AI at Your Jobs + Hank Green Talks TikTok + Deepfake High School

A synthetic chief executive, a bot trained on employees’ personalities, and a regular duel with ChatGPT — our listeners brought us their stories.

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.

• 0:34Kevin Roose?

  I had a big technology victory this week.

• 0:36Casey Newton?

  What was that?

• 0:36Kevin Roose?

  Which is that I finally used my cord box. Are you familiar with the with the cord box?

• 0:41Casey Newton?

  Like a box where you store a bunch of cords?

• 0:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes, every man of a certain age has a box in his house with 20 years worth of random cords in it.

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  I do, and it's sort of like charts the development of cord history.

• 0:53Kevin Roose?

  Exactly, and you just keep this box like deep in the closet. You never use it for anything. And then you die and you pass your cord box down to your heirs. And this is how cord boxes generally work.

• 1:04Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 1:05Kevin Roose?

  But this week, I've been doing a technology project at home in my home office, which is I'm setting up something called a KVM switch.

• 1:12Casey Newton?

  A KVM switch?

• 1:13Kevin Roose?

  You don't need to know, but it's basically.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  No, I need to know.

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  OK, it's a keyboard, video, mouse switch.

• 1:17Casey Newton?

  OK.

• 1:17Kevin Roose?

  And it's basically a way for you to attach multiple computers to the same set of monitors and peripherals. Anyway, as part of setting this up, I found myself in need of a few cables. And I thought, I've got a cable box. I'm going to go in there. I'm going to look for the cords. So I found them. I found HDMI's. I found display ports. I found adapters. It was like it was like Christmas morning for myself.

• 1:42Casey Newton?

  These are some of the great cords.

• 1:43Kevin Roose?

  And so I just want to say to all the all the people with cord boxes out there, just collecting dust, keep collecting them. Just just keep putting the cords in the box because you never know. Someday, you will need them.

• 1:54Casey Newton?

  You know, the story really struck a chord with me, Kevin.

• 1:56Kevin Roose?

  Oh.

• 2:04Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 2:06Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 2:07Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard For.

• 2:08Casey Newton?

  This week, listeners tell us the wildest ways you're using AI at work. Then legendary YouTuber Hank Green stops by to talk about how creators are reacting to the prospect of a TikTok ban. And finally, deep fakes are coming to Main Street. We'll tell you how one caused turmoil in a Maryland high school.

• 2:40Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, about a month ago, we asked our listeners to send us examples, stories, anecdotes from their use of generative AI at work.

• 2:50Casey Newton?

  That's right. You know, Kevin, we spend so much time on this show talking about AI, what the companies are doing, what products they are making, how it might change the world. But honestly, it is a lot more interesting, most of the time, to just talk to real people about what they are actually doing with this stuff.

• 3:03Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So we sent out a sort of call out, asking people to send in their stories. And we got just an overwhelming number of them, like more than 100 responses came in from listeners.

• 3:14Casey Newton?

  And to give you some sense of perspective, we normally only get that many emails when we make a grammatical mistake.

• 3:18Kevin Roose?

  It's true. It's true. Or when I say um or like too much.

• 3:24Kevin Roose?

  So we went through them all, looking for sort of themes or commonalities and just like interesting stories that stuck out to us. And today, we are going to talk about them.

• 3:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Kevin Roose?

  So one of the most interesting things about the responses we got is just how wide the range was of things that our listeners were reporting, doing and experimenting with AI at work. But people also just reported having a lot of feelings about the use of AI at work. Some of them were sort of scared or intimidated by AI. Some of them were sort of delighted by AI and how it helped them do more work or be more productive. And so today, I think we should just give people a taste of that range.

• 4:03Casey Newton?

  And it makes sense when you think about it, Kevin, because this is a general purpose technology. You go to ChatGPT, it is a blank box. You can put anything. In it. And so of course, people are going to have a really wide range of experiences. But that's why I think it's so important to just go in and do that check and try to take the pulse of how people are using this stuff.

• 4:22Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So for this segment, we're going to bring you a few short stories that we got from some of our listeners about how they are using AI at work. Some are going to be voice memos that people recorded and sent some just through the emails they wrote to us, and we're going to just kind of react to and talk about those. And then at the very end, we're going to kind of zoom out and talk about some broader takeaways about some of the patterns that are emerging about how people are or aren't using AI at work.

• 4:47Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, shall we hear the first one?

• 4:49Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it. So first up, we have a story of a listener who figured out a pretty creative way to use AI to get a client to make decisions faster. Let's play the tape.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Alec Beckett, creative partner at Nail Communications, a creative agency in Providence. Now, we have a client who's been really hesitant to make subjective decisions until his CEO is weighed in. But of course, the CEO is always busy and it's very hard finding time on her calendar. So we were seeing timelines starting to slip when Stephen, our director of strategy, came to me with an idea that I really loved. Let's make a synthetic version of the CEO.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  So we trained a custom GPT with the CEO's latest strategic plan and as many of her speeches and blog posts and podcast transcripts as we could find. Then before we presented the next round of work to our client, we uploaded that presentation to our synthetic CEO and asked for an opinion. The feedback was was actually kind of amazing. It wasn't all positive, but frankly, it was exactly the kind of feedback we'd love to get more often from our clients. It's very cogent and strategic and clear. And it was really interesting to see how that sort of loosened up our client who felt like he was getting a version of his CEO's perspective. And it seemed to make him more willing to make some of these decisions and keep the process moving forward.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  It did get us start to wondering, like, are synthetic CEOs the future? I mean, they certainly are cheaper.

• 6:26Kevin Roose?

  I love this. What did you think of this?

• 6:27Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, it raises the question, like, aren't most CEOs kind of a little synthetic to begin with? It's true. The question of what is a CEO doing at any hour of the day, I think, has always been very mysterious. So the idea that you could come in and partially replace them with a chatbot, I think, makes some intuitive sense to me. Look, this is a very creative idea. This is a very fun idea. But of course, it also has me wondering, whatever feedback that these folks are getting from the chatbot, how closely does it actually mirror what the CEO would have said?

• 6:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so Alec told us over email that he doesn't actually know whether the client ever told the CEO that they made a synthetic version of her. According to him, when they first brought this out, the client just kind of laughed and thought it was a novelty. But once they actually solicited feedback from the AI CEO with the client watching in real time, he says that the client's tone shifted. And he also said that they're now regularly running their work by the synthetic CEO as part of their process with this client. So to me, I think this speaks to one of the most uncomfortable things about this technology, which is that it is often better at doing the kinds of work that managers and bosses do than the work of individual contributors.

• 7:36Casey Newton?

