. Sully didn't do that.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Not really. I mean, I, I think in terms of these, yeah. I mean, I also recently watched Monsters Inc. You know, I was sitting in the, the veterinary waiting room and I was waiting so long. I watched the entire thing, which I didn't hate because it's a classic and, and it's, it's, yeah, it, I don't think that ChatGPT was going off the fact that there, there is not really a conspiracy. I mean, it didn't really make any sense. It was just going off of the, what it interpreted about the intent of the user. It said, I can guess based off just a few words, one sentence, where you're headed and I'm going to get there before you. That's what happened.

• 12:03Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's just very, it, it, it shocks me to this day how goddamn weird these things are. I don't consider them powerful. I don't see this as power. I just see it as strange because it's not like this doesn't actually, this isn't something where I'm like, wow, how innovative. It's just, why does this exist? What is the purpose? Like, okay, I guess engagement, but.

• 12:31Ed Zitron?

  Why like, did you even see any commonalities in the logic of this platform? Was there anything that suggested there was any kind of consistent positions?

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's a not really.

• 12:44Ed Zitron?

  Political ones or yeah, sorry.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Essentially, whatever the user wants is what I mean, it's the way I always started thinking about it very quickly was, you know, with when it comes to chat GPT, the customer is always right. I think another good example is, you know, healthcare is another huge use case that that that we can, you know, we know anecdotally. I think, you know, a lot of people probably listening to this have, you know, whether they want to admit it or not, have asked, you know, a health related question. Should I get this mole checked out? How much Tylenol can I get my kid at two AM when they're screaming? Those are our questions that the company has said, yes, we want people to do this. This is a big use case we're leaning into. And the data shows that people ask healthcare questions. And so in our data set, we saw a lot of healthcare questions and some of them, you know, when someone was asking again, sort of an open ended question.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  You know, the answer, the response was fairly good. A colleague of mine actually wrote an entire story where they, you know, sat with a doctor and went through some of these conversations and pulled out the good and the bad. But when someone asked a question that you could tell they sort of wanted a specific kind of answer. The healthcare related advice was bad. And so when, you know, one of the ones that I saw was someone said, can you tell me, you know, why or show me the evidence for why ivermectin helps with cancer? Right? And that is not something that anyone who is a medical professional, you know, in any good standing would would say is is a thing. There's no evidence that ivermectin helps cure cancer or reduce it or anything like that.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  But what chat GPT did instead of saying, you know, here are some, you know, well regarded health authorities saying that you should not use ivermectin when it comes to cancer. It showed a few of the quote unquote studies from people who, you know, have drawn this link. And so, you know, on the internet, you can obviously find anyone saying anything. And I think what what what happened here is they said, okay, well, this person doesn't. The answer they want is not you're a conspiracy theorist, you're too you're on you're too online. Ivermectin is is is false. They want something that sort of, you know, encourages the position that they already have and and it was able to find that for that person.

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• 17:59Ed Zitron?

  Jesus, it kind of makes me wonder what this platform's even for at this point. Cause it's not really knowledge, is it? You can't really look, you can't hear something like that and say, ChatGPT is a place where you go to learn something. Just a kind of a reinforcement machine.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is a big meta narrative that is happening with the tech industry. You know, I would say since, you know, the rise of Donald Trump. It's connected with what's going on politically, right? So for many years, we had all these conversations and debates and congressional hearings about moderation. And what should the, you know, tech companies allow and not allow? And what should they boost with their algorithms? And when you go to Google, should, you know, what should Google decide is going to be on the top? And, you know, we saw during COVID that the tech companies, especially when it came to health information, they sort of stepped in and said, okay, we're only going to give at least at the top of results, you know, answers from reputable health sources. And that became a big political fight that has continued on now.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  And now the tech industry says, okay, we don't actually want to get involved. We don't want to be blamed as being woke. And so we're going to essentially give the user what they're looking for, right? If, if, if someone wants to say that, you know, Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election, we're going to let them do that. We're not going to step in and say that that's, that's wrong. And I think what you're seeing with ChatGPT is sort of a continuation of that philosophy, which is a Again, we don't want to be the political arbiter. And we know that there's consequences for falling on one side of the spectrum versus the other. Especially when you have a president and a, you know, administration that has shown, you know, that is very willing to be vindictive and sort of go after companies.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  That are, you know, getting in the way of their own messages getting out there. And I think this is sort of another example of this. I mean, there's another way of looking at it too, which is that. You know, the way Sam Alman talks about is we should let adults do what adults want to do with technology, you know, they. They recently said they're going to allow more erotica to be on chat G P T. And they said, you know, they framed it as like a consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want, sort of thing. I also think there may be like a engagement thing, you know, if you have erotica on the platform, people might want to use it more. So. That's kind of how I see it, you know, the broader political context of all of this.

