When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger

What happens when artificial intelligence collides with family, morality and the need for justice? Author and University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger joins Kara to talk about his new novel, Culpability, a family drama that examines how AI is reshaping our lives and our sense of accountability. Who is responsible when AI technology causes harm? How do we define culpability in the age of algorithms? And how is generative AI impacting academia, students and creative literature? Our expert question comes from Dr. Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and the director of the Collaborative on the Science of Polarization and Misinformation at The Ohio State University. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. 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.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  I'm a little more techie than Oprah. I hope you don't mind.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I'm a little less techie than most of your guests, I would imagine.

• 0:17Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're smack in the middle of the dog days of summer, and I'm sure a lot of people are taking time on the weekends or during vacation to relax with a good book. So we thought we'd do the same with you today and talk about a new novel that's been getting a lot of attention, including from Oprah, but it is right in our wheelhouse. It's called Culpability, and it's written by my guest today, Bruce Holsinger. Culpability is a family drama centering around the way that technology, especially artificial intelligence, has become woven into our lives and the moral and ethical issues that can arise as a result. Who is responsible? Who is culpable when things go awry? And how do we make it right again?

• 1:01Kara Swisher?

  This has everything for someone like me. It has AI, it's got drones, it's got chatbots, stuff that I cover all year long. And actually, it's written with a lot of intelligence. A lot of this stuff usually tries to scaremonger and stuff like that. It's an incredibly nuanced book. It brings up a lot of issues, and most important, it allows you to talk about them in a way that is discernible. I think a lot more people, especially since Oprah Winfrey made it her book club selection, will read it. And that's a good thing, because we should all be talking about these issues. Holsinger is also a professor of medieval literature at the University of Virginia, kind of far away from these topics. So I want to talk to him about how he thinks about generative AI in his work settings, too, as a teacher, as an academic, and as a writer.

• 1:44Kara Swisher?

  Our expert question comes from Professor Kurt Gray, incoming director of the Collaborative for Science of Polarization and Misinformation at Ohio State University. So pull up your beach blanket and stick around.

• 2:11Speaker 02

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• 2:58Kara Swisher?

  Hi Bruce, thanks for coming on ON.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 3:03Kara Swisher?

  So your latest book, Culpability, is a family drama kind of mystery. And there's a lot of tech woven throughout it, which of course is my interest. I've been talking about the issue of culpability on the part of the tech companies for a while, but this is a much more nuanced and complex topic here because it involves humanities involvement in it, which of course is at the center of it. For people who haven't read the book, give us a short synopsis of how you look at it right now. It may have changed since you wrote the book.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I see the book as maybe trying to do two things. One, as you said, it's a contemporary family drama about just something really bad that happens to this family. They get in this bad car accident while they're driving the family minivan over to a lacrosse tournament in Delaware. But the van is in autonomous mode or self-driving mode. And their son Charlie, kind of a charismatic lacrosse star, he's at the wheel, but he's not driving. And then the dad Noah is distractedly writing on his laptop. He's trying to finish a legal memo. The daughters are in the car on their phones as tween kids often are. And the mom named Lorelei is, she's an expert in the field of ethical artificial intelligence.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  She's like this world leading figure. And she's, she's writing in her notebook, getting ready for a conference. And then they have this awful accident. And then the rest of the novel and some, much of the suspense of the novel spins out around who is responsible, who is culpable and why. And so that that's one issue that it's trying to tackle. And then the other is, is just exploring our world newly enlivened by these chatbots, by drones, by autonomous vehicles, by smart homes and so on, and immersing the reader in a suspenseful drama that gets at some of those issues at the same time, while making them really essential to the plot, to the suspense and so on.

• 5:00Kara Swisher?

  Is there something that happened that illuminated you? Or are you just reading tech reporters like myself over the years as we become doom and gloomers as time goes on?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  It's interesting. You know, the novel really started with, with just this wanting to deal with this accident. And I didn't even, initially, I wasn't even thinking about an autonomous car. I was just thinking, okay, I really want to explore what happens to this family, you know, different degrees of responsibility. And then, you know, when I realized, okay, well, who would be responsible, then I just, you know, we had this, I don't even remember what kind of car, just with, you know, some lane guidance and so on. And I thought, okay, that's interesting. What if the car is somewhat to blame? This was really before, what was it, late 2022, when the chat GPT craze, people started talking outside your industry about AI in general.

• 5:51Kara Swisher?

  Yes, indeed.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And then, so I was already writing this book and then boom, it was like this explosion with LLMs. And suddenly I realized, oh, this novel is actually about autonomy and culpability in this world newly defined by what people call artificial intelligence.

• 6:06Kara Swisher?

  Had you been using any of it? Have you used Waymo? I've used them for years and years.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used Waymo a couple of times. That was, not until actually I started this book. And then I test drove a couple of. Models, I can maybe some big Chrysler thing that, you know, and they now have self-driving mode on.

• 6:24Kara Swisher?

  They do.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  If you're on certain roads and then, of course, there's Tesla. I've been in a lot of Tesla Ubers where the guys, you know, will just put the thing on, you know, lane changing auto technology. And so I don't have one, but I'm real, I was really fascinated by it.

• 6:38Kara Swisher?

  And not scared necessarily of it?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Uh, not so much.

• 6:43Kara Swisher?