  Say more about that.

• 7:37Kevin Roose?

  Well, a lot of what managers, especially at big companies, do is kind of synthesizing. It's spotting patterns. It's taking data from across the company and kind of putting it together and projecting forward in some way. It's like, it's this sort of, this work of prediction and agglomeration and synthesis that AI is actually quite good at doing. Now, obviously, there are parts of a CEO's job that AI can't do. A lot of that is sort of leadership and, you know, setting the tone and the agenda for an organization. But I think if a lot-

• 8:08Casey Newton?

  Covering up crimes.

• 8:10Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. But I think if a lot of CEOs and leaders of big companies are honest with themselves, they'd find that, like, actually, maybe this stuff is better at doing our jobs than some of the people who report to us.

• 8:18Casey Newton?

  Here's my thought. And my suspicion is that this chatbot probably is not doing an amazing job at mimicking the actual CEO of this company that they're working for. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was like, a pretty good median CEO.

• 8:32Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 8:32Casey Newton?

  And it's able to give like, the median CEO answers. And for folks who are working on this sort of creative work, it is useful to get the median CEO answer the median CEO feedback. And so for that reason, I say this seems like an interesting tool to put in the toolbox.

• 8:46Kevin Roose?

  Totally. It also just opens up a radical new avenue of like workplace conflict, which is that if your boss doesn't want to talk to you or hear your pitch, and you're like trying to get a meeting with them, they'll just be like, well, I'm a little busy right now, but you could talk to my AI clone and they'll give you some feedback on your project.

• 9:03Casey Newton?

  I thought you were going to say that conflict is like, you know, you go to the real CEO and they hate your idea and you're like, well, don't look at me, the fake version of you. You love this.

• 9:10Kevin Roose?

  That could happen too. All right. Next example. Our next voice memo comes from listener Jane Endicott. Jane is a freelance writer. She makes short form video scripts for a media outlet that she did not name. And her story stood out for how she has incorporated generative AI into literally every single part of her job.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  I do the research. I write the news clip. I write the catchy headline and a banner headline. That all used to be human work and now it is completely, I have a bot for every single part of my process. I have a bot that my, my client made that scrapes news articles. So it sends me links. I, I use another bots on a site called Poe that summarizes the URL. So I'll go to that website. I'll drop the URL into the pot on Poe and it will summarize that article for me. Then I have a separate bot that creates like a catchy headline. So to, to kind of give you some perspective, when I started doing this, I think they had me on,

• 10:15Speaker 04

  I want to say maybe five to seven clips per day. Now with the process that I have, I'm creating 25 clips per day in three hours. So something that would have taken me 20 minutes can take me anywhere from three to five minutes. What I can do in an hour is, is like, Mind-blowingly more than it was in September 2022.

• 10:42Casey Newton?

  September 22, of course, right before ChatGPT came out. So Kevin, what do we make of Jane's AI workflow?

• 10:48Kevin Roose?

  So I'm impressed by the extent to which Jane has managed to sort of automate certain parts of her job. But I am a little worried because it does sound like she's kind of automating herself out of a job gradually. It seems like if she can sort of give every part of her process over to a bot, eventually the people who, you know, who employ her might just say, well, why are we paying Jane then? Why don't we just have the bot do the whole thing?

• 11:10Casey Newton?

  I mean, this kind of is the whole question, right? Because I think, you know, if the average manager here is, I'm using AI and it sort of helps me with the first 20 or 30% of every assignment. People say, oh yeah, that's going to make you a lot more productive. That's good, you know, we can sort of like, you know, focus your attention on more creative matters. Once AI is doing 60 to 80% of the job, I do think that's where the manager is like, wait, what exactly are you doing over here? So, you know, I think there's just going to be a maybe longer than we expect period of arbitrage, essentially where a bunch of really savvy workers who know how to get the most out of AI are going to basically be living on Easy Street until their bosses catch up. But it's also possible the bosses are going to catch up faster than I'm thinking.

• 11:52Casey Newton?

  You know, I will say as a creative worker myself, Kevin, I do bristle a bit at the idea of leaning this hard on these bots, right? If you're making video, my hope would be that you want to put a real personal stamp on that. You want to put some human ingenuity in that. You just don't want to sort of rely on the regurgitated writings of every human to come before you. But I don't know, what, how did you react to this one?

• 12:19Kevin Roose?

  So, yeah, I agree with that. I think there's, there's sort of a commodity part of the media industry where you are basically just like producing, you know, scripts or little short videos out of articles where you are essentially taking things from one format and putting them into another format. I think that is very low hanging fruit for AI.

• 12:37Casey Newton?

  All right, next up, an email from a listener named Rick Robinson. Should I read this one?

• 12:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Casey Newton?

  All right. Rick wrote in to tell us that he started using AI to help him navigate difficult situations with colleagues, and here's what he said. Quote, "I work for one of the country's largest nonprofits in tech," okay, brag, "with a recently expanded staff of folks across a range of ages. To get to know one another, we all took a DISC profile assessment." You ever done your DISC profile assessment?

• 13:03Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 13:03Casey Newton?

  DISC, capital D I S C. Rick writes, quote, "It's like a Myers-Briggs or other personality assessments." Anyway, after getting together to understand each other's DISC reading, we promptly forgot about it, which I think is sort of the median outcome for taking any personality test. Okay, back to the quote. "I thought that was a shame, so I built a GPT bot that was trained on a portion of everyone's results, leaving us with an AI that could answer questions on how to deal with difficult situations that arose with one another. Example, I need to tell Sally and Ned some bad news, but it actually impacts Ned a little worse, I think. What's my approach, so as to minimize his anxiety and make Sally understand how this could actually be a good thing? Boom, a series of suggested approaches based on their profiles and on how they might react to one another.

• 13:48Casey Newton?

  It's a skeleton key for lazy bosses."

• 13:51Kevin Roose?

  What did you make of this?

• 13:52Casey Newton?

  Wow, well, number one, I want to learn more about the DISC reading, because I'll take any personality test.

• 13:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, you really like that kind of stuff.

• 14:00Casey Newton?

  Well, I'm trying to get a high score.

• 14:01Kevin Roose?

  This is like astrology for people who went to business school.

• 14:04Casey Newton?

  It absolutely is. And, you know, if listeners want to send us their DISC readings, we'd love to take a look. But look, whatever the personality test was, I do think it is interesting, this idea of, I'm going to use AI in a kind of benign way to help me understand my coworkers, to kind of store that somewhere, and if I'm in a difficult situation, lean on the AI to help me a little bit, give me some tools for how I might work through this. Now, I am going to say here, Kevin, I actually don't think that AI is the most important part of the story.

