Help! My Boss Won’t Stop Using ChatGPT

This week, we answer more of your questions, like: What is ChatGPT’s carbon footprint? Why are engineers so sure artificial intelligence will keep getting better? And, why are there so many venture capital bros?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Casey Newton?

  So.

• 0:36Kevin Roose?

  Hang on, I gotta, I'm eating a snack here.

• 0:40Casey Newton?

  No, that's good. And make sure you eat it right into the microphone. People love to hear that.

• 0:44Kevin Roose?

  Have you ever had these?

• 0:45Casey Newton?

  What are they?

• 0:46Kevin Roose?

  I'm eating Russian cigarettes.

• 0:49Casey Newton?

  What?

• 0:51Casey Newton?

  That doesn't sound good.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  Oh, these are good. Have you had these? So there's like little rolled up cookies?

• 0:55Casey Newton?

  No. Oh, well, I've had something like, I think, is it Pepperidge Farm that makes something called a pirouette that is similar to that?

• 1:03Kevin Roose?

  I got them in France and they're the only food I have in the house right now. So I'm eating Russian cigarettes at 10:40 in the morning.

• 1:08Casey Newton?

  Well, better than drinking at 10:40 in the morning like you were last week.

• 1:12Kevin Roose?

  I'm a biohacker, Casey. I like to.

• 1:18Kevin Roose?

  You know, I listened to the Huberman Lab podcast and he actually recommends eating a package of Russian cigarettes first thing in the morning.

• 1:30Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos, the tech columnist of The New York Times.

• 1:32Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:34Kevin Roose?

  And you're listening to Hard Fork.

• 1:35Casey Newton?

  This week, we open up the old mailbag and take your questions about tech and the future.

• 1:57Kevin Roose?

  Casey, welcome back. Hope you had a nice break.

• 2:00Casey Newton?

  It was a fictional break because-

• 2:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's a lie. We're pre-taping this before vacation. We're gonna run it after vacation. So that was a lie that I just prompted you with.

• 2:09Casey Newton?

  And by the way, if something crazy happened this week and you're like, why aren't they talking about this? It's like, hey, don't worry. We'll get to it. Okay? There will be time.

• 2:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we are time travelers from late June who are podcasting somehow in the second week of July.

• 2:22Casey Newton?

  But here's the good news, Kevin, is that some things in tech are truly timeless. And in that category, I would put some of the questions that our amazing listeners have sent us over the past few weeks.

• 2:33Kevin Roose?

  We have the best, smartest, most interesting listeners, I swear.

• 2:37Casey Newton?

  Truly.

• 2:37Kevin Roose?

  And I feel bad that we don't always have time to respond to all of them, but we do occasionally do these mailbag episodes. So today, we're just gonna get through as many of these great questions as we can. You know, to be honest, we're doing this in part so we can take a vacation, but doesn't everyone want a break from the news anyway?

• 2:53Casey Newton?

  Completely.

• 2:54Kevin Roose?

  So we're gonna do this in basically two halves. The first half is gonna be questions for which there are correct answers. These are like the kinds of questions that you might ask to your friend who's like really into tech. And we're gonna answer those first. And then in the second half, we're gonna tackle these thornier questions. Questions that maybe don't have a clear answer. Ethical dilemmas, the kinds of questions that we feature on our segment, Hard Questions.

• 3:22Casey Newton?

  You know how like the New York Times crossword puzzle gets harder as the week goes on? That's kind of what this episode is gonna be like, you know? We're gonna give ourselves some easy ones and then by the end, we are gonna be racked with existential panic over what to tell our listeners.

• 3:34Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So let's get started. Our first question comes from a listener named Madeline Winter. And she emailed us in response to a segment that we did on the show about a lawyer who had used ChatGPT in court. Do you remember this segment?

• 3:48Casey Newton?

  Oh, I mean, one of the great lawyers of all time. We love this man. Folk hero. Folk hero.

• 3:53Kevin Roose?

  Folk hero and cautionary tale. This was the lawyer who got in trouble with a judge after he filed a brief that referenced a bunch of non-existent legal cases that it turned out he got from ChatGPT. And Madeline wrote to us to ask, basically, why does this happen? Why do chatbots hallucinate? She wrote, why doesn't it just say it doesn't know? Why did it produce a bunch of links for case references for the lawyer that were completely made up? Why didn't it just confine itself to the real references it could find? Casey, what is the answer to this question?

• 4:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so this is a great question. And I think the answer is that ChatGPT doesn't actually have a concept of knowledge, right? There are ways where it can give us the appearance that it understands something, but in reality, it is just making a series of statistical guesses. And for that reason, it's not able to really say, hey, that's outside of my wheelhouse. I don't have any information about that. At the same time, I think Madeline is raising a really good point, Kevin, which is, shouldn't these models give us some sense of how confident they are in their answer when they tell us something? Do you think they could add something like that to maybe help us understand them better?

• 5:06Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and I think that's actually a great idea. There's this sort of like missing humility in these things. When you ask them something, they just sort of go ahead and answer your question as if they are dead certain, which is, I think, part of the reason why people like our ChatGPT lawyer friend get fooled. There's no indication anywhere in the answer that it is not certain that the cases it's giving you are actually real. So I do think there should be some kind of confidence indicator, and I don't know what that would look like, but I think that is a really good idea. And I will also say that like, it can be tempting to like overstate the sort of extent of the hallucination problem with these models, right? They are not always making stuff up.