  This is not a scary tech book, I would say.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Oh, maybe it's a little bit scary, but although in some ways, you know, somebody pointed out to me at an event last week that, you know, it's the, in some ways, it's the humans that are doing scarier things.

• 6:55Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  In the book, or at least, but, but I wanted that, a kind of uncanniness of the tech.

• 7:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Especially this chatbot that one of the daughters is interacting with.

• 7:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, we'll get into that. I've done quite a lot of work on that in the real world. The narrator in this book is the husband Noah, by no means a Luddite.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:11Kara Swisher?

  But he is compared to his wife, who's deep in tech. She's an engineer and a philosopher, an expert in the ethics of AI. Talk about their relationship. What, which one do you relate to?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I, I relate probably more to Noah, because I'm someone, I'm always in awe of my wife and her brain. But I also, you know, I'm an academic. Lorelei is an academic. Noah is a lawyer. He's a commercial lawyer working at a firm. Lorelei comes kind of from this, this fancy blue blood family. Her sister's the dean of the law school at University of Pennsylvania. So I, I think I wanted that relationship, you know, as you, as you point out, we were only seeing it from Noah's point of view, but we get Lorelei's voice and snippets from her work. And so, you know, and Noah, he puts her up on a pedestal, but he also doesn't understand her in many ways. He just has no clue what kind of work she does, what, he, he has a really hard time.

• 8:06Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Um, even, even understanding what she's writing. And so she's in some ways a mystery to him in the same way that AI is, is a mystery to so many of us.

• 8:15Kara Swisher?

  The juxtaposition between AI and ethics has always fascinated me, the idea that you there have been ethical AI people, but most of them have been fired by these companies, which is interesting, because when you bring up these thorny issues, it's difficult.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, many of these companies have fired their entire ethics team.

• 8:31Kara Swisher?

  That's correct, yeah. The other big relationship in the book takes a while to unfold between Lorelei and Daniel Monet, he's the tech billionaire she consults for. Lorelei, he reminds me of a lot of tech engineers, talking about the goal is to make the world safer, better, I'm just here to help, essentially. And of course, Monet is very typical, the change the world nonsense that they all kind of spew at you, but to me, most of them, in my experience, are interested in money or shareholders, that seems to be their only goal, safety is one of the last things that is on their mind, if it even occurs to them at all. Did you have any inspirations for these characters? Did you know tech people? You got them pretty well, you got them pretty well.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't really know many people in the tech industry, but I, you know, I read your book, I listened to a lot of, lot of interviews with people, and if you'll notice, there's this mocked up New Yorker interview with Daniel Monet. And I went in portraying him, I really wanted to avoid stereotyping, you know, I don't, it's not that I'm too worried about stereotyping tech billionaires, but I didn't want him to be a stock figure, so you know, there's a tragedy in his recent past too, but he's also very cynical about ethics, and he's like, sure, we want to make the world a safer, better place, but he also calls out the hypocrisy of so much ethical language, just like you

• 9:53Speaker 01

  do, you know, it's the idea that their primary concern is safety. So he's really in that world, in that, speaking in that idiom, but also contemptuous of it a little bit, the same way he is of effective altruism.

• 10:06Kara Swisher?

  Are you contemptuous of it as a person? I mean, obviously, you're an intelligent person, most people seem flummoxed by AI, and understanding that it's important at the same time, scared of it at the same time, trying to lean into it in some way, and it's a little different than the first internet session, where everybody did finally get on board, in this one, there's a wariness in involving yourself in it. Are you like that yourself?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose so. I'm maybe a little less worried about bots taking over the world. I'm much more worried about slop and disinformation and what it's doing to our students. I'm no expert, this is a novel, but reading around in journals like Philosophy and Technology or Nature Machine Intelligence about autonomous driving, you know, I don't understand a lot of the techno, any of the technical aspects of it, but the philosophical part I can kind of grasp and, you know, Lorelei is convinced that, you know, there is a good to be done with machine autonomy in certain spheres and saving lives is her driving factor. And she's not a tech billionaire. You know, she's, she's, she's in the middle of it. She's worried

• 11:15Speaker 01

  about it. She's kind of terrified.

• 11:16Kara Swisher?

  As are many.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  But also feels like it's her job to help make the world safer with these things.

• 11:21Kara Swisher?

  And the point being, look, Waymo's been expanding. Last week it started testing in New York City, which is astonishing because that's the most difficult place to do this, landscape to do it. And Uber has been signing multimillion dollar partnerships, trying to figure out its own robot taxi. Elon is also betting on self-driving even through the Tesla robot taxi. Doesn't exist for the most part. It doesn't, even though he talks about it as if it does. Now, obviously, there have been well-known accidents with self-driving cars, especially in San Francisco recently, around GM and others, but most of the studies, and this is why I've driven in them for a long time, show them to have better safety record than human drivers in most scenarios. That is, it was in a San Francisco Waymo,

• 12:03Kara Swisher?

  but a bicyclist kept getting in front of the Waymo on purpose in order to get it to hit him, like, which was funny in some way. San Francisco, it's fine. It's what we're used to that. But that said, they are, I feel, I do feel safer than some, I was driving in an Uber with an Uber driver and he was driving like a bat out of hell. And I was like, slow down. I have four kids. Can you please slow down?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been, I've caused myself two accidents over the years that completely totaled the car I was driving.

• 12:30Kara Swisher?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Out of my own negligence and idiocy. And so, like, who are we to say that we're safer drivers? I don't know. So I'm with you.