• 14:34Kevin Roose?

  What do you think the most important part is?

• 14:36Casey Newton?

  The most important part is that this person, when confronted with a difficult situation, took a beat and stopped and thought about how to respond before he acted, right? You think about most of the workplace conflicts. That arrive, people stew and they stew and then they see each other in the office and it all just kind of boils over, right? And people act from emotion. And the trick of it is to try to separate yourself from the conflict enough to say, okay, what kind of human am I dealing with? What do I know triggers them? Is there a way that I can approach this where I might get a little bit better result? I think that's probably like 85% of the reason why this succeeds. Now, at the same time, if you have 15 different coworkers and they all have very different personalities and you sort of have trouble, you know, keeping track of this person's drama and where's this person emotionally right now?

• 15:20Casey Newton?

  Keeping some sort of AI system, I don't know, maybe it could assist, but what did you think?

• 15:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I like this use case of of sort of what you could call like sort of conflict simulation, like you could, you know, I and I use AI for this sometimes too, not not in the same way that our listener Rick did, but basically like if I have to have a hard conversation with someone or if I'm like, like, um, you know, I was, I was trying to help a friend sort of negotiate for a raise a few weeks ago. And I was trying to

• 15:47Casey Newton?

  I didn't get it, by the way, but go on.

• 15:49Kevin Roose?

  You're your own boss. You can just give yourself a raise anytime you want. But I, but I was basically, you know, I was being asked for my advice and, and I was a little unsure about how this specific situation would unfold. And so I did go to a chat bot and say like, what advice should I give my friend? And it gave me some pretty good advice that I then relayed to my friend. So this kind of thing I think AI can be very useful for. I also think that there's a intriguing potential here and I want to propose a new product.

• 16:18Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 16:18Kevin Roose?

  Which is Slack simulation mode. Cause how many conflicts at workplaces around the world are basically sparked when someone posts something sort of off topic or controversial in Slack and it totally derails an entire team?

• 16:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Kevin Roose?

  I think there should be a simulation mode where before you derail a Slack conversation, you enter the simulation mode, you type whatever you're going to type and all of your synthetic coworkers respond in real time. And so you can get a sense of how mad you are going to make people by posting the thing. And then you toggle off synthetic mode and you go back into real Slack and you post your thing.

• 16:55Casey Newton?

  This is genius. I love this idea. I also just think it'd be fun for people who work on really small teams like I do to just, you know, have six or seven synthetic coworkers who are dropping funny memes into the chat, you know, I'd really enjoy that.

• 17:06Kevin Roose?

  Alan, VP of Sales, what do you think about that, about this idea?

• 17:11Casey Newton?

  All right. I do want to do our disc readings after the show.

• 17:14Kevin Roose?

  All right. So next up, we got a bunch of responses from educators, teachers, even school administrators and principals who figured out ways to use AI in their jobs. And in particular, for one of the most painful and time consuming tasks involved with being a teacher, which is writing evaluations. So here's an experience we heard about from one high school teacher.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Hi, Hard 14. This is James Deck, Director of Innovation at Franklin School in Jersey City, New Jersey. And I wanted to share how generative AI has transformed my work as a high school design and technology teacher. Writing report card narratives used to take me 20 to 30 hours each semester. But now with the help of the OpenAI API, I've created a tool that extracts all the assessment data from our learning management system, anonymizes it, and generates a draft narrative for each student. Then I review and edit these drafts, reducing my total time spent to about two to five hours. I've shared this tool with my colleagues, and there's about 10 of us that have been using it. It's been a game changer for all of us.

• 18:18Casey Newton?

  This is so cool. I love this one. Do you like this one, too?

• 18:21Kevin Roose?

  So I do, with one caveat. So, you know, obviously, there's a lot of work involved in education that is not directly related to teaching students in a classroom. I would put evaluations, college recommendations, things of that nature into this category.

• 18:37Casey Newton?

  The work never stops for these teachers.

• 18:38Kevin Roose?

  Yes, they have so much busy work and paperwork involved with their jobs. And if AI can help cut down on that, I am all for it. The caveat here is that I hope that James and other educators who are using AI to speed up the process of evaluating student work, of giving feedback to students on their report cards, I hope that they are still thinking as hard about those evaluations as they would have before. I hope that they are not just kind of taking the stock output of the AI language model and giving it to their students and saying, here is the assessment of how you did this semester. Because those assessments can be very helpful for students in figuring out like what to work on, what they need to improve.

• 19:21Kevin Roose?

  Giving them positive reinforcement or feedback when they're doing a good job. I think that loses a lot of its appeal and usefulness to the students if it's all or mostly being produced by AI. What do you think?

• 19:32Casey Newton?

  I mean, that makes sense. My hope is that these narratives follow a pretty standardized structure, right? Like ideally, you're really trying to coach these kids in a few areas and the narrative reflects essentially how well they're doing in those cases. If this were the case where it's like, you know, write a lyrical 20-page assessment of these individual humans, like on whatever rubric you want, then yeah, you're right, something would be lost. But let's just say, if this teacher has, he was spending up to 30 hours a semester on these, that is almost a full week of work that he was doing in addition to everything else that he had going on. That seems like a really tough requirement to put on these teachers. So if he's able to get that down to two or five hours and lean on the AI to do work that it seems like can actually be automated decently well, that seems good to me.

• 20:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, if it's just sort of clerical paperwork happening here through the AI, I think that is totally fine, as long as there is actual substantive person-to-person feedback and assessment and guidance taking place in the classroom with these students.

• 20:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, now, I will say, a sort of similar story that did make me more concerned was, did you see this thing about Texas using computers to grade written answers on their standardized tests this year?

• 20:40Kevin Roose?

  Uh, no, what happened?

• 20:41Casey Newton?

  Well, so they changed some of their standardized tests to involve more written answers, so like less multiple choice, more kind of open-ended, and they are using some sort of AI system to do the initial scoring of these answers. They apparently will still send a quarter of responses to humans to be rescored as a kind of quality control, but the AI is still going to be taking a first pass. And this is one where I say, I actually am nervous because it just feels like in two or three years, we will find out that the system was biased against students who are minorities, basically.

• 21:13Kevin Roose?

  How interesting. So your worry is that the AI just isn't up to the task of evaluating these student responses?

• 21:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, yeah, that it's going to have certain biases that are programmed into it and that that gets reflected in the grades. And there aren't that many humans to sort of review the answers and it winds up having sort of inequitable outcomes.