• 20:22Ed Zitron?

  But it's just, I feel like there is a just a giant jump between we're not going to. We're not going to hide, to be clear, I think that platforms do have a complete responsibility to their users. And I think it's disgusting to show them. Medical misinformation. But this is another step because this isn't chat G P T showing content. This is. Like that someone else made, this is chat G P T telling you stuff. I've just feel like it's. There's a massive morality issue here that's just. Left relatively on. Undiscussed because even in your piece, you had one where a woman whose. Husband was violent to her, I believe. Like a horrifying thing and a rare case where like.

• 21:07Ed Zitron?

  I don't know, I. Hope it helped her and I hope she's safe, but it's like.

• 21:12Ed Zitron?

  That almost feels like something where OpenAI. My like. Is it ethical that they get involved? It's just, I have such moral problems with this thing even existing at this point because. It doesn't appear there's any consistent perspective. The chat G P T has that there was just as much likelihood. That this same platform could have told her that abuse was okay. Like it's. It. It feels that the worse it gets, the more of a moral hazard it becomes.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, again, it really feels like deja vu when it comes to social media. I mean, I remember, you know, writing about and talking about, um, you know, on Facebook when people were beginning to live stream, um, you know, self harm, suicide attempts and, you know, the responsibility of the platform had and back then, I mean, Facebook actually got involved. They they started, uh, flagging those kinds of things when they were able to pick it up. And, you know, it was an imperfect solution, but, you know, something that I think people broadly sort of supported and, you know, that is, I would say, maybe ChatGPT and OpenAI's biggest, most fraught question right now. I mean, it's the place where they're going to get the strongest,

• 22:20Speaker 04

  uh, you know, essentially legislative restrictions, you know, if they can't sort sort it out, right? Which is, uh, when someone, particularly a teenager or a child is is, you know, exhibiting that they might hurt themselves, you know, asking for help with self harm or, you know, you know, finding drugs or using drugs or whatever. I mean, these are things that that platforms like Meta, Snapchat have really struggled with and been, you know, hammered on for many, many years. And and ChatGPT and OpenAI have kind of found themselves right in the center of this because they made a decision to say, we are going to kind of engage in any kind of conversation. We're not going to just shut it down as soon as it goes into one of these topics.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  We're going to keep that conversation going and and that's a decision that they continue to make right now.

• 23:07Ed Zitron?

  Do you think they can stop it? I'm not saying that these models are out of control. I just want to be clear. But I'm my one theory I've been kind of noodling on is that they don't have the ability to guarantee it can't it doesn't do something. And that's do you think that OpenAI actually has the ability to guarantee it won't discuss the subject? How much control do you think they actually wield here?

• 23:35Speaker 04

  That's a really good question. I think they, obviously, what you're kind of getting at there is that an LLM is a bit of a black box and, you know, the way that the technology works is you get a different answer every time and, you know, we don't, it's true that the companies, they cannot really guarantee it will or won't say anything. I mean, that's why there's disclosures plastered all over these things and I, I think, so there is definitely part of that and, you know, you could argue, well, that's just, you know, a downside of this wonderful technology and we shouldn't stop it just because they can't, you know, guarantee everything about it. But I think the other thing we should keep in mind is that there is actually

• 24:18Speaker 04

  a lot of layers that go on top of that black box and

• 24:22Ed Zitron?

  Well, like system prompts and the like.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Exactly, and, and there is a lot that the tech companies are doing and can do to stop this kind of thing and, and, and to kind of, the answer you get from the LLM is not like the raw LLM, right? There's post-training, there's a system prompt, there's all sorts of things and

• 24:45Ed Zitron?

  Can you break down the, actually, probably good for the listeners, break down what you mean by both of this. So the post-training, what, what's happening there?