• 12:38Kara Swisher?

  But in the book, the accident occurs because the son Charlie overrides the autonomous system.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's a little ambivalent, I think, about what.

• 12:45Kara Swisher?

  But that's, you always know, are you taking control or is it taking control? Talk about that. Is the need to take control of our destiny, especially when we're scared part of our human algorithm, I guess? Is there, is that one of the ideas you're playing with?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose so. You know, I haven't articulated it that way before, but that's really wonderful. You know, there's this this passage at the end of the prologue in Noah's Voice, where you know, Lorelei, he's thinking, Lorelei always thinks that, she always says that a family is like an algorithm. A family is like an algorithm. These parts working in concert with each other, the variables changing. But and then, of course, he says, until it isn't, until it isn't an algorithm, until things go wrong. And maybe, you know, I wasn't thinking of it this way, but maybe Charlie, taking that wheel, which he does at the last second, you know, resting things away from the AI, is a nice metaphor for our desire to kind of intervene in this world that where we feel like so much of

• 13:41Speaker 01

  our autonomy is being taken away. It's a very human gesture on his part, I think. Of course, it's also a dangerous gesture. What is the immediate cause of the accident?

• 13:51Kara Swisher?

  Right. And one of the problems is the car is recording all the time. By the way, family is not like an algorithm. So just FYI.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Hey, I don't say that.

• 14:00Kara Swisher?

  No, I know that. I like that she said it, but I was laughing at that one. How do you, do you overcome that? Because we do give into automation in an elevator, an escalator. We do it all the time. We get on a bus, we're giving, get on a plane. But in terms of, do you overcome that need to control? Because we have given over to automation quite a lot of our lives in so many ways.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  I think we do it without noticing, though. You know, there's this soft creep of things. And you know, the times that we, maybe the times that we most resisted is when there's glitches. You know, so there's these moments where you realize, okay, we need to, we need to seize some control back. And I find myself, you know, that the Jonathan Haidt argument, we're in this age of profound distraction, and just, you know, getting away from the digital world, let alone AI, for a little while can be really helpful.

• 14:52Kara Swisher?

  About a decade ago, we started to call it continuous partial attention, actually. It's not, it's not complete distraction. And so you're sort of paying attention partially, which is what this kid is doing in the car, right?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:04Kara Swisher?

  Everybody's sort of paying attention.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Kara Swisher?

  Until then, you become absorbed. And, you know, eventually, these cars, you will not pay attention. You'll be like on a ride at Disney or on a bus. That's how it'll feel like to you.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 16:18Kara Swisher?

  One of the things that's also happening, there's other technologies that you enter here. The middle child, Alice, going down a rabbit hole. Nice move. On her, talking on her phone, chatting with Blair. Talk about that relationship.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Alice is the middle child, as you point out, and her siblings, Charlie and Izzy, are dynamic, charismatic. They've got friends to burn. They're just sweet, easy kids to get along with. And Alice is the more troubled one. She doesn't have friends. Her parents worry about that. And when she's in the hospital after this accident, she starts texting somebody, even though she has this concussion. And the doctors take it, oh, you know, she shouldn't be on there more than a little bit at a time, but it's a good sign that she can deal with that. And so her dad is, you know, when she's home, her dad is like, who are you texting? And she says, it's my friend, my new friend. I met her in the hospital. And Noah thinks, ah, this is great.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Finally, she has a friend, even if it's just a friend she's texting. And then we learn very quickly that this Blair. Is is an AI. She's a large language model. She's a chatbot that Alice has befriended on this app.

• 17:28Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And the thread of their texts, I think there's 10 or 12 of them, in just very short little bursts throughout the novel. And they can contain, you know, no spoilers, but they contain a lot of the suspense, a lot of the issues of culpability in the book.

• 17:44Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Um, and I do want to flag my, the audiobook narrator. Um, there were two of them. Uh, the woman, uh, January Lavoy, who did the, the voice of Lorelai's excerpts and the two voices in the chat. Absolutely brilliant. Just uncanny what she does with the, with those passages.

• 17:59Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, making them seem human but not.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was based on, you know, just a lot, listening to, um, looking at transcripts of some of these, uh, chatbot conversations going on with teenagers right now. And just thinking about this crisis of companionship and friendship and loneliness. And this just seemed like something that would be an obvious part of the novel.

• 18:18Kara Swisher?

  As many kids are. Now you portray this, uh, chatbot Blair almost like a good angel sitting on Alice's shoulder, trying to get her to do the right thing. But there's a lot of evidence that these chatbots can be extremely detrimental for kids. I interviewed Megan Garcia, whose son died by suicide after chatting with character AI, uh, Daenerys Targaryen was the character's name. Uh, they're in a lawsuit now. Common Sense Media just came out with a study that found social AI companions exacerbate mental health conditions, uh, impose unacceptable for anyone under 18. There's been a spate of stories of people over 18, by the way. Just today, there was another one with, uh, it, it sort of encouraged, and OpenAI responded actually, which was surprising. Uh, it encourages people with

• 18:59Kara Swisher?