• 21:30Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I just kind of wonder what the status quo was there because it's not as if standardized tests with sort of essay responses are being sort of, you know, carefully and thoughtfully reviewed by a team of expert educators. They're basically comparing them against model answers and figuring out like, does it address this point and this point and this point? Does it have a thesis and supporting evidence and a conclusion? I think AI can take a first pass at that, but I, yeah, I would love to see humans kept in the loop on that kind of thing, especially if these are tests that might determine, you know, where students are getting into college or whether they're tracked into sort of gifted programs or not, like things that have a real measurable impact on their lives.

• 22:08Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, so far we've heard some sort of fun and cool AI use cases, but we'd be remiss if we didn't include a few AI horror stories, Kevin.

• 22:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's see the blooper reel.

• 22:18Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 22:19Kevin Roose?

  Our first nightmare AI story comes from a listener named Colin Berry, who has a regular work meeting where his writing is basically put to the test against ChatGPT, saying like, basically, is this better than what ChatGPT would have come up with? Here's what Colin said to us over email. Quote, "I am a freelance marketing writer and I probably have the worst interaction with ChatGPT that you'll read. While I do use ChatGPT as a writing assistant, not in actual writing, but drafting and ideation, my largest client insists on reviewing my work by giving the same job to ChatGPT and then comparing the two results. Every week without fail, they copy and paste my assignment into ChatGPT in the meeting with me.

• 23:01Kevin Roose?

  They aren't any good at prompts and I like to think my work is better, but with every new update, it inches closer."

• 23:07Casey Newton?

  Here's what I want to say about this. This is a human rights violation. Whatever is happening in this workplace is specifically prohibited under the Geneva Convention, and this man needs to get a lawyer. I would scream if I were sitting in a meeting and people are looking at my copy and they're saying, "All right, Colin, now let's just see what the AI can do." And then it's competing against me. Shut it all down, Colin. You need a new job.

• 23:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, you need to fire this client. This is basically the digital white collar equivalent of like the John Henry story where you're like racing against the machine. And it is truly dystopian that you would be constantly compared to an AI chatbot that gets better with every new iteration.

• 23:53Casey Newton?

  Also, it's like, what is Colin supposed to take from, you know, seeing the AI get better? It's like, you know, I'm sure he is being as creative as he can be, you know, given the terms of the assignment. I think just seeing your work next to an AI isn't going to suddenly, you know, inspire you to become Shakespeare.

• 24:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think the proper response to this sort of behavior is to write back to whoever is pasting in these ChatGPT answers and say, "Hey, it looks like you're finding a lot of utility out of ChatGPT. Why don't you do that? I'm gonna go work with someone who actually wants a human being to do this."

• 24:25Casey Newton?

  For real.

• 24:26Kevin Roose?

  Get out of here.

• 24:26Casey Newton?

  Get out, knock it off.

• 24:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, if we might do one more, this feeling that you're gonna hear in this call reflected a feeling that came up over and over again, which is that so many workers these days are turning to these AI tools because the demands of their jobs just keep increasing and increasing and they are not getting any more help, right? So a classic story of capitalism. And I want to play this one from a listener named Emma Fairchild Barge. Let's listen.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  Hey, Kevin and Casey. I'm a senior manager at a technology company living in New York City. What I see in my daily life and across my peer set too, is a massive feeling of workplace overload and being asked to do too much with too little. The context across many industries here is that most professionals have experienced significantly off of that backfill. And then we add to that that the typical corporate calendar is filled with six to seven hours of meetings daily, the result of which is often a long to do list of tasks that come out of the meeting. The sheer volume of work expected of employees is astonishing and completely unrealistic. What I find is that AI can be a lifeline to kickstart projects when workers are mentally drained and facing incredibly tight deadlines.

• 25:46Speaker 06

  I think what we'll see in the future is a better use of AI to right-size the workload of professionals struggling to stay afloat.

• 25:53Kevin Roose?

  Hmm. What do you think about that?

• 25:56Casey Newton?

  I mean, it it makes me really sad. You know, I mean, I have to say, I feel like I've been lucky in my life that I have not had managers who truly gave me more than I can handle for any extended period of time.

• 26:07Kevin Roose?

  But of course. Yeah, you work like two days a week. It's like, you're basically on European schedule here.

• 26:12Casey Newton?

  I mean, I I work a lot, but it's like all on my own terms. You know, I do what I want. I, you know, I lead a charmed life, but you know, this person's story, I think, reflects the experience of just a huge number of folks who do not have managers who are good, who are kind of working them to the bone. And, you know, my, while I think it's great that this person is able to use AI to reduce their workload and maybe gain a little bit of sanity, my fear is that as their bosses catch on, AI actually starts to become an excuse to give them more work.

• 26:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 26:43Casey Newton?

  Right? It's like, you actually should be more productive because now I know that you're doing the first forty percent of every assignment in something like ChatGPT. What do you think?

• 26:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think I think the take that our listener has here is the optimistic take, which is that this technology is going to help stressed-out, burned-out workers sort of speed through their excessive workloads and basically come to a more balanced place at work. I think the pessimistic take is that what you're saying is true, that as soon as this technology becomes truly useful for improving efficiency, managers, bosses, people who run companies are going to say, well, if you had ten meetings before, now we're going to give you twenty meetings because you're going to use AI to get a bunch of stuff done faster, and they're going to sort of raise their expectations. And actually, I was thinking about this because I was reading a study recently that

• 27:33Kevin Roose?

  was done by Accenture, the consulting firm, where they basically surveyed workers and bosses about their feelings about gender. Of AI in the workplace. And one of the surprising things that stuck out to me was that there was a huge disparity in how workers and bosses responded to prompts like, I am concerned that AI may increase my stress and burnout. So 60% of workers in this survey said that that was their concern, that AI was going to make them more stressed and burned out. Only 37% of bosses felt that way. So you have a situation now, I think, where a lot of managers and people who run companies, people who get excited about AI as a productivity enhancer are thinking, this is going to make everyone, you know, more productive, they'll be less stressed out, they'll be less overloaded.

• 28:18Kevin Roose?

  And workers, meanwhile, a lot of them are saying to themselves, wait a minute, that just means that my boss is going to expect more of me, and that's actually going to increase my stress rather than decreasing it.

• 28:27Casey Newton?

  Well, I'll be very curious to see how this one plays out, and I hope that we continue talking to our listeners about those moments at the workplace, like, you know, is there going to be a moment when you first realize that your boss does actually expect more now that AI chatbots exist? We would love to hear those stories.