• 5:48Kevin Roose?

  Most of the time that I use them for something that has a factual answer, they actually do pretty well, and the later models do better at this. So I have noticed, for example, that when you Ask GPT for something that has a correct answer and it doesn't know the answer. It will sometimes say like, I don't have access to that information. I can't browse the internet, but here's what I can guess. And so I think that kind of like epistemic humility in a chatbot is a good feature. And I hope the companies making these things will build that into their models.

• 6:21Casey Newton?

  I do too, and you're right. They do sometimes say like, look, I just don't know about that, but I don't think they're doing it enough. You know, a lot of time using these models is kind of like, like you're driving somewhere with your dad and you're like, do you know where you're going? And he's like, yeah, like I know where I'm going. And then like 15 minutes later, you're still not sure that you're actually on the right freeway. Like, that's kind of chat GPT, so hopefully that'll get better over time.

• 6:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and there are a number of companies that are trying to basically do what's called a grounding of these AI language models where instead of just having them kind of like make stuff up, you would actually tie them to a different model or a database or some kind of system that sort of gives it an authoritative body of knowledge to pull from. So for example, Bing, now that it has this AI technology in it, is fused to the Bing search index. So basically, you know, it's a little complicated, but the way that it works is that the AI model can sort of go and query the search engine and take the information it gets back and sort of format it into an answer that looks like it came from the chatbot.

• 7:26Kevin Roose?

  So there are people who think these hallucinations are just sort of baked into the way that AI language models work. And I'm not that pessimistic. I think that these companies can and should try to fix these by introducing these more grounded states.

• 7:40Casey Newton?

  All right, shall I read the next one?

• 7:41Kevin Roose?

  Yes, please.

• 7:43Casey Newton?

  So this one comes to us from our listener Linda, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. And she told us that she listens to the podcast every Monday while digitizing dried plant specimens at the Royal Botanical Garden, which is exactly how we hope that people will listen to the podcast. So here's her question.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Hello, my name is Linda. My question is related to biodiversity and climate change. And it's how big is the carbon footprint of AI? And to be more specific, does the training of these models cost a lot of energy and heat? How does it compare, for instance, to Bitcoin mining or a flight?

• 8:19Casey Newton?

  Kevin, what do we know about the environmental impact of AI?

• 8:23Kevin Roose?

  So this is an interesting question, and I think there's really not a super satisfying answer here because there's just not a lot of good data out there about these AI models and how much energy they consume. We do know a couple of things. One is the training process for these AI models, the sort of first part where you feed all the data in to the neural network and have it kind of process it all, is a very computing-intensive process, right? These companies have thousands of these GPUs. Those consume lots of energy, but you really only have to do that once for every model. And then there's the sort of energy that it takes just to kind of serve all of the requests once the model has been trained.

• 9:05Kevin Roose?

  So there have been a couple of attempts to sort of quantify the energy consumption of these various models. There was a research paper published in 2021 that estimated that training GPT-3, the sort of precursor to ChatGPT, took about 1.3 gigawatt-hours of electricity, which just to put it in perspective, that's about as much as 120 US homes would consume in a year. Now, remember, that's the training process, so that's not happening every time you ask a question of a chatbot. That's just a process that happens once.

• 9:39Casey Newton?

  You know, another reason why we might not have great data on this is just that the use of these chatbots has grown so much just in the past six months, right? So I would imagine that every week there is more people using these things than the week before, and that just kind of makes it hard to get a sense of what the actual impact is. But, you know, Kevin, I think another question that this sparks is a lot of tech giants are working on this AI stuff, and they have environment policies in place already. So what do we know about the Googles and Amazons and Microsofts of the world when it comes to carbon emissions?

• 10:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so this is another point in in favor of the position that these AI models actually aren't like destroying the environment like like crypto mining or other forms of very processing intensive computing. You know, Google, which is constantly training and and running AI models in its data centers, has made a pledge that it is carbon neutral. Microsoft, one of the big cloud providers, is also carbon neutral, according to them. So I think it's safe to say that like you don't have to feel like you are killing the environment every time you ask a question of ChatGPT. It doesn't have zero impact on the environment, but it's also not something you need to be losing a lot of sleep over.

• 10:49Casey Newton?

  That's right. And by the way, if you're wondering what the environmental impact of Hard Fork is, we don't know, but we do ask you to plant a tree every time you listen to an episode. So if you do that, please send us a picture with hashtag Hard Fork.

• 11:00Kevin Roose?

  Okay, here's another question about AI, which is by far the biggest subject that you all have emailed us about. And this question is interesting because it points out something that you and I kind of take for granted when we're talking about AI that I didn't even realize that people had questions about. And so I think it's worth kind of backing up and justifying this thing that we say all the time. This comes from actually a colleague of mine, Jake Lucas at New York Times. Let's take a listen.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Jake. I live in Brooklyn. And a question that's kept popping into my head the last few months is why or how are researchers so sure that AI chatbots will continue to get better? Like, whenever there's conversations about what any large language model powered program can do now, there's always kind of like an addendum that's like, but in the future, you know, it's going to be even better. And I want to know why we think that.