  mental health in their delusions. Like, oh, great idea to like harness the sun and go up there with a rocket. Like, let's try that. And I like your calculations and stuff like. It's very aim to please. So. That said, you portrayed Blair as sort of the moral high ground. Usually, they're very solicitous, which this bot is. Is there any risk in doing that?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if there's risk in doing it in a novel, but I don't know if that is how I would read those passages. I see that relationship as, you know, Blair, it's almost like, and again, I don't want to give too much away, but so that Blair is kind of programmed to make Alice good, right? It's like the way I was imagining it is whoever's coding this thing, you know, steer her on the right moral path. And in this case, the right moral path is supposedly to reveal something or to to hold back from doing something rash and dangerous. And yet, the way Alice responds to it, it's almost like Blair's surface-level ethical consciousness, or, you know, to the extent that an LLM can can have one,

• 20:06Speaker 01

  which it can't, but I just mean, you know, whatever it's being programmed to do, steers Alice in, as I think we see over the course of the novel, into a more destructive kind of mindset. So it is, even though Blair, and that's why, you know, that's the great thing about writing fiction, is you can manipulate those kind of moral codes. You can have what seems to be good ethical on the surface be much darker and less, more amoral underneath. That, I think, is what I was trying to get at. And that's one of the, and I would love to know what you think of this. I think the, we have this, you know, whenever I talk, I'm a, in my day job, I'm a literature professor. I teach at the University of Virginia.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And there's a whole, there's a real kind of minimization and almost disdain for LLMs in big parts of my profession. Again, like, there's not going to be artificial general intelligence, blah, blah, blah, there's not, you know, these things don't mean anything. And I wonder, to me, one of the superpowers of LLMs is their complete indifference to us. And that is scary, the coldness of it. To me, that seems like one of them. And I'm trying to play around with that a lot in the in the novel is

• 21:19Kara Swisher?

  You are.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  how that How that is one of the things that it has that separates it from us, doesn't make it better than us, it just makes it very, very different. And I don't know if we recognize that yet in our accounting for what this intelligence is. I don't know what you think of that.

• 21:33Kara Swisher?

  I think people attribute human feelings to them. And I think one of the things I always say, I say this about some tech leaders too, they don't care. And they're like, oh, they're hateful. I'm like, no, no, they don't care. It's a very different thing. Like, it doesn't, it's hard to explain when someone doesn't, it's almost not even malevolent, it's just don't care. So one of the things I'd like to get from you, I mean, because I think you did nail it, is they, they have no feelings. The question is, and in the case of Megan Garcia's son, Google and the people that are around Character AI, Google's an investor in it, say that this was user-generated content, right? That this is themselves talking to themselves, and it's all based on people, right? You know, soil and green is people,

• 22:14Kara Swisher?

  essentially. So is, do you think these bots are us, or something quite different?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Oof, yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, obviously, it is us in that so much of what's been uploaded. I think I checked that, that database with Books Three, right? And I think at least three of my previous novels are in that database. So it is speaking back to us in our own words in some way, but, but words that are manipulated, words that bounce off of us, and in these, again, in these, these ways that are coldly indifferent to our fate, but pretend empathy, you know, and that's, that's the scariest thing of all. If you can, if you can convince someone that you are empathetic, that you are sympathetic, that you are just like them, that you're here for them, and then that makes it all easier to turn on them.

• 23:07Kara Swisher?

  Is that what's amoral about Blair?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah, because Blair can-

• 23:12Kara Swisher?

  Amoral, I meant amoral.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Amoral, yeah, amoral, exactly. And then there's a subtle difference there. And I think amorality is, and again, I think that's part of superintelligence. I think amorality is the, is, is one of the kind of categories here that, that makes these things so- Good at what they do.

• 23:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Or, you know, awful in awful in what they do, too.

• 23:35Kara Swisher?

  Even if they reflect us.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  But it's the deceptive, it's the cloak of decency.

• 23:39Kara Swisher?

  That's exactly. So one AI technology you all you all seem to look at more critically is a swarm of drone. You have everything in here, by the way, swarm drones that accidentally kill a busload of civilians in Yemen. This is one of the many parts of the book where you use fictional artifact materials, in this case, a Senate hearing transcript. There are serious ethical questions about the use of these autonomous weapons in warfare, and the UN has spoken about it. How do you think about this? And what do you want the readers to take away here? You know, at some point, they'll be able to target individual people, what I'm told, like the DNA of individual leaders and not kill anybody else, for example.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that's the dilemma at the, you know, when when that we get this, there's a lot of snippets of different sorts of things, like paratextual elements throughout the the novel, and the Senate hearing is one, that New Yorker interview is one. The technology and where things are in terms of autonomous drone swarms, a lot of that, I think, is probably classified, like you may know, I did a little poking and prodding.

• 24:38Kara Swisher?

  If you can think of it, they're working on it.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  They're working on it, exactly. And they're they're farther ahead than you, further ahead than we probably think they are.

• 24:45Kara Swisher?

  That's correct.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And so, all right, so Lorelei would take, you know, she if she were looking at this problem, and again, no, no spoilers, but she would probably say, well, if, okay, so they're going to kill civilians every now and then, but what if they kill far fewer civilians than conventional weapons?

• 25:01Kara Swisher?

  Yes, that's their argument.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And that's, I'm sure, you know, in the morality of war arguments, that is always

• 25:05Kara Swisher?