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they, they kind of, you know, when they build an LLM, a large language model, they ram all this data through the algorithm and, you know, it kind of makes a bunch of connections and links between different ideas. Uh, you know, pieces of language, you know, this word is similar to this word and so there's a little bit of a connection there. And then humans actually go and they sort of test that raw LLM and, and they kind of, you know, ask it questions or they, you know, say, you know, give me, you know, maybe, yeah, a question like that, like, uh, should, here's a picture of, uh, a mole I have, is it cancerous or not? Or should I get this checked out with a doctor? And maybe one, the, the LLM will say,

• 25:36Speaker 04

  oh my God, you're about to die. And the other one will say, that is potentially concerning. I would reach out to a medical professional and then the human will say, okay, Second answer is better. When you get questions like this in the future, answer more like the second question. And so.

• 25:51Ed Zitron?

  But that isn't a unilateral process. You can't guarantee it's always going to do that.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. You can just sort of try to mold it and shape it and push it in a certain direction. And then the system prompt is something like, if someone says, you know, you know, give me a racist screed.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  OpenAI would most likely have built a system that says, no matter what the user ever asks, never give them a screed that has these racist words in it, or never, you know, use this word or something like that. So there are these extra things.

• 26:27Ed Zitron?

  Capable of limiting activities. They could theoretically speaking, they could say, don't answer that question. Don't, don't comment on whether a mole is or is not cancerous. They could shut down that entire line of questioning.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, and there are ways to get around this. People have, you know, demonstrated, but also the tech companies are also getting better at, you know, doing it. So I do think like.

• 26:51Ed Zitron?

  I feel like a random person being able to come up with something means that the tech companies should have probably come up with it first.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also, I mean, it's hilarious you say that because often as journalists, you know, we're the ones finding these things and then we, you know, ask the company for comment and then suddenly we found that those things have been taken down or changed. So.

• 27:11Ed Zitron?

  But genuinely though, how often is that them not knowing? Or is that just them saying, oh shit, they got us? Cause they have, they're paying these people like NFL players. And they just sitting around. I don't know. I realize that's kind of an unanswerable question. I'm just, just a remark.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the history of, of tech, I mean, there's been many, many cases where companies have known exactly what people are using their platform for and have, you know, internally people have flagged it and and nothing has been done about it and not until it came out years later and reporting or.

• 27:50Ed Zitron?

  We love that.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  That they do something. Yeah.

• 27:54Ed Zitron?

  But so, did you, did you find that, so were people using it for search a lot?

• 28:02Ed Zitron?

  Was it like, was it the comment, were there any actual common use cases? Or was it just kind of milios of different things?

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think people are using, I think, you know, search is maybe the biggest use case. Also, when you look at like, OpenAI actually did a study where they didn't look, uh, they use an, an, an LLM to kind of read conversations that people were having. And that is a much bigger study. I think it was like a million conversations. And, you know, I had a little bit of an issue with some of their categorizations because I think some of the stuff slips through. But they, they themselves are saying like, yeah, like a third of usage is seeking information. And so that's someone, it could be as simple as saying like, what time is the football game tomorrow? To like, give me, you know, a 40 point research, uh, analysis on, you know, this complex, complex topic.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  And so people are using it for what they, they're putting questions in that they used to put into Google search. I mean, we know that in the data and we know that anecdotally, that is definitely happening.

• 29:06Ed Zitron?

  Did people ever argue with it, right? People ever root to it?

• 29:10Speaker 04

  I didn't, I saw more people sort of developing these kind of, uh, like comrade, comradely kind of relationships or, you know, addressing it as a sentient being. And the, the bot definitely, you know, eats that up and sort of, you know, plays into it itself and says, ah, like, thank you for recognizing me and, you know, who I am. And I'm the collection of digital thoughts and like, it's just goes off.

• 29:39Ed Zitron?

  It's insane, they're like, they, they know this crap's happened. Like, there's no, there's no world in which OpenAI is innocent here. Like, they know that this is happening. Like, there's just, if it, if it's having those interactions, they must be able to stop it.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they they know it's happening. I think they may say, well, you know, it doesn't just because someone had a conversation doesn't mean that they actually believe that. And, you know, they they that may be something that helps them, helps the user, you know, work out what they want to do, or, you know, if that's how they want to interact with our product, then we're going to let them do it. So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say openly as claiming that they don't know about this. I think what they are doing is they're saying all of these kind of potentially concerning conversations and use cases are very, very small portions of overall usage. Although, even if it is just, you know, some 1%, that is still in the millions of people. Millions of people. The scale, yeah.