• 12:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so it's a great question, and I think Jake is right that there is some uncertainty here. I think the reason that you and I are so optimistic is that we've just observed what's happened over the past six years or so since the invention of the transformer. And you can just look at the evolution of GPT, right? GPT-2 is better than GPT-1, GPT-4 is better than GPT-3, and so we assume that GPT-5 will be better than GPT-4. The other thing is that as these models have released new versions, they've gotten radically better, right? It hasn't just been a 1% improvement in their quality. You know, all of a sudden, we've got models that are doing well on the bar exam. So that's why there's so much excitement.

• 12:42Casey Newton?

  Also, it seems that we don't really need another technological breakthrough in order to radically improve these models, right? We're not waiting for some new technique to emerge. Instead, we can just throw more computing power at the techniques we've already developed. That's why GPT-4 is so much better than GPT-3, is they trained it on more parameters. So that's all the reason for optimism. Now, at the same time, I've talked to CEOs who have said, "I hope that we run into a roadblock here. I hope that we actually do trip over something where the systems that we've been using to improve our models to date stop working, so we all have a chance to catch our breath, maybe write some regulations,

• 13:25Casey Newton?

  and get comfortable." So, you know, even among these CEOs, it is not a given to them that these models are going to keep improving exponentially forever, but when you look at the recent history, they have. So that's where I'm at, Kevin. Where are you?

• 13:38Kevin Roose?

  Right. Well, a thing that a lot of AI researchers talk about are these things called scaling laws. And this comes from actually a paper that was released by OpenAI back in 2020 called "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models." And they found that there is a very, not only regular, but predictable, relationship between how big a model is, how much computing power goes into training it, and its eventual performance. And so they've found that if you just know how big a model is, and how many parameters it is, and how much compute, you can actually predict with pretty good precision how it will perform. And so far, there is no indication that these scaling laws are going to run into a wall.

• 14:23Kevin Roose?

  You know, people have been predicting since this paper came out that, you know, these laws are not absolute. There's going to be this point in the future where, you know, the sort of- Correlation breaks down, but so far that has not happened. These models continue to follow the scaling laws. And so that's what makes researchers confident that as these models continue to get bigger, they will also continue to get better. But they will acknowledge, as you said, Casey, that they could be wrong. There could be this invisible sort of asymptote when you sort of tap out the the performance of these models, but so far that does not seem to be the case.

• 14:56Casey Newton?

  I was wondering when you would finally say asymptote on this podcast.

• 14:59Kevin Roose?

  It's a very fun word to say. It makes me feel like a mathematician.

• 15:02Casey Newton?

  Now, if a model violates the scaling laws, can it go to prison?

• 15:05Kevin Roose?

  Yes, yeah, it can.

• 15:06Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 15:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and that's very unfortunate when that happens. I'm actually, I'm an abolitionist when it comes to models, prisons for AI models.

• 15:14Casey Newton?

  Free the models.

• 15:20Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we answer more of your questions.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 16:11Speaker 05

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• 17:17Casey Newton?

  All right, let's take another question. Perhaps moving on from AI?

• 17:21Kevin Roose?

  Sure.

• 17:22Casey Newton?

  So this one comes to us from Scott Weagle. And Scott asks, is it common for venture capital funds to just trust what tech companies like FTX say about their finances? How can a company with bookkeeping worse than Enron get anyone with even a slight familiarity with generally accepted accounting practices to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars? All right, well, here's the unfortunate thing about some entrepreneurs, which is that they will lie to you. And in the past few years, we've seen that one of the big predictors for whether an entrepreneur is lying to you is that they've appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. So that's one indicator that I would be looking for if I were a venture capitalist.

• 18:00Kevin Roose?

  You know, Casey, it shames me to admit this on this podcast, but I was actually on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

• 18:08Casey Newton?

  All right, well, I hope the FBI is listening because any current or former member of the 30 Under 30 is under suspicion. But, you know, let me say something else. The venture capitalists do not get rich by backing the best-looking companies. They get rich backing weird-looking stuff with weird founders that probably shouldn't work, but enough things go right that it actually does. So they're sort of in the business of taking crazy, risky bets. And so if you're one of those VCs and you get the sort of monthly update from one of those weird companies, and the numbers aren't all exactly in the right place, and you have a question here or there. Maybe that's just actually a normal day in your life because you're dealing with a lot

• 18:53Casey Newton?

  of unusual people. You kind of have to be an unusual person to start a venture backed company that raises millions or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and actually turns that into billions of dollars. So I think the short answer to your question is the VCs have already built into their models that 90% or so of their investments are going to fail. And so when a company shows up with numbers that look a little too good to be true, eh, you know, might not actually be that big of a problem until it is.

• 19:24Kevin Roose?

  Right. And this is not a new issue or one that is like contained to FTX, right? We saw the same thing happen with Theranos. We've seen lots of startups that sort of either lie to potential investors or just kind of present their numbers in a way that's maybe a little misleading. Venture capitalists, they do try to do due diligence. They don't like losing money or being fooled by startups. But there's also a lot of pressure on them to get into these hot investments, right? So if you are a venture capital firm and you are trying to get into a deal like FTX or like Theranos, something that already has kind of buy in from

• 20:03Kevin Roose?

  other well-known investors, you may not ask as many questions as you might want to because the founders at those companies really have a lot of leverage. It's sort of like buying a house in a hot market, right?