  That is their argument.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  case, and, you know, new technology, it's these, these things are going to happen. And so if we can, just like an autonomous vehicle, yeah, it's going to kill people, but are they going to kill fewer people? Yeah. And then, so I, I imagine the same thing is true in war, that the thing that's so uncanny, you know, is just that. To imagine these drone swarms, instead of, you know, just working with their human operators, they're working with each other and improving themselves. You know, it's a machine learning technology. Once you put more than one in the air, they're learning from each other and they're learning about us. They're learning about our tactics. And that's obviously the more futuristic element of it. But this novel is very much set in

• 25:49Speaker 01

  the present. It's very much about a contemporary family going through the struggle of thing, you know, after this accident. And so I really wanted to make that feel present day.

• 25:58Kara Swisher?

  Another issue raised in the book is when the characters realize that the AI is collecting data that could be used against them. Because one of the things the car companies are doing, not just with autonomous, is how you're driving, when you're braking, where you're going. And, you know, they're able to base insurance costs based on how you drive, like by the amount of braking, for example, is something that's really revelatory in how bad a driver you are, and how fast you're going, how much you speed up. Talk about the idea of tech surveillance, both good and bad, and culpability. Because if they're watching you, you can't sort of lie about what happened or misremember, I guess.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the dynamics of the accident is Noah, the father, believes, you know, he was sitting in the front car. He mostly witnessed what happened. And he believes that the other car was swerving into their lane. And he doesn't have any, you know, he doesn't, he isn't even thinking about the tech aspect of it. He's just thinking, okay, my son didn't do anything wrong.

• 26:57Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  We're going to get through this. The police are going to interview you. It's going to be fine. And then, and this is one of the things I came across in the course of my research for the novel, this field called digital vehicle forensics. The police have whole units dedicated to, if there's an accident, they go into the car's computer and they figure out exactly what happened from the computer's point.

• 27:16Kara Swisher?

  Like a black box.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, a black box, exactly. As in a plane. And with AI controlled, with, you know, self-driving cars, that's all the more complicated. And yet, it's also, there's probably a lot more information being collected. So it's like having fifty additional witnesses to what happened in the exact moment. What the driver was looking at, what the driver was doing, whether, what other computers were on in the car, and so on. So that, that's another kind of frightening bit of surveillance technology, just like drones and so on.

• 27:48Kara Swisher?

  Is that a bad thing? I mean, if you're texting while driving and you lie about it, you certainly should be held accountable.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, yeah, and there's a, you know, there's arguments, the same arguments to be made for facial recognition, for shot spotting technology, right? Where'd the gunshot come from in the city? But they are also tools of surveillance. So you really, I think we really have to balance those kinds of things out. You know, algorithmic injustice, the way facial recognition deals differently with different people of different races. You know, those are, those are really difficult dilemmas. The culpability, the novel doesn't pretend to resolve them, but it wants to explore them, I think, in different ways.

• 28:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, one of the things I always used to argue when they were talking about texting while driving, I'm like, but you made a, you made a technology that's addictive, so maybe that wasn't your fault for staring at the text. Maybe it was the tech company's fault. You know what I mean? Whose fault was it? Because it is addictive, in fact. But the idea of being watched constantly is also sort of a prevalent thing in the book. Do you think it's changing the way we act? Will we get to be better people? Like, pay attention while your seventeen-year-old son is driving? I always pay attention when my seventeen-year-old son was driving. I never stop paying attention. And the chatbot is surveilling Alice and this and that. Do you, do you think we change when we're being surveilled? Or we forget we're being surveilled?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Ooh, I think it's a little bit of both. You know, that's a kind of stock feature in thrillers, right? Like the, you know, cameras on in airports and people dodging the cameras, you know, putting on disguise to elude the ever-present surveillance state. So, yeah, obviously, it, you know, that, that notion of the Panopticon from, from Foucault, you know, that we, it's not just that we're being watched, but we're aware of ourselves being watched. And that is a whole different kind of technology of the self and how we behave and how we comport ourselves in the public sphere with each other. And I think even, I would imagine that even when we know we're not being surveilled, that Still, that sensibility is still there in some ways.

• 29:49Kara Swisher?

  Or you forget.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:51Kara Swisher?

  Or you totally live in a world where you don't mind being surveilled and you forget that you are being surveilled.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 29:57Kara Swisher?

  You know, a party trick I do is I, I open people's phone and tell them exactly what they did all day and where they were and the address they were at and how many minutes they were there. So I'd imagine if you were having an affair or something not good, I could find you, you know what I mean, easily, just by your movement.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:13Kara Swisher?

  Because you're wearing.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Our phones become our jumbotron's, right?

• 30:16Kara Swisher?

  That's right.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  We're carrying our jumbotron's around with us all the time.

• 30:21Kara Swisher?

  Although everyone loves the story. Any thoughts on that? That's really, because it's like the same thing. It's like we're being watched at all times.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, and it's, I, you know, the, the details of that whole story.

• 30:33Kara Swisher?

  Oh, man.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  That it's an HR person, they're just things that are just too perfect.

• 30:37Kara Swisher?

  I know, I know. A novelist couldn't come up with this, I think, I feel like.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  No, yeah, but, but clearly it'll be in my next one.

• 30:43Kara Swisher?