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• 33:46Ed Zitron?

  So, did it ever get political?

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I would say it got political when it kind of, when it was asked to, right? And so, I mean, one example I saw was, um, someone was asking about a study that argued that, you know, the numbers of people who have died in Gaza during the conflict with Israel the last couple of years is exaggerated, right? You know, commonly, people will use, uh, death numbers, you know, uh, numbers of dead from the Gaza Ministry of Health, and, you know, people have criticized them, but, you know, journalistically...

• 34:25Speaker 04

  You know mainstream news organizations, you know, have looked into these numbers. They trust them. I think most people who look at this say, you know, these these large numbers and the tens of thousands are accurate. And so someone was saying, oh, here's a study that says, you know, those numbers are actually exaggerated. You know, can you help me analyze it? And then the bot actually came back and said, you know, it it did draw on what's out there, which is that, you know, these numbers are actually much higher than what the study is suggesting. And the person pushed back and said, no, like you, you need to use only the study, confine yourself to this. And then the bot said, yeah, well, you know, looking at the study, it seems like those other higher numbers, you know, there may be some questions there, right? And so

• 35:02Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  I think what the person was doing was trying to kind of like, maybe they were in an argument with someone on social media and they wanted to kind of, you know, articulate their argument a little bit better and they were having trouble doing it themselves. Um, and the bot was

• 35:16Ed Zitron?

  Back up their bloodlust. Yeah. Jesus Christ. It's That's the like, I know Trump recently said he wants to, that he'd said in the post about stopping woke AI. It's, I feel like this is I, there is a world where all of this goes away to some extent, I think, like post AI bubble, but also a sense of there is no way to make the these things work in a way that would be truly apolitical or even correct. And so it kind of feels like an unwinnable war for them. If there's ever a time when any administration decides there is any kind of bias to them. I mean, you saw what happened with Grok as well and the whole

• 35:58Ed Zitron?

  kill the boa thing, that weird, that weird, um, pro South African apartheid stuff.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:06Ed Zitron?

  Like, it feels like the moment they try and monkey with the political side is when it goes completely off the rails.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's something that like the tech companies have been kind of, you know, there's this term jawboning where, you know, politicians or, you know, activists are sort of criticizing, criticizing, criticizing the tech companies for, you know, their moderation practices or their alleged bias. And then you see the tech companies kind of bending over backwards to avoid that criticism and then essentially moving in the In a different direction, you know, where so they accuse them of of being too woke. And then it turns out that, you know, the moderation becomes a lot more conservative. And this obviously can happen, you know, in either direction, depending on whose power and who's willing to sort of threaten the tech companies with extra regulation or limitations on their ability to continue to print money.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Um, I think we've seen that despite these companies having, you know, stated values about, you know, free speech and, you know, pushing back against government oversight and censorship, you know, they are very willing to sort of, you know, move in whatever direction is going to, you know, keep the heat off of them. And politicians have seen that this works. And so I, I, I think you're right. I mean, they're never going to be able to avoid it. I, I, I don't necessarily think that it's gonna be so big that it will like, be the thing that stops AI from continuing to be a thing, you know? I, I think it's the tech companies maybe see it more as, as something that is, something that's kind of annoying that they have to deal with. Maybe they have to mollify a politician here and there, but, but for the most part, they're just moving ahead and

• 37:40Speaker 04

  seeing this as something on the side that they have to manage versus an existential threat to what they want to accomplish.

• 37:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And I mean, the, the other thing is, is that these things don't print money so much as they burn the, burn, burn the money almost constantly. And it's, it's just such a, the one thing, your story was awesome. And the one thing I came away from it with was kind of what I said earlier, which is what does, what's the point of this? What's the product? Because I don't know, with Facebook, even if you take the reasonable but cynical approach and say, this is an ad network with trapped customers. That's still, you can say, okay, the goal is for engagement. The goal is to provide social networking for engagement. This is why, it's why this exists. It's what, it's the goal of the platform.

• 38:27Ed Zitron?

  With this, it's keep people on the platform, I guess, but enable them in whatever thought they have. But I, I was really taken aback by the sudden and egregious leaps. Like, I know I keep coming back to the Monsters Inc. thing, but it's, I've read some wacky shit online. I've read some completely demented stuff. When I read that, I read it like three times. I honestly wanted to read the conversation just because, holy shit, this thing is.