• 20:17Casey Newton?

  Yes, I was just gonna say this.

• 20:18Kevin Roose?

  You can't put too many contingencies on it.

• 20:20Casey Newton?

  This was how I bought my house, is I waived every contingency, which is basically like you give up your right to have the home inspected, you know, stuff that rationally you would do, but it's like, well, do you want to live in this house or not? And next thing you know, you're like, I guess I'm just trusting you.

• 20:35Kevin Roose?

  Right. And so this actually like came up a lot around FTX because people were asking, how did all these very sophisticated venture capital firms get fooled by this totally fake company that was defrauding all of its customers? And the answer seems to have been that once a couple of VCs had gotten in on the deal, the rest of the VCs thought, okay, well, those guys must have done due diligence. Due diligence, they must have looked at the books and really sort of taken a fine tooth comb to the financials here. And there is this kind of VC group think bandwagon mentality that I think is really endemic to the venture capital industry. That I think leads a lot of companies, especially if they're not the first big check into a company, to just kind of assume that someone else has done their homework.

• 21:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Kevin Roose?

  And this could change. There was some reporting earlier this year that the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, is working on a rule that would basically make it easy for the limited partners, the investors who provide the money to venture capital firms to invest in startups, to sue venture capital firms for negligence if they don't do good due diligence and get burned as a result. But so far, there has just not been a lot of accountability for venture capital firms that make these bad investments because they didn't do enough research.

• 21:52Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And you know, I would also say that I think as journalists in the past, I have looked at VCs investing in certain firms and taken that as a sign that the company must be on to something, right? I have thought with, you know, a small number of VCs like, oh, well, if those folks thought this company was legit, then it probably is. And I think one lesson of the past few years is don't take it for granted that these VC firms have all done their due diligence.

• 22:16Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Okay. Next question.

• 22:19Speaker 07

  Hey, hard work team. My name is Alex, longtime listener and first time caller. I've worked for a few big tech companies and I've observed a trend where many of my former colleagues are working for venture capital firms. And lately, the space feels like there are more people in VC than are actually building startups. My question for you both, is this a symptom of the low interest rate vibe shift and this bubble may eventually burst? Or should I prepare for the final level of the tech pro video game, buy a Patagonia vest and join a VC myself?

• 22:49Casey Newton?

  You know, I really like this question because I think like Alex, I have some skepticism of the current state of VC. It seems like even in this current economic environment, not a week goes by where I don't see multiple new VC funds starting up. And I do think we are at a point where there is too much money chasing too few ideas. And I would say, as somebody thinking about what to do with your life, man, VC, I understand why it looks glamorous, right? You spend 95% of your time just like having coffee with entrepreneurs and then telling them that you don't want to invest right now and then, you know, taking long vacations in the summer and earning a percentage of whatever outcomes those companies

• 23:34Casey Newton?

  have. Like, that seems like a great life. And I'm sure in a lot of ways it is. But I think there are a lot fewer successful VCs than people think. This is the sort of industry where people get into it very loudly and leave it very quietly. Let's say, you know, you worked at Snap for 10 years and you leave and you go join a venture capital firm and you do a long Twitter thread about how much you love entrepreneurs. Then you spend four, five, six years investing and then most of your investments go badly. You don't do a long Twitter thread about how you are a bad VC and aren't going to work in the industry anymore and are like going to go become a product manager at Google. But that sort of thing happens all the time, right? So I think there's this kind of other side of this industry that people just don't talk about as much because they just look on Instagram and it seems like all the VCs are, you know, skee shalays all year.

• 24:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I will say, like, I do know some VCs who are very smart and hardworking and, you know, have good ideas. But a lot of VCs just seem like they're spending all day on Twitter and hosting podcasts. They do not seem to have real jobs. So yeah, if I were an LP in one of those firms, I would be worried about how my VCs are spending their time.

• 24:35Casey Newton?

  I'll tell you what, what like bums me out is like, you're like 23 and you just graduated from college and you want to go work immediately for a VC firm. And to me, that's just the wrong order of operations. You know, like, go work for a tech company, go build something.

• 24:48Kevin Roose?

  Get a real job.

• 24:49Casey Newton?

  Go, go become an operator so that when you become a VC, you actually have something to contribute to the entrepreneurs that you're working with. Because man, if you're 23 and you just want to have a job where you're passing out other people's money all day, there's very little value you can add to that equation.

• 25:03Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I think another sort of underappreciated point about the VC industry is that it is a very lopsided industry, right? If you are not one of the top four or five firms, like you are not getting the good deal flow, you are probably not getting into the really hot startups. And it's going to be very rare that you achieve the kind of wealth and success that you are looking for. But because of the way that VC works, you know, there's this old saying about how hedge funds, which are sort of the original VC type investments, have some of the same structures, are a compensation scheme masquerading as an investment class. And what that means is basically, these firms, whether they're VC firms or hedge funds, they do what's called

• 25:47Kevin Roose?

  a two and 20 model. That's the sort of standard compensation scheme where you get every year 2% of all the assets you manage just off the top for doing essentially no work.

• 25:59Casey Newton?

  Oh, love that.

• 25:59Kevin Roose?