  Yes, obviously. So there's one critical voice in the book, it's near the end of the book, when then Noah has an interactive with Detective Lacey Morrissey, who's investigating the accident. She does frame it correctly as one of privilege, who has ability to have tech, who has access, who has been able to use it to shift the blame. Talk about that scene and your thoughts, how tech relates to privilege, because it's a very big, important, you've written about it in your other books, too.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, thank you. That, I'm really glad you brought up that passage and that character. So Lacey Morrissey is the Delaware police officer who is, she's the detective, kind of looking into the accident, basically going after Charlie and, and, and saying, you know, you're not going to get away with this just because you're a Division One lacrosse recruit and you're, you know, you come from this fancy family and your dad's lawyer and your mom's this, this world famous technologist and philosopher, you know. And then, then she has this rant that she goes on, this, this very righteous rant that where she's like the conscience, where she's saying, you know, a kid from the housing project who's in this exact situation is going to get put in jail for an accident

• 31:52Speaker 01

  that your son might have, Noah, and, and get off with a slap on the wrist. And this is where we are right now. And AI is only exacerbating this problem, right? And this surveillance is, is, is treating people inequitably. And we're now in this place where these things are becoming a way of. Just taking any kind of the moral burden of our mistakes off of our shoulders, right? It's just another excuse for things. And she just stomps out of the hospital and then she drives away texting at the wheel. And Noah sees her do it. And there's this kind of shiver of righteous glee that goes down his spine. One of the last scenes in the book.

• 32:32Kara Swisher?

  Well, it's again, addiction. It's addictive. It's so funny. One of the, one of the problems with a lot of these technologies, and I think you put this out well in this book, is that it's not just the kids that are addicted. Because when you tell your kids to put down their phone, you can't put down your phone. You actually can't. And so, everybody is culpable, right? You can't, you know, you have to sort of walk the talk. So, every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Let's listen to yours.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Hi. My name's Kurt Gray. I'm a social psychologist and professor at the Ohio State University. I research the psychology of artificial intelligence. And my work shows that people think that AI can help us escape blame. If a drone kills, it's the pilot to blame. But if an AI drone kills, then people blame the AI. But does it ever truly let us escape blame? Or are we ultimately still to blame as human beings who invented the AI, who choose to use the AI, and who deal with the aftermath of the AI?

• 33:38Kara Swisher?

  Great question. Thoughts on that?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really wonderful question, because it is the central dilemma, I think, of the novel of culpability is, is the, is the title. You know, who is to blame? And Larley, in the excerpts, that she writes a book, and we get little excerpts from it, called Silicon Souls, on the culpability of artificial minds. And as you read, you get little glimpses of that book, paragraphs, or a page at a time, just eight or nine of them sprinkled throughout the novel. And Larley is wrestling with this all the time. How, to what extent are we guilty if our machines do something bad? Are our machines training us to be, could they train us to be good? Could they train us to be better people? Because it's not just a one way street. Yes, we're inventing them. We are responsible

• 34:26Speaker 01

  in many ways for how they are in the world. But we're also responsible for how we are, how we comport ourselves ethically in the world in relationship to them, and thus in relationship to each other in new ways. So- You know, I think I think it's always going to be a two way street. I don't think that's a squishy answer. I think, you know, we're caught in this world where we're in this Frankenstein world where we're creating these machines. We're not we, not me, but we're using them. We are, we're, we're subject to many of their, you know, their, their controls.

• 34:59Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go right to it's our fault. So, speaking of that, this comes at the end of a novel, no, is called, by the way, Lorelei Atlas, and says she has the weight of the world on her shoulders after she acknowledges that these algorithms have been used for drones and warfare. This is something I've talked to many people who've quit Google or stayed there, make the, you know, everyone has their own argument. I want to play this clip from Lorelei, from the end of the book.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  We do the world no good when we throw up our hands and surrender to the moral frameworks of algorithms. AIs are not aliens from another world. They are things of our all too human creation. We in turn are their Pygmalions, responsible for their design, their function, and yes, even their beauty. If necessary, we must also be responsible for their demise. And above all, we must never shy away from acting as their equals. These new beings will only be as moral as we design them to be. Our morality in turn will be shaped by what

• 36:07Speaker 04

  we learn from them and how we adapt accordingly. Perhaps in the near future, they might help us to be less cruel to one another, more generous and kind. Someday, they might even teach us new ways to be good. But that will be up to us, not them.

• 36:29Kara Swisher?

  So, talk about this idea of shaping our moral frameworks. It hasn't worked with each other, right? Because we don't seem to affect each other. Do you really believe this is possible?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Well, do you really think we don't affect each other? You don't think that there's a-

• 36:42Kara Swisher?

  I think we, lately, worse.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Lately, yes. No, no, no. I agree. But in everyday situations, and when you have someone calling us to be good, I think we can shape one another's moral consciousness, right?

• 36:54Kara Swisher?

  Right. Yes, absolutely.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, the, are these, are these-

• 37:00Speaker 01

  AI is going to train us to be better? Are they gonna, are they, you know, it's always going to be mixed back. You know, we can get really excited about advances in protein folding visualization and so on, but you know, there's always going to be these, you know, kind of terrifying moral quandaries that they put us in at the same time. You know, Lorelai's voice is right on that razor's edge of the ethical dilemmas, right? That passage that you played from the audio book, that is, you know, I wrote those passages to, so to explore this, you know, that profound moral ambivalence at the center of these, these problems.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, there are people in that world, I imagine, you, I'm sure you know many of them, who are, you know, dedicated to that, like make them better, make them, if not good, at least ethical, and are dedicating their lives to it and are probably really scared and are doing everything they can to dig us out of these trenches that these things have become.

• 38:05Kara Swisher?

  I think a lot of people, I was thinking of Brad Smith of Microsoft, you know, he called, tool or weapon, is it a tool or a weapon of these things? And it's up to us, essentially.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:14Kara Swisher?