• 28:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and it speaks to one of these central themes that kind of emerged out of not just sort of the literature so far of what we know about generative AI at work, but just our listeners' stories, which is that there are sort of two trust problems with AI at work right now. The first is trust in the technology, right? There are a lot of reasons that people still don't trust this technology. It gets things wrong, it makes things up, it causes embarrassing errors in sort of client-facing work. But I think there's also a trust problem between people that is sort of being illuminated and exposed by this technology, which is that workers don't trust that if they use this stuff, their bosses will consider them valuable and, you know, allow them to be more

• 29:25Kevin Roose?

  productive without just piling more work on. Bosses don't trust workers to not cut corners and sort of, you know, automate themselves into a very easy job. And so there's just kind of this mutual unease and distrust that I think is happening at a lot of workplaces right now, spurred by this technology.

• 29:43Casey Newton?

  That's really interesting. What do you think like workplaces should do about that?

• 29:47Kevin Roose?

  So one thing I think it could be helpful just as a first step is just to bring this discussion out in the open, right? I think at a lot of companies right now, these discussions are happening sort of in private, sort of side channels around the water cooler.

• 30:02Casey Newton?

  Disappearing signal chats.

• 30:03Kevin Roose?

  Yes, but I think there's a real value in just sort of putting this all on the table, saying, hey, this technology exists. What is it good for? What is it not good for? How can we use it? And how should our jobs change as a result? And I think involving not just senior managers, but everyone at a company in that discussion is a really important piece. I think right now, a lot of companies are trying to kind of implement these top-down rules for like how we are going to use AI in this workplace. And I think it should be a more organic bottom-up process where everyone from individual contributors all the way up to the CEO feels like they have a voice in that conversation.

• 30:39Casey Newton?

  Very interesting.

• 30:41Kevin Roose?

  So those were incredible and illuminating stories. Thank you to all of the forkers who sent in examples of AI at work. We love our listeners and their very thoughtful submissions.

• 30:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, those were really great.

• 30:59Casey Newton?

  When we come back, let's bring a little green energy to the podcast.

• 31:02Kevin Roose?

  We'll talk to legendary YouTuber Hank Green about what it's like to be a creator in 2024.

• 32:02Speaker 07

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's Outsystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used Outsystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. Outsystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.

• 32:37Speaker 08

  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.

• 33:10Kevin Roose?

  Casey, I'm very excited for our guest today.

• 33:12Casey Newton?

  Oh, me too.

• 33:13Kevin Roose?

  This is someone we've been wanting to get on the show for a long time. Really, I would consider him a friend of the show, even though he's never been on before.

• 33:19Casey Newton?

  But he did email in a question one time.

• 33:21Kevin Roose?

  It's true. So today, we're talking with Hank Green. Hank is, I would say, a legend of online content creation. I don't know of really any other way to describe him. He has been making videos on the internet since 2007 with his brother, John, and they have created this kind of whole online empire. They've got educational video channels, including SciShow and Crash Course. He also is one of the creators of VidCon, the big annual convention for online content creators. And I would say he's been sort of a driving force behind the rise of the creator economy, this world of people trying to make a living by putting stuff on the internet.

• 33:58Casey Newton?

  That's right. And I would say in recent years, he has become a sort of elder statesman of the creators, a very smart, reasonable voice on issues affecting creators. And so whenever I want to know how changes in platforms and algorithms are affecting the people who make their living on them, Hank is always the first person I want to hear from.

• 34:17Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So he's someone we've wanted to talk to on the show for a while. And there's so much happening in the world of online video and media creation right now. We've got the looming ban of TikTok, which may happen at some point in the next year. We've got the rise of TikTok competitors, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels. We've got sort of the larger platform changes and kind of the splintering of social media brought about by kind of the decline of Twitter, now X. And we've also got a YouTube channel that we need to grow, Kevin. It's true. So now seems like the perfect time to bring him in to talk about the many changes facing online creators in 2024 and what he thinks the future might hold. All right, let's bring in Hank.

• 35:01Kevin Roose?

  Hank Green, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 35:02Speaker 09

  Hey, thanks. Hi, Hank.

• 35:04Kevin Roose?

  Hank, you have a big presence on many platforms, but one of them is TikTok, where you have 8 million followers. And as a very popular TikTok creator, I have to know, how are you feeling about the prospect of it potentially going away?

• 35:18Speaker 09

  Well, in addition to being a popular TikTok creator, I am also a lot of other things, including like a human on Earth at a weird moment in history. So I am, maybe unsurprisingly, feeling very conflicted. I feel very conflicted. I feel like, I'm glad I'm not in charge of this choice is one of my big sensations.

• 35:41Kevin Roose?

  I wish you were in charge of this choice. I think it would be a better choice if you were in charge of it.

• 35:46Speaker 09

  I would definitely do it different.

• 35:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. You've been very strategic about sort of building a bunch of different platforms for yourself, such that if any one of them sort of disappears or changes in some way that makes it harder for you to like make money from there, you've got other options. But a lot of TikTokers are just TikTokers. And so I'm wondering, like, have you had other TikTokers sort of come to you and say like, how do I diversify? How do I build these lifeboats for myself? And what do you tell them?

• 36:12Speaker 09

  Oh, for sure. I mean, I mean, I tell them you have to diversify and TikTok is terrible at letting you diversify.

• 36:20Casey Newton?

  What do you mean?

• 36:21Speaker 09

  The algorithm is so sensitive to any sign that people might like one piece of content a little bit less than another, that if you make a piece of content that has a call to action in it, that's like, come sign up for my newsletter, or come follow my new podcast, the algorithm immediately notices that people are a little bit less engaged in that piece of content than a normal piece of content that you make. And then on YouTube, you might go from getting 100,000 views to 60,000 views on a piece of content like that. On TikTok, you'll go from getting 300,000, because base levels are higher on TikTok. And then it'll go from 300,000 views to like 3,000 views.

• 36:59Casey Newton?

  Wow.

• 37:00Speaker 09

  And it notices that immediately. Like, this is like what these swipeable platforms are so good at, is noticing the difference between something that people love a lot and that people love a little bit.

• 37:11Casey Newton?

  And I think this explains this phenomenon at TikTok, where I see somebody do some like little piece of shtick, and it's really funny, and I like it. And then every time I see them ever after, it's just the same shtick. And it feels like it does get kind of trapped in a box, which, which I don't really like.

• 37:29Speaker 09

  No, yeah, I mean, like, one of the things that I say to creators is like, you have to understand that you make two kinds of content. You make one kind of content to reach new audience, and you make one kind of content to connect with existing audience. And every time you make that second kind of content, it's going to feel like you're failing, because it's not going to have the same reach. But it's succeeding, because it's doing something that is way more valuable to you long term, which is actually building an audience and a relationship with that audience, rather than just, rather than just making something viral that will come across your feed and you'll forget about it.