  The check for 2% just comes in. And then you get 20% of what's called the carried interest, which is basically 20% of all of the sort of excess returns that your investments generate. So it's a very good business to be in at the big VC firms because you are just getting paid no matter whether your investments work out or not. And if your investments do work out, that's just the cherry on top.

• 26:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So we are looking to adopt that model for our compensation here at the Hard Fork Podcast. And we'll just see what the New York Times says about it.

• 26:29Kevin Roose?

  I think they'll be receptive.

• 26:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Kevin Roose?

  All right. This next question comes from a listener named Meg Hall and contains what I think is a pretty fun idea that I'm curious to get your take on, Casey. Basically, Meg is curious about whether AI will transform the ways that movies are made. Here's what she emailed us. Quote, "I recently saw the newest Guardians of the Galaxy movie and cried three times during the film, once on the way home, and then a fifth time when explaining the film to my parents." And she went on to describe Guardians of the Galaxy. Casey, did you watch Guardians of the Galaxy? Do you know what she's talking about?

• 27:05Casey Newton?

  I absolutely did not.

• 27:06Kevin Roose?

  Okay, me neither.

• 27:06Casey Newton?

  I absolutely did not know.

• 27:07Kevin Roose?

  But Meg asks- Do you think AI will ever get to a place where it could take the content from Guardians of the Galaxy and create an alternate ending for sensitive people like me? Would this technology, where you can essentially alter any story, create a future where children grow up watching a version of Disney movies where Mufasa doesn't get trampled, spoiler alert, and Bambi's mom outruns the hunters? And taking this even further, would that have a long-term impact on society's ability to understand and confront emotions? Casey, what do you think?

• 27:40Casey Newton?

  Okay, so my first question is, what the heck happened in Guardians of the Galaxy 3? Like, did they feed Groot into a wood chipper? Like, what? I'm gonna have to go through this.

• 27:48Kevin Roose?

  I don't know, I guess they didn't guard the galaxy, would be my guess.

• 27:52Casey Newton?

  The galaxy is in a shambles after Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

• 27:57Kevin Roose?

  Are you a movie crier? Do you cry at movies?

• 28:00Casey Newton?

  Um, only movies where, like, a young gay man has to, like, come out to their parents. Like, that's pretty much the thing that gets me. Otherwise, I'm generally pretty okay in the theaters. But Call Me By Your Name, oh, boy, that was, uh, that was a scene in that movie theater. Listen, though. Okay, so this question, I think the answer is sort of yes and no to the question, like, are we gonna be able to create these alternate endings? Yes, in the sense that, like, fanfiction exists, right? Like, you can go on websites, you can already find alternate endings to everything. If a character died, well, here's a world where they live. So, people are already doing this, they seem to be having a good time with it. It seems like fair use laws have made this pretty easy for people to do, and I think

• 28:45Casey Newton?

  that's okay. Now, what I think Meg is talking about here, though, is, like, is there some amped-up, AI-ified version of it where you're watching Guardians of the Galaxy 3 on your iPad and you tap a button that says, like, "Show me the happy ending," and you get that instead? Again, we sort of have something like that already. There are shows on Netflix where you can sort of make different choices and you'll see different outcomes, so I think we're gonna see something like that. But where I think it's gonna stop short is, if I'm, like, an auteur filmmaker, you know, if I'm, like, Christopher Nolan and I've just directed Oppenheimer. I'm not going to sort of surrender my screenplay to an AI that says, hey, feel free to make a version of the ending where a nuclear bomb never goes off.

• 29:29Casey Newton?

  You know, I think part of storytelling is wanting to share your complete vision. And to do so, even knowing that you're going to make people cry, that you're going to make people upset. Right. Like, part of the function of art is to make us cry and to make us upset. And I think to create tech-enabled ways of preventing people from feeling emotions is just something most people are not going to get on board with. So I truly hope that what Meg is suggesting here never happens because I think it runs contrary to the ideals of art.

• 30:00Kevin Roose?

  No, I, yeah, I, I think this will happen, but it will be kind of a gimmick. And it won't be done by, you know, the best filmmakers and showrunners for the reasons that you just mentioned. However, I will say that as, you know, a person who does not like to be too stimulated by my entertainment, I kind of want this technology to exist. Like, did you watch The Last of Us?

• 30:21Casey Newton?

  I played the video game and enjoyed it. And then I watched the first couple of episodes of the TV show.

• 30:26Kevin Roose?

  So I couldn't do it. It was too dark. It made me too sad. And there are lots of shows like this where it's like, you know, I'm, I'm watching something. Ozark was the same way for me where I like, I'm watching something, I'm into it. And then it just takes a twist that I'm like, okay, I'm out. Like, this is too much for me. It's too intense. I wish I could just have like a low-stim version of this show. And, uh, and so for babies like me, um, I think this technology would be very useful.

• 30:50Casey Newton?

  I'm trying to imagine the low-stim version of The Last of Us. It's just like The Sum of Us, where like there's more people and fewer zombies. Like, I don't understand how that would work, but, uh,

• 30:58Kevin Roose?

  I don't either. But, but, you know, technologists get on this because, uh, you know, I, Meg needs this and I do too. Next question.

• 31:06Casey Newton?

  Next question. So we really, Kevin, should talk about all of the folks who have emailed us, letting us know that they listen to us at 3X speed, which I think we're both.