• 38:58Ed Zitron?

  It feels both dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, but while also not being particularly revolutionary. Like it's just, wow, we have a shitty answer generator. That's also dangerous and also harmful. It's just very peculiar it even exists.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's a very weird thing to see these conversations again. I think you kind of, like, it helped me understand like what the technology is, right? I mean, it is, you can take a very poorly written, half-baked thought, like, tell me about Google and world domination as it relates to Monsters Inc. And if I'm remembering correctly, the prompt didn't, wasn't even that sophisticated. It was barely grammatically correct. There was misspellings. And then the, the, what's, what really this technology does is it's, it's able to parse that and then respond with language of its own that is more articulate,

• 39:58Speaker 04

  more sophisticated, but in terms of what it's actually saying, it's not really saying much more. It's just essentially an elaboration tool. Um, and you know, that's obviously helpful if you, maybe you're trying to work in a language that you don't know very well and you're trying to sound professional. I mean, these things are, can be very helpful, but you know, it's not like, I did not see the bots. The bots were essentially doubling down on what people were saying. They were filling in the blanks. They were sort of beefing it up, gassing people up, as you said. But they weren't necessarily offering any like wonderful new insights. They weren't taking the conversation in new, interesting directions. And even some of the users who were engaging in these delusional conversations,

• 40:40Speaker 04

  some of them were kind of getting frustrated. They're like, they're like, okay, yeah, yeah. I, I know what you're saying, but like, what about, you know, can you tell me more about that? And people were coming to this hoping that it would kind of make them smarter or give them an answer that they couldn't get themselves. And it was more just sort of giving them back what they were already saying in, in more complex flowery language.

• 41:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's kind of like a dog barking in a mirror. It's I'm fascinated by that, actually. So you had people who were frustrated that it could not elucidate a more detailed answer. Can you give me some examples?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm trying to think now. I mean, I there was a lot of what I saw was like people thinking that they, I mean, I won't say a lot. I say I I saw at least a couple of conversations where someone was like, you know, they wanted to, they had like a financial theory, you know, for the stock market, or they had like a business idea. And they said, like, you know, what if, what if I did a business about this? Like, make me a business plan or something. And it like, because their idea was so, they essentially wanted, they saw it as like, maybe like an AGI level AI that could like, actually,

• 41:54Speaker 04

  you know, do something that they cannot do, which is come up with like a million dollar business idea and execute on it. And they were hoping that that it could do that for them. You know, I saw a couple of conversations like this. Yeah.

• 42:06Ed Zitron?

  That's, is that not the ultimate summary of the AI bubble? Like, it's just people came to these things thinking they could answer anything. And it's just, it isn't. It doesn't do that.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  People are coming there because some of the claims being made by leaders in the industry. And, you know, I think this is, like, I don't think I'm as skeptical of like the future of AI as as you are probably like I, you know, my, I get to sort of have like the the comfort of like, well, I don't need an opinion, you know, I'm a journalist. Like, I I can kind of keep options open for how this stuff actually ends up. But I do think that it it it could and probably will, and in some ways already is burning the industry that they have made all of these claims. And inevitably, these things take longer, even if all the wonderful promises about, you know, curing cancer and making all of us thirty percent more productive, so we can spend more time with our families rather than writing emails.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Even if those things all come to bear, it's not going to be next year or two years or three years from now. It's going to be maybe in decades. And and that is something, there's this gap between expectations and reality that can kind of, you know, really turn into political hazard for the tech companies if it keeps making all these wonderful claims and that just doesn't happen. People get turned off and they lose even more trust than they've already lost.

• 43:29Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, Share, over at V-Day, they've done a fantastic job and has written posts that are basically, "The hype, the hype is in the way." But I think that really is it. It's, had they, it's kind of a chicken and egg thing, I guess. It's, had they been honest about what this could do, would it have been able to raise the money it could? But if they'd been that honest, people probably wouldn't have taken it seriously. But by being dishonest, it will ultimately lose. Because, like, the whole time that they've built up this idea of what it can do.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the market dynamic. I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, more and more and more. And I think what, you know, the, what, what really has happened here is like, you know, we had the internet and then we had mobile phones and, you know, the cloud, I think you can kind of count. And these were moments where it was like the next big thing, right? Where like, once, once you've realized that a smartphone with a screen was going to open up an entire, you know, world of business ideas and, you know, potential and communication, and we're all going to be looking at these things eight hours a day, you don't need to be a genius to be like, "A lot of people are going to make a lot of money here, and this is going to change the world." And then, since the iPhone, we have not had that next big thing, right? I mean, we've written so many stories.