• 38:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Right. So I want to ask about business, Hank, because in 2022, you made a great video about the TikTok Creator Fund, which was the main way that it was paying creators at the time. And the gist was that, as the platform grew, the pot of money it was paying out to creators stayed the same, meaning that people like you had to work harder and harder for less money. That's different from something like YouTube, where you get to keep 55% of the ad revenue on your channel. So my question is, has the money you made on TikTok changed much since then? And how do you rate TikTok overall as a place to grow your business?

• 38:37Speaker 09

  You know, I'm so sorry to my contacts at TikTok for what I'm about to say. But like, if you're listening, it'd be nice if I knew how much money I made. Because I have no idea.

• 38:49Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 38:50Speaker 09

  It hasn't updated since January. It's broken. It thinks I'm British. It's paying me in pounds. Like, the thing, the thing to remember about TikTok is that, like, it's not super together. Like, sometimes people are like, I think that TikTok is trying to do X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, if they are, nobody knows about it. Like, it's very messy.

• 39:09Kevin Roose?

  So you literally do not know how much money you are making on TikTok?

• 39:11Speaker 09

  I have not. My dashboard hasn't updated since January.

• 39:14Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 39:15Casey Newton?

  This sounds like it could be a classic Chinese Communist Party psyop, Kevin.

• 39:20Casey Newton?

  I mean, one of my, like, takeaways from what you're saying, Hank, is like, sort of, however you feel about, like, the geopolitics of a ban, they sure don't seem to be treating their creators all that well. And so as a result, what should be their biggest and loudest constituency has actually been a little oddly quiet, right? If you don't even know how much money you're making from the app, you're probably not going to march in the streets demanding that they let it continue to exist.

• 39:46Speaker 09

  Yeah. If you went on Instagram the day that they posted, they're like, you know, you have to call your Congress. Like, there's lots of creators in the comments there being like,

• 39:56Speaker 09

  so now, now you want us to do stuff for you and you're not doing anything for us? You know, like, you, like, giving us no signal for, like, what's happened to my account. Um, and it's oftentimes it's things like, people feel like they've been shadow banned and actually their audience just got less interested in them because TikTok audiences move on extremely quickly from everything. But I will say, plenty of people are very upset and I don't think that we understand how weird this is.

• 40:21Kevin Roose?

  What do you mean?

• 40:22Speaker 09

  Like, we don't understand properly that we live on social media platforms. Like, what is happening if not living while you're on TikTok? You're living. You are alive. You're like, in those moments, your attention is focused on this thing, and this is a part of your life. It's a part of your social life. And the idea of it going away is...

• 40:46Speaker 09

  A little mind boggling. It's like imagining your town stopping existing. But then the idea of the government being like, okay, your town doesn't get to exist anymore. It's like, oh, like the people who are saying that this isn't a First Amendment problem are so are wrong. Like it is. It is about speech, but like also there's a problem.

• 41:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 09

  But I don't think it's a specific TikTok problem. I think that TikTok might be a little bit worse at it right now than YouTube and Facebook, because YouTube and Facebook have been through it. But like, we can see very clearly that being on TikTok changes how you see the world. We all know this. This is one of the things that people say is a good thing about it. They're like, this has really informed how I see the world. It's given me a view on things that I never would have had otherwise. And that's totally true. And the problem is that both the the views are determined by the algorithm, but also the kind of content that gets created is determined by the algorithm. The content that gets rewarded is the only content that gets created.

• 41:50Speaker 09

  Content that does not get views doesn't just not get views, it does not exist.

• 41:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 09

  So like, as a creator, I just know this like functionally to be true.

• 42:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'm curious, like, if you believe, as I do, that sort of the medium is the message, the old sort of Marshall McLuhan formulation. I'm curious what you think like the message of TikTok has been. Like, to me, it seems like every time there's a successful new platform, it kind of teaches us something about humanity and our psychology. Like, I feel like the lesson of YouTube was like, your video doesn't have to be slick and professionally produced for people to want to watch it. In fact, maybe it's better if it's not. And maybe the lesson of Twitter, sort of original Twitter, was like, a lot of thoughts can be communicated effectively in 140 characters or less. If TikTok does go away, like, what do you think it should teach us?

• 42:44Kevin Roose?

  What was the lesson of TikTok?

• 42:46Speaker 09

  I mean, the first thought I had is that the lesson that TikTok has taught us is that the only currency is attention.

• 42:55Speaker 09

  But like, I also think that Twitter taught us that, you know, like, it's not like anybody made a bunch of money off their tweets. And yet, we spend a huge amount of time giving free labor to the owners of these platforms, because there's something there, you know? And then I think also that, like, the lesson of TikTok is that, like, culture can happen very fast. Like, the speed of culture is, in a lot of ways, the speed of connections between humans, and that, like, that the rapidity of the cultural creation on TikTok

• 43:33Speaker 09

  is unmatched. It's wild. Like, remember when we were kids and, like, the Macarena was a thing for six months? Like, we, like, every three years, we might get a new dance? And now TikTok is like, "We're gonna give you 18 a day."

• 43:51Kevin Roose?

  Totally. It does feel like it has increased the overall sort of cultural metabolism of the world.

• 43:56Speaker 09

  Oh, my God. It's so fast.

• 43:57Casey Newton?

  It's sped it up.

• 43:58Speaker 09

  Exhausting.

• 43:58Casey Newton?

  But I think you hit on something else important, which it, like, it created the conditions for culture to almost spontaneously self-organize. Like, my favorite moments on TikTok are, like, when folks came together to do that Ratatouille musical, and it was just people sort of guessing, "What song might you write if you were writing a Ratatouille musical?" Somehow, Disney actually let them stage a version of it during the pandemic as a sort of streaming-only thing, which I watched, and it was amazing. But, you know, but we should say, this was like a software thing with features like Stitch and duets. They sort of invited people, "If you see something on the platform, come in and remix it." And to me, that was sort of the lesson, is if...

• 44:37Speaker 09

  And then it was also, it's, it's so, like, the thing that the algorithm is good at is identifying when something is a part of that moment, which I don't even know how they do. Because, like, how do you tell one, like, a Ratatouille musical versus somebody just singing Hamilton? Like, it's a computer program. It doesn't know, but it was able to do it.

• 44:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah. If you were starting today, which platform would you start your empire on?

• 44:59Speaker 09

  I'd probably still start on TikTok.

• 45:01Kevin Roose?

  You would.