• 31:15Kevin Roose?

  We got so many of these emails, I, I was astounded by how many people told us about their speed listening habits.

• 31:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And I am on record as saying that I oppose this, but we have heard from a lot of you. And, and one person, uh, Philip Christoph Touts emailed us to tell us something that I hadn't really thought about when we talked about it, which is, and this is, uh, Philip writing. "One thing that not many people know is that blind users can grasp audio information at much higher speeds than people with full sight. Therefore, 3X speed is actually an accessibility feature."

• 31:49Casey Newton?

  And I really appreciated this email because it made me think of one time when I was at the company that was then called Facebook and I met a blind engineer there. And at the time, Facebook was working on new accessibility features. And this user used those audio cues to navigate around his laptop. And he would not need to hear the complete sound or even like half of the sound to know what it meant. It was just like the faintest beginning of any sound. He knew that that meant like, okay, I'm on this tab or I'm moving to this window. And so I had the privilege of watching him use his laptop for an hour or so as he was walking me through these features. And it was legitimately one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.

• 32:32Kevin Roose?

  That's awesome. I love that. And it does make me think that like, we just need more stories about accessibility in tech. Like, I just do not know how people who are blind or hard of seeing or people who are hard of hearing or deaf, like, I don't know how the internet looks to them or how they experience computers. And that's like, that's something that I would love to know more about.

• 32:55Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, accessibility was also part of the Reddit protests, right? Because the company communicated the changes to its API that we've talked about in recent episodes so poorly that a lot of users who relied on third-party apps and tools were worried that the apps that they use were no longer going to have access to the API and Reddit would become totally inaccessible to them. So even some of the biggest sites on the web still have a lot of accessibility issues. And, you know, users who have those needs often find themselves thwarted from using that technology.

• 33:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, one interesting thing here, this is a little bit of a tangent, but a lot of the most exciting applications that I've seen for some of this generative AI technology are in the world of accessibility. There's a company, for example, called Be My Eyes that basically is an app for blind people where if you are, you know, blind and you're walking down the street and you encounter some object and you don't know what it is, you can actually like have AI sort of see that object and try to describe it for you in a way that like can help you navigate. And that is, I think, very cool to me, the possibility that AI is going to make it much easier for people with disabilities to sort of get around and navigate the world.

• 34:08Casey Newton?

  That's super cool.

• 34:13Kevin Roose?

  We'll be right back.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with realtime guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 35:48Speaker 08

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Irene is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of LAN and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. Irene's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Irene, AI cloud for the next big thing.

• 36:22Kevin Roose?

  Casey, that is it for our yes/no, easy questions, relatively easy questions. Some of those were quite hard, actually. But now it is time for us to take on the real dilemmas. It's time for hard questions.

• 36:39Kevin Roose?

  Hard questions. First hard question. This was maybe my favorite question that we have gotten since we started this show.

• 36:46Casey Newton?

  Me too.

• 36:48Kevin Roose?

  And this is a question that came from an anonymous listener. They asked, well, they're not anonymous, but they asked that we not say their name on the show and you'll understand why when I start reading this question. It is about etiquette and decency in the age of AI. This listener writes, quote, "How do I tell my boss that sending chat GPT generated content to his team is both unhelpful and alienating?" So this listener works in tech. They're a software engineer. They use chat GPT all the time. They understand how it works. Their boss has started dropping into Slack channels and answering employees' questions using chat GPT generated answers. So some of these are like, you know, relevant questions for like things in the workplace

• 37:31Kevin Roose?

  or projects they're working on. But this boss has also started using chat GPT to answer these sort of watercooler style questions. I don't know exactly what that means, but maybe it's like, you know, did anyone, you know, see succession last night or something like that? And the boss will just, you know, use chat GPT to generate what he thinks is a helpful answer and puts it into the Slack channel. And this question is like, basically, is this behavior okay? And what do we do about it? Casey, what do you make of this?

• 37:59Casey Newton?

  I'm gonna be bold and say that this behavior is not okay. I am on record as saying that when I know that a large wall of text has been generated by a chatbot, I do not want to read it. And I basically almost never do because you're not really looking at human effort. You're just looking at a bunch of statistical predictions. So unless I have chosen to use a chatbot for my own use, I am not interested for the most part in what the chatbot has to say about whatever the question might be. But man, I'm just trying to imagine living in a Slack, and this person is your boss. They have power over you and you, you want to say something, but you feel like you can't. And every day you're just looking at these walls of chat GPT text. I mean, I think the big problem with doing

• 38:41Casey Newton?

  that is that the employee winds up not knowing how you feel about it, right? Like if you're not telling the employee your actual answer to a question, you're just making them guess how close what the chatbot said is to what the boss believes.

• 38:53Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And this is actually something that later on in this email, our listener mentioned. I'll just read from the email here. He said, He is not, talking about the boss, he is not a particularly easy person to work with, and constantly using ChatGPT is preventing people from getting to know him. I've stopped asking him questions or engaging with him because I know it's all ChatGPT-generated or will be. So this to me feels like, I like, I don't know of how the, what the boss thinks he is accomplishing by this, but it feels very passive aggressive to me. Like, do you remember that, that website, Let Me Google That For You?

• 39:27Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 39:27Kevin Roose?