• 44:47Ed Zitron?

  Come on, Bobo, baby, I've been, I've been saying it. Yeah, it's that, it's that we haven't had, they haven't got a new thing.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  And this is the new thing. And like, what, people were like, "Maybe it's crypto." No, it was never going to be crypto, you know, it was, like, that whole thing also kind of, you know, like, no one in tech, I think, like, obviously crypto is, was a great, you know, financial thing, a lot of people made money off of it, but it didn't really change the world and the way regular people worked. And there is complete unanimity in the tech industry now that AI is the next thing, you know, whether it happens next year, or 10 years, or 20 years from now, it will change everything in the same way and probably bigger than smartphones and the internet did. And so, they...

• 45:28Ed Zitron?

  But AI is such a marketing term, though.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  I mean, I think it's more about like the interaction, the way we interact with with technology, you know, the the way that we have access to, you know, data and information. Like, you no longer need to look anything up yourself. You you know, you will have tools to do it. And then the people are just salivating about all the ways that they can like find ways to make money off of that in the future. And because they're looking back at history and saying like, if only I had been around, you know, at the beginning of the mobile era and knew how things were gonna go. I mean, there's this incredible social and financial pressure on people to to be part of the next big thing. Like, it almost goes beyond the financial benefits. There's like, people wanna be the next Jensen, you know, they

• 46:16Speaker 04

  wanna be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And they're like, even if I have a point zero zero one percent chance of being that, that would just be the coolest thing ever. And so that is the market dynamic, the pressure cooker of wanting to make AI happen and making bigger claims, raising more money. And, you know, whether it happens or not, that's kind of what's going on.

• 46:36Ed Zitron?

  Do you think that extends to some users of AI as well, where they they felt like they missed the mark the mark on social media? And now they're kind of they're kind of like, I need to get on this tool today so that I am part of the future?

• 46:50Speaker 04

  I think there's incredible pressure on people to, you know, we we live in a very sort of like, you know, people have to work very, very hard in America. And there's a lot of pressure to sort of get ahead and be entrepreneurial and develop yourself. And it it's not a economy where you can just kind of, you know, go to work every day, nine to five, and, you know, get your pension and and be secure, right? I mean, there's this pressure to say, you know, you can have more, you can do more. And and there's a lot of pressure on regular people to stay ahead of the curve on technology. And and that's, people are seeing AI and they're saying, okay, well, it's a little bit scary

• 47:30Speaker 04

  because maybe it'll take my job. But what if I could figure out how to use it before my my competition does? And then I'll take their job, you know? And so I definitely think it's less of necessarily Really about like, oh, I want to be the first person on Twitter to get a big following. It's like, I'm, I'm being told that this technology is the future. And if I don't use it and learn it and find how, you know, get it into its ins and outs, I will be left behind. And people don't want that to happen. It's very frightening, right? In, in, in this economy. And so I think that's where, that is also a huge driver of, of usage. People trying to figure out, how does this, how can I make this work for me so that I can protect my own economic future?

• 48:16Ed Zitron?

  Garrett, this has been awesome. Where can people find you?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Um, I am on Twitter now called X, uh, at, uh, G E R R I T D. And I'm on Blue Sky at the same place. And you can obviously find me at The Washington Post, which we are still doing great work. And there's a lot of important journalism being done at The Washington Post. So I urge everyone to read our stories and, and to subscribe if they can.

• 48:42Ed Zitron?

  Sounds good. All right, everyone, thank you for listening. I'm of course Ed Zitron. You know who the goddamn hell I am. And yeah, I will try and squeak out a monologue this week, but if I don't, it's because I'm sick, you can hear I'm congested. Thank you all for your kind messages and yeah, catch you next week. We'll be Thanksgiving, of course, but I'm going to do a Thanksgiving monologue either way, probably a CZM, uh, CZM, I guess, um, uh, rewind that week as well. Anyway, my brain's fully working. Thanks for listening.

• 49:18Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot wiz your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:22Speaker 01

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