• 45:01Speaker 09

  It's just that the great, like TikTok is bad at everything except discovery. You know, it's, it's so good. It's so good. Because you, there are so many chances. Like when you're scrolling TikTok, occasionally you'll get one of those videos that has like three views. Because it's giving it a chance. And YouTube doesn't have enough human, like, time when you're like spending 10 minutes watching a video to like give a lot of content a chance. So it has to find another way to get a chance, whether that's, you know, getting posted on Reddit or getting noticed by someone. Or, you know, I try to watch like a lot of YouTube videos from smaller creators, but like I'm not watching YouTube videos from people who have one view, you know?

• 45:38Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Hank, I, I know you are a student of media and I know this because we've talked about, you know, our industry. And I've also heard you talking about journalism and where all this is headed. I encountered a term this week for the very first time, which was ginfluencer, which sort of made me recoil, but, but it was in the context of someone asking me about this apparently new thing where journalists are being told that they have to be ginfluencers. And, and

• 46:08Speaker 09

  Drinking a lot of

• 46:12Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it's when you have too much beef eater, then you become a ginfluencer. No, but, but, but they're basically saying, look, journalists are not this sort of sanctified class anymore. You kind of have to get out here in the creator economy and like make your stuff entertaining and put yourself on TikTok and like that is part of your job description now. Do you think that is true?

• 46:31Speaker 09

  If it is not obvious to the two of you that you're influencers, I will stand up and leave the room. What do you mean? You're like, you guys, you like, this is the thing. Influencer is a horrible word. We can all agree on that. Who created the word influencer?

• 46:47Casey Newton?

  They were very influential, whoever they were.

• 46:49Speaker 09

  Yes, they, they themselves, they must have been influencers. Influencer is the word that marketing people use for creators. Because influencing is what creators do for marketers. But, but I will say. Obviously, you guys are content creators on the internet. Your internet content, like, just picture Twitter two years ago. It's all journalists, like, talking to each other and influencing each other. That's what it was.

• 47:16Casey Newton?

  I will say, to me, there's like two ways of not caring. If you're a journalist, like, there's the not caring. It's like, I just wrote an incredible investigation that's going to change the world. I'm going to drop it and I'll let, like, my institution promote it and I'm already on to the next thing. And that could be a big flex and congratulations. And then there's the kind of not caring that's like, I just don't actually care about my job that much. And so I'm going to do the work and I'm going to put it online. If somebody else wants to read it, that's fine. But, you know, I'm just not going to be too invested. And, you know, again, I think that's fine, but I think there's like a low ceiling on that kind of career in this day and age.

• 47:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I'm thinking in particular about this exchange you had with Neelai Patel on his podcast recently about sort of whether the future of media will belong to sort of individual creators or whether it's going to be big institutions that sort of profit from the kind of loss of trust or sort of the changing media landscape. And you were sort of on the side of like, it's all going to be individual creators. People trust individuals now. They don't trust institutions. And Eli was like, no, no, no, that's all like a fake story that you've been sold by platforms who want you to believe that, that legacy media institutions don't matter anymore so that they'll buy more ads on YouTube. And it just occurs to me that, like, Casey and I have basically made opposite bets on that argument, that like, he is now like a solo entrepreneur, like, media brand, and

• 48:32Kevin Roose?

  I get a paycheck from a big legacy media company. So I guess my question to you, Hank, is like, which of us is smarter?

• 48:41Speaker 09

  That's actually a separate question. I do have an answer to that one, if you'd like me to answer it.

• 48:46Kevin Roose?

  Please.

• 48:48Speaker 09

  I think Neelai is wrong. I thought about it a lot. It might, like, it might very well be that it is. Like part of the structure of the social internet. But I don't think it's a, I think, don't think it's a lie that's being sold to me by platforms. I think it's a choice that people are making when they are choosing what to watch. And I think it's bad. I think it, so I think, so I think that Casey is right and terrible. I think you're correct, but also a bad person.

• 49:17Casey Newton?

  I'm always saying this. No, I mean, I, well, I, I basically agree with you. And again, look, I mean, I think that you can, you have an absolutely great career, career working for a big institution as you are, Kevin. I also thought that like, I really wanted to try in making a go of it on my own. And it's been super cool. And I wish we had more big, great journalistic institutions in this country. I wish we had more big institutions in general. I wish there were more trust in institutions. One of the reasons I write is so that I can write about institutions when occasionally they do the right thing, right? In the hopes that maybe it might build some trust in them. So I think that even though we all sort of sit in different parts of this landscape, we, we maybe agree with each other more than you might think.

• 49:55Speaker 09

  Oh, for sure. I, I, I also think that as we move into sort of a more potentially with more content being created by non-humans world, that, that the systems that build trust are going to be very, very important. And, but that is done both through institutions and through individuals. Like there's a bunch of like, I think, bad and incorrect mechanisms that, that like weigh down on institutions more than they weigh down on individuals. But also you can tear down an individual permanently more easily than you can tear down a, a institution permanently.

• 50:35Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 50:35Speaker 09

  Good point.

• 50:36Casey Newton?

  I, you teed up my next question very nicely, which was about AI. I'm, I'm very curious how you feel about, you know, the advance of AI as it pertains to like what you do for a living. Are you using AI in your daily life? Do you feel like five years from now, most or all of what you do will be possible to do with AI?

• 50:56Speaker 09

  I just want to, listeners at home to know that they, that they told me I was going to come talk about TikTok and then they, they hooked me in and now, now we're talking about AI.

• 51:05Casey Newton?

  It was a bit switch.

• 51:05Speaker 09

  I did not prepare for this.

• 51:07Casey Newton?

  You brought it up.

• 51:10Speaker 09

  I um, I'm not entirely sure, and I'd be curious to hear y'all's thoughts about this, that it is okay that we accepted that this future so easily, that content that was trained on the creations of all of us, is kind of okay to like, let that have happened.

• 51:31Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 51:32Speaker 09

  And then let it replace us to some extent. I, so like, part of me is like, is it even okay to use it all? I feel weirder about image generation than I do about text generation, but I don't know why. But also I do use it, like, I, like, ju- just like how I have always felt very sort of conflicted about being on TikTok. I'm like, but I'm a TikTok guy now. I will totally be.

• 51:57Kevin Roose?

  What do you use it for?

• 51:59Speaker 09

  I use it for, um, starting out when I'm confused about something. Uh, if I come across something in a paper that I don't understand. Um, and I like, so instead of like, looking up each term individually, you just like, copy the paragraph and you're like, what the heck does this mean? Then it like, oh, so that word means that and this acronym means this. And, uh, that's just like a, a helpful, quick tool to sort of get into a, a topic that is complicated faster. Um, and then here's my weirdest way. And this is gonna sound ridiculous. I use it to fact check.