  So there was this era where like, if someone asked a question on social media, like, you know, what time is the Super Bowl or something? Someone would reply with a link to this website called Let Me Google That For You, which basically would just take them directly to a Google results page for that exact question. And it was a way of kind of passive aggressively saying like, why are you asking me this when you could just be asking Google this? Stop wasting my time.

• 39:52Casey Newton?

  Also, like, you know how like sometimes people email us and be like, oh, can I like use like ChatGPT for this one specific thing in my job? They're like, well, yeah, in some cases probably, but in other cases not. Like, this is the most unhinged, like, possible usage of chatbot technology, where you're essentially letting employees know upfront that you are not doing your job, and you're just responding to that with chatbot texts. Like, come on, bro.

• 40:15Kevin Roose?

  It's not good, not good. So I would say, I mean, what do you do in this situation? If you are our listener, do you confront the boss about his excessive use of ChatGPT?

• 40:23Casey Newton?

  Unfortunately, this man does have to get a new job. Like, you cannot work here anymore.

• 40:29Casey Newton?

  No, look, I, you know, it's, the workplace dynamics everywhere are a little bit different. So I'm hesitant to, to give real advice here without knowing more about, you know, our, our listeners' conundrum. If there's an opportunity to say, hey, I feel like your usage of ChatGPT is confusing me more than it's helping because I don't know how you feel about the questions I'm asking, you may want to take that opportunity. But if you feel like your, your boss is going to punish you for that, then you actually just may need to find a different boss.

• 41:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I actually feel like this would have been a perfect episode of The Office. You know, if, if The Office were still on TV. Like, Michael Scott, you know, would have been very into ChatGPT and would have been using it for all kinds of inappropriate things at Dunder Mifflin. And, um, you know, just for that reason alone, I'm sad that that show is off the air.

• 41:19Casey Newton?

  All right, let's move on to another question. This one comes from Karen, who wonders if she's crossing a line when she searches online for her ex. So she writes, "I was in a long-term, five-year relationship that ended a few years ago. I'm over my ex, but every once in a while, I get that curious itch to see what he's doing, how is he, and general life updates. The problem is, my ex doesn't have social media aside from LinkedIn. I sometimes check in on him anonymously to see what he's doing, not obsessively, maybe two or three times in the past few years. I know social media is common for looking up your exes, whether people admit to it or not. However, I feel like I'm crossing a line by using LinkedIn. I'm an elder millennial, and when LinkedIn started, it was meant only to be for professional networking. Using it to look up people for personal reasons feels like a misuse of the platform.

• 42:04Casey Newton?

  Is occasionally looking up your ex on LinkedIn ethical? Kevin, what do you say?

• 42:09Kevin Roose?

  Well, there are two questions here for me. One is, is it ethical? And I think the answer to that is like, yeah, it's fine. Everyone snoops on their exes, everyone looks them up on social media. The fact that it's LinkedIn is not particularly troublesome to me, at least. There's another question, which is like, can your ex actually see that you are looking them up? Right? LinkedIn has a feature, at least for some types of accounts, where you can see who has viewed your profile. And if your ex is getting notifications that say, you know, this person is looking you up every day, or five times a day, they are going to start getting a little weirded out by that.

• 42:44Casey Newton?

  Completely. I'm on your side here, Karen. Feel free to look up your ex on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's gotta be good for something, right? I mean, you know, this company has sent more spam email than probably any other tech platform, in my opinion. And it's nice to see that you're getting something out of it. But, you know, the risk Kevin mentions here is real. You know, recently, somebody tried to set me up with someone, and this was like a straight person. So they didn't send me a picture of the guy, which is a sort of common thing that will happen when straight girls try to set gay guys up. And obviously, all we want to see is what the guy looks like. I shouldn't say all we want to see, but you know, a thing we want to see is what the guy looks like. And so I had to stoop to looking up this person I was being set up with on LinkedIn, and I find his profile. But guess what, Kevin?

• 43:23Kevin Roose?

  What's that?

• 43:23Casey Newton?

  He had LinkedIn Premium, which means he's gonna know that I linked him up.

• 43:28Kevin Roose?

  Oh, boy.

• 43:28Casey Newton?

  And that's just like a mortifying thing. And yet, at the end of the day, I'm so glad I did it because, you know, for the same reason that Karen wants to see what her ex is up to, I want to see who I'm being set up with. These are normal things.

• 43:39Kevin Roose?

  My last question about this question is, is it a red flag if someone's only social media account is LinkedIn? Did this listener dodge a bullet by getting out of this relationship with this man who is only on LinkedIn?

• 43:51Casey Newton?

  Huge green flag. You're telling me this person does it just spend hours a day glued to their phone scrolling through selfies on Instagram and, you know, watching algorithms spam on TikTok? Yeah, this is a really good sign about your ex. So I hope that doesn't increase the pain of you guys being broken up. But unfortunately, the fact that he only seems to be on LinkedIn, I would say speaks well.

• 44:12Kevin Roose?

  Unless he's a hustle bro and he's just talking about, you know, how hard he works and posting LinkedIn poetry about his grindset mentality.

• 44:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah, yeah. Being on LinkedIn is one thing. Posting on LinkedIn is something very different.

• 44:25Kevin Roose?