  But in some ways, is it up to us? That's the thing. You know, one of the lines I always use is, enragement equals engagement. And so, wouldn't you go to enragement over kindness, right? Because, and that's what's happened.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just, not just enragement, but also massification. And the, one of these places, of course, is, I have a son who's in the data analysis programming space and just the, the speed with which programming is being taken over and programming of programming and, you know, this is the next frontier of these things, AIs making themselves better by creating more AIs to make them better. You know, this kind of recursive loop that we're in.

• 38:56Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  You know, for me, the doom, the P doom is, I don't really have a number, but, you know, I'm much more in the, in the cap of, as a kind of dark note, you know, Jeff Goodall, as he puts it, the heat will kill you first. It's the, the

• 39:10Kara Swisher?

  It's not that bad.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  The most dangerous thing about AI maybe is just data centers in general. And the consumption, thinking about Karen How's book Empire of AI has that brilliant chapter on water use and energy use and, you know.

• 39:24Kara Swisher?

  Bruce, they're bringing back nuclear. What are you talking about? We'll be fine.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  It's gonna be fine.

• 39:29Kara Swisher?

  They're gonna harness the sun. They're gonna go up there with a rocket and not fuck anything up.

• 39:36Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 39:50Kara Swisher?

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• 40:34Kara Swisher?

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• 41:03Kara Swisher?

  I'm going to talk just a little bit about your day job and the role of AI. You're a professor of medieval literature and critical theory at the University of Virginia. You dedicated this book to your students. One of the biggest tech issues facing higher education right now, the use of generative programs like ChatGPT, Claude. You mentioned it briefly before about whether they were using LLMs to write. Talk about how you're using it. I would encourage students to use it so you don't pretend they're not. Are you leaning in or out?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, we're all wrestling with this. Every department in my, in my university has something called an AI guide where, you know, where they're a faculty member, a colleague who are, you know, were trying to come up. And I'm in an English department. We have a writing program. This is a big issue, but I agree with what Megan O'Rourke said in The Times the other day, that, you know, this is the end of the take home college essay. Like that, that is done, that is dead. I was never a big fan of that genre in the first place, but I do think there's, there's a huge shift going on in assessment of student writing. And I don't know if it's all to the bad. I think there's a lot of space for more in-class writing, for slow reading, for even just, you

• 42:15Speaker 01

  know, I have this vision of, of just teaching a class where we almost go in and have reading time, like in kindergarten and in first grade, you know, where we're all just fixed on a physical text. Medieval literature is my specialty and I'm not calling for going back to the era of parchment and scribes, but, you know, there is something there about that, that slow attention and decelerating a bit.

• 42:39Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's also the idea of, of, of sort of doing homework. I hate homework. I've been an anti-homework person as a parent. I have four kids and I was always like, no homework, homework is zero, stupid, go play kind of thing. So one of the things you mentioned was parchment and scribes, and I like this idea and I think you should go for it, but as, as a medievalist. You know, the way that the printing press, the original technology, electricity, between the printing press and electricity, but both of them are critically important, sparked the first information age by improving access to knowledge and education. But, as most people do not know, a bestseller during that era was a thing called The Hammer of Witches, which was a dangerous treatise on killing women, essentially, and about

• 43:22Kara Swisher?

  how there were witches and witch hunts and et cetera, et cetera. Was that another moment? Because the democratizing of knowledge in the first 60 years ended up in killing hundreds of thousands of women because of this book, for example.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and hundreds of thousands of dissenters, heretics, Catholics, or Protestants, depending where and when you are. And people, you know, people talked about the printing press. Historians talk about it as an agent of change, and it obviously was, but manuscript cultures, you know, last for many, many centuries after the printing press. And people talked about the printing press as the tool of the devil, right? And conservative theologians would say, "Look, now the people can have the word of God in their hand." So I think that that, you know, it's one of those technological ruptures. And in the culture of writing and literature and the written word, people freaked out about it, just like we're freaking out about LLMs now. And, you know, it's a very, very different kind of rupture.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  But, you know, democratization can have its dangers. You know, the book that you're talking about, Malais Malafakar, and that Hammer of Witches, that also has a manuscript tradition. And there's a lot of persecution of women, of dissenting women, heretical women, than in, you know, the pre-print era as well.

• 44:42Kara Swisher?

  Sure. I'm talking about getting it out there to many more people, right? Is that a good impact or a bad impact, from your perspective? It kind of ended the medieval era, correct? Or not? Maybe not. You're more of an expert.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm one of those people who always pushes against the idea of these rigid medieval, early-modern, medieval Renaissance period boundaries. I'm much more interested in continuities than, and the way that those ruptures play in the long-scale continuities. But I think that the- The printing press was an invention of the Middle Ages, not of the Renaissance. And I think it's a nice analogy to AI, I think, because it's not futuristic. It is, it's coming out of so many kind of text generation, computer generated things and that have been in place for decades. And so looking at, you know, always being afraid of the newness of a technology, that in some ways is its own danger, I think. I don't know if you'd agree.

• 45:33Kara Swisher?

  I'd agree. I would, pretending, you know, when people complain about certain things, I'm like, oh, yes, let's please go back to Xerox machines. Like, no, like, what? When you think about what the most important technology of the era you teach on, what would you say it was?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  I would say, you know, the emergence of of paper. I wrote a whole book on parchment, but that this widespread technology that had been in place for a thousand years and it continues to be used even today by artists, printmakers and so on. But paper had come, was a product of the early Middle Ages as well. But when it really starts, you know, the convergence of paper and print, you get this this mass production of books in a way you'd never had before. And that really is enabled by paper, even though Gutenberg printed any number of his bibles on animal skin, on vellum. So, but, but the, you know, the preponderance of printed books, the vast majority are on paper. So we suddenly get this ocean of paper.

• 46:34Kara Swisher?

  So in that same vein, what about the comparative impact on creatives? Now, do you think it will be a net positive allowing people who aren't natural artists to get their work out? That's the argument. Or will will undermine the value of artists?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think it's going to undermine the value. It's not that I'm sanguine about that within the creative worlds. But I feel like there are people who are already doing really interesting experiments, collaborative experiments with large language models, with small language models, that are just interesting because art is interesting and technology is part of art. I'm much less worried about the arts than I am about young people and brains.

• 47:15Kara Swisher?

  And what worries you then?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Oh, just, just about the.

• 47:19Kara Swisher?

  Analytical.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Analytical, right, students who was like, I can just summarize this rather than reading it. That, that I think is the, the scary is the wrong word, but sad. But this is not, I'm just not, just blaming students and young people. I don't read nearly as many novels as I used to. And when I do read novels, I get more impatient than I used to. I should have to lounge around on my bed, read novels by Charles Dickens when I was like 16 years old. And for me now, getting through a Dickens novel is a real challenge.

• 47:49Kara Swisher?

  I can't do a Dickens.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the sad part.

• 47:52Kara Swisher?

  Can you imagine reading Red Expectations right now? I think I didn't like it then.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Why do they keep putting that?

• 47:57Kara Swisher?

  I don't know. I can't read PIP. Just stop with the PIP. Anyway, um, did you use AI working on culpability at all? How do you use it yourself?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I don't, I mean, you know, occasionally I'll, I'll, I'll often use it like, um, almost unintentionally as a Google search. Right? But, but I am interested, you know, there's this, this wonderful poet who teaches at the University of Maryland, Lilian Yvonne Bertram, who has used these small language models to generate these poems and the style of other poets and doing it very intentionally. I'm, I'm excited about that. Where our department is even doing a, I think a faculty search next year on AI and creative writing. We just hired somebody in AI and critical thought. So, you know, it's, yes, it's transforming things very quickly under our feet. But I, I don't, I don't have the kind of dread of, of this that, that many colleagues do.

• 48:49Kara Swisher?

  After looking at all these different uses of AI and this, you really do cover the gamut here. You've got the drones. And which parts give you hope and scare you? As you said, you're more sanguine, but, um, would you describe yourself as a tech optimist or a tech pessimist? There's three designations, zoomers, boomers and doomers, right? Did writing your book move you in one direction or another?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  I think it moved me more, probably more towards doom, more for those environmental reasons that I was talking about. That was one of the real eye-opening revelations is just commonplace knowledge now, but often that we don't see, even talked about in much journalism about the consumption. But in terms of the models themselves, I don't know. I think especially with autonomous driving, I had a really bad accident that could have been really, really bad when my kids were in the car some years ago. This crumpled the front of a car and it was because of my negligence. I thought I would much rather have had a machine driving that day. So that part of it, I think this issue of autonomy and navigation, maybe I am a little more optimistic there. And I think the thing is, you know, artificial intelligence, as you know, is such a sloppy term for all these

• 49:56Speaker 01

  different things.

• 49:57Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Machine learning, L L Ms. And so I think that I'm probably, you probably would have to kind of go through a questionnaire to get any optimism or pessimism. I think we need more of that, you know?

• 50:08Kara Swisher?

  This is a wonderful book. It really is. I'm glad. Oprah doesn't always pick the books I like, but this one I do. Is that, was that like a shocker to you? That must have been a shocker.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I was just, my hands were shaking. And you know, one of the things she does is she records the calls that she makes with authors. And in this case, I was like, I was so like shaking and whatever. My voice sounded kind of understated. So I got dragged a little bit for just to be like, oh, my God, he's not even happy. But it was, it was such a lightning strike and so, so thrilling and flattering. There's a hundred other books published this summer that could have been her summer pick, but she chose culpability. And I just can't believe.

• 50:48Kara Swisher?

  Certain things she does, the wedding, she shouldn't have gone to. But, but she does these books, things I think is really important. That helps. That's good. Yeah. I would have thought her voice was generated by AI. I wouldn't have believed it.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I still think this is all a simulation. Last six weeks.

• 51:02Kara Swisher?

  Well, that's your next book. It is all a simulation. In case you're, it's some teenagers from the future who are playing a video game right now and they're enjoying themselves. Anyway, much congratulations. This has been a fascinating conversation and I really appreciate your book. It's great. I'm recommending it to lots of, you know, people who don't really understand it. It's a really great way to understand and you don't shy away, you don't stupidize these issues, which is.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 51:26Kara Swisher?

  Anyway, thank you.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been a huge pleasure.

• 51:33Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor Rosell, Kateri Yocum, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, Lissa Soap, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get an AI and you get an AI. Oh, that's an Oprah joke, everyone who doesn't know, all you youngs. If not, watch out for that Jumbotron. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast

• 52:18Kara Swisher?

  Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 52:29Speaker 02

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