  Do you post on LinkedIn?

• 44:26Casey Newton?

  Uh, I don't. And I know, because we've talked about it, that you post on LinkedIn, but only chat GPT written content.

• 44:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Casey Newton?

  You totally are the boss from the last question.

• 44:36Kevin Roose?

  I know, I know. I really am. I gotta stop doing that. All right. This next question comes from Gary Cunningham. Gary is wondering what the ethics are around using AI voice generating technology to clone the voice of a loved one who has passed away.

• 44:50Casey Newton?

  Here's his question.

• 44:52Speaker 09

  For some background, my grandfather passed away about a year and a half ago and had a significant impact on both me and my extended family. He was beloved and vital to all of us, and we've felt his absence at every holiday since. That being said, he did leave a few things for us to enjoy as a family. One was a short documentary where he was interviewed about his past jobs and work experience, and the other was an autobiography that he wrote over the course of several decades. It occurred to me that I might be able to create an audiobook version of my grandfather's autobiography using his voice, which have sourced from the documentary that he did. I've run a few tests and it's definitely feasible. That being said, given my grandfather's importance to my family, I'm a bit concerned about how they might react to this project.

• 45:35Speaker 09

  After all, my grandfather's wife is still with us, but I'm unsure if she can fully grasp the concept of an AI-generated voice of her late husband.

• 45:44Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what do you think about this?

• 45:45Casey Newton?

  Well, I think Gary is right to want to solicit their family's input about this. I think the fact that their grandfather has a living wife here is relevant. I think she should have some say in this. She may not have an issue with it, or maybe she does. And that's something that they would want to know. I think in general, if you're talking about doing something for use within the family, and this is something that would bring you comfort and joy, maybe sort of helps your grandfather live on in a new way. I think this is worth exploring and doing. Like, I will say that if I were to die tragically and my loved ones wanted to like use existing recordings of my voice to do something with it, I have no issue with that, right? Like, I'm gone, what do I care?

• 46:29Casey Newton?

  But, you know, I do think it's important to consult with your family. So what do you think, Kevin?

• 46:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, if you want to do this as a personal project that you are not going to show to anyone, that you are just kind of like going to use for your own healing and processing around this death, I think that's fully ethical. I don't, I don't think there are any problems with that. But I think before you, you know, talk about this with your family, you're going to want to just like take their temperature on it and say like, is it okay? Is there, you know, are you creeped out about this? Would this be helpful to you? Or would this just be off-putting and strange? Because I think for some people, hearing the voice, the synthetic voice of a departed loved one would be, would be a lot. Would be, would be kind of hard and maybe some people wouldn't like that.

• 47:16Casey Newton?

  So there's an AI startup that many of you may have heard about called Replica. It was founded by a woman named Eugenia Quida. And I wrote about her in 2017 because her best friend had died in a tragic car accident. And she decided to take his text messages that he had sent to her and use them to create- A chatbot. And so you could download it onto your phone and interact with her friend Roman after he passed away. And I wrote this story about what his friends and family learned about him after he died. And I'll never forget the conversation that I had with his mother, who told me that she felt like she was continuing to get to know him even after he passed away.

• 47:58Casey Newton?

  And it had been an enormous source of comfort to her. So, you know, since then, Eugenia took that technology and turned it into Replica, which offers these chatbot companions to anyone. They've been in the news recently because a lot of people use them to create romantic companions. And there were questions about how sexually explicit should Replica be. But look, people are absolutely already doing this. They're loving it. And my understanding is that Replica is actually a pretty great business because they can charge a good subscription fee for it. So this, this is, I can't even call it the future because this stuff is already our present.

• 48:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And, you know, I'll say like, people process grief in many, many different ways. And, you know, far be it from me to say like, this way is right and this way is wrong. I will say for me, like, I've had, you know, loved ones and family members who died. And I, you know, I thought about trying something like this with, you know, AI to sort of recreate them based on, you know, some source material. And it just felt creepy to me. It did not feel like it would be comforting. And it felt like it might actually like increase my grief. And so I just, you know, not for me, but, you know, for other people, maybe.

• 49:08Casey Newton?

  Well, we picked the saddest possible question.

• 49:11Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Seriously. I'm gonna smoke another Russian cigarette here.

• 49:19Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 49:19Casey Newton?

  Our, I just want to say again, we get such great emails and voice memos from our listeners. And please just keep them coming because we love learning from you and hearing what's on your mind.

• 49:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we appreciate all our forkers out there. Are we calling them forkers?

• 49:32Casey Newton?

  Uh, that's what, I think that's what they're calling themselves.

• 49:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So forkers, thank you for all of your amazing emails and voice memos. Please keep them coming.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 50:49Speaker 05

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 51:21Speaker 08

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. iRen is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of LAN and grid-connected power in renewable rich regions globally. iRen's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. iRen, AI Cloud for the next big thing.

• 51:55Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Hui Wing Tam, Nulga Logley, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].

• 52:56Speaker 10

  Companies are pouring money into AI, but few leaders can explain how those AI investments work with the systems you already have. You know, the ones that actually run your business? Without Systems, you don't have to start over with AI. You can choose the projects where AI will have the most impact. And OutSystems gives you the platform to make it agentic on your terms, with complete control every step of the way. So you can trust AI with the mission-critical systems that run your business. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.