• 52:34Casey Newton?

  Hmm.

• 52:35Speaker 09

  Which I, let me, like, I don't put that in without putting the disclaimer in. It will catch things that are incorrect. It will catch things that are simplifications. It will catch things that are correct that it thinks are incorrect. And it will miss things that are incorrect. So it will do all the different things, but it will highlight moments in my scripts where I'm like, you're right, I shouldn't simplify that much. Um, and then I will send it to an actual human fact checker. Uh, because I do science videos, so if it's like a sci show script, that has to go through a human fact check. But it's less work for that fact checker because I, I, I pre-identified some of the things that they were gonna come back to me with.

• 53:15Casey Newton?

  Now, I'm curious, what kind of prompt are you giving? Are you saying like, fact check this or how are you getting it?

• 53:20Speaker 09

  Fact check, colon, paste the script.

• 53:22Casey Newton?

  Got it.

• 53:22Kevin Roose?

  Wow. This has been a pretty gloomy conversation about the present and maybe near future of the internet. But one thing I've always liked about you and your work, Hank, is that you do sort of find these pockets of delight and magic in the internet. I find fewer and fewer of those moments these days, but I'm curious, Hank, are there parts of the internet that still feel like that to you? Just people like making really good stuff, putting it out there and getting discovered?

• 53:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course. I mean, it's like, it's everywhere constantly. And I think that if you, um, I don't know, like, there are weird human nature problems where we get so much more energized by finding out that we are better than other people and that other people are terrible than anything else. And that that is just like, it really tears at the fabric. But the, I think that what will ultimately be the solution to this problem will just be us getting better, just in the same way that like old clickbait headlines don't work

• 54:29Speaker 09

  anymore. I think that like, people will get more aware of when someone is just trying to find the wound you have in the body of America and wiggle their fingers around in it. Like, it'll just be more obvious that it's happening. It is so obvious to me now when it's happening, but like, I understand that like, I have a different relationship with media and I have been in it for a really long time. But my hope is that we solve these problems not through infringing upon the speech of Americans and saying like, you have this amazing platform that you have used to build a community and connect and we're just going to evaporate that, or just let it sort of like, not be in the App Store and peter out over time.

• 55:12Speaker 09

  But we solve that problem through like, being better at being people, which is like, how we have solved long-term all of the other problems, which I think we're capable of.

• 55:22Kevin Roose?

  I think we need to work toward a collective point of view on how algorithms should work. Right now, the only sort of commonly held view that I hear about algorithms is I should be getting more views than I am.

• 55:33Casey Newton?

  That's the sort of one thing that everyone can agree on, right? But when it comes to like, what should be the content of these feeds? How should it sort stuff? How manipulative is it allowed to be? How long should people look at it? You know, how addictive should it be engineered to be? This is just stuff that we have no collective understanding on. And so what we're left with is this essentially superstitious feeling that whatever's going on in these algorithms sure doesn't feel good. And so maybe let's get rid of the Chinese one. And I think we will just look back and feel like that was not a very sophisticated way of addressing the underlying issue.

• 56:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, sometimes it feels like we're monkeys with guns. And we like, are like, this thing's loud. And then you're like, why does my foot hurt? You know, you don't even know why you got hurt by your new toy. Because it's like so outside of your previous experience, you know?

• 56:27Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 56:27Speaker 09

  Like-

• 56:27Kevin Roose?

  What you're talking about is essentially like evolution. Like, we are the finches. Our beaks are not long enough to like get down in the seed pods. And we just need to like, spend a couple of generations like, developing longer beaks.

• 56:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, and I think that's totally possible, but not if it keeps changing so fast.

• 56:44Kevin Roose?

  Right. Hank, great. Thanks so much for coming.

• 56:47Casey Newton?

  Thank you, Hank.

• 56:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, thank you.

• 56:55Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, a wild story about a deep fake scandal that rocked a Maryland high school.

• 57:54Speaker 07

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's OutSystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used OutSystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. OutSystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/nyt. That's outsystems.com/nyt.

• 58:29Speaker 08

  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.

• 59:02Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, we have one more story we have to talk about today because it has been on my mind all week. And that is the story of what I would call Main Street deep fakes. Deep fakes, these AI-generated synthetic fakes are a problem. We've known this, we've talked about on the show before, usually in the context of kind of big national issues, elections, protests, things of that nature.

• 59:28Casey Newton?

  Somebody created some synthetic audio of President Biden.

• 59:32Kevin Roose?

  Yes, exactly. So that is a problem. And I think lots of people are rightfully concerned about it. But we're also seeing a bunch of stories kind of trickle up from local media outlets about things that are happening in much smaller sort of settings where AI deep fakes are creating major problems.

• 59:49Casey Newton?

  Yeah, this technology is very easy to use. It is almost freely available to use on the internet and it is finding its way into more and more hands. And this is a story about that.

• 59:59Kevin Roose?

  So we've seen over the past few weeks and months, a number of stories like this. There was a story about deep fake nude images being created by and of high school kids that are going around in high schools. There was a similar story out of Spain that caused a big outcry. And then there was the story that happened last week that my colleague Natasha Singer at The Times covered, really wild story about something that happened at a high school in Baltimore County, Maryland.

• 1:00:25Casey Newton?

  All right, so walk us through it.

• 1:00:27Kevin Roose?

  So this story takes place at a high school called Pikesville High School in Baltimore County, Maryland. And in mid-January of this year, there were some mysterious audio clips that started going around this high school. These clips are purportedly of the school's principal, Eric Isworth, who is making a kind of bunch of inflammatory racist and anti-Semitic comments. He talks about ungrateful black kids in the school who can't, quote, "test their way out of a paper bag." At one point, The Voice says that if he gets one more complaint from a Jewish person in the community, he's going to, quote, "join the other side." It's like very inflammatory statements. And the audio clips kind of sound like he was secretly

• 1:01:11Kevin Roose?

  recorded making these statements. And a lot of people in the community are outraged when these clips come out. They think, you know, this stuff is real. They're sort of harassing and threatening the principal and his family. He was actually temporarily removed as the school's principal and just triggered a huge wave of backlash, as you would expect.

• 1:01:33Casey Newton?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:33Kevin Roose?

  A school principal had been caught on tape saying these kinds of offensive things. But then people start investigating. The principal says, "This wasn't me. I never said these things." The police start getting involved. They send the audio recordings to experts and got access to some emails. And they find that actually this has a much stranger origin story.

• 1:01:56Casey Newton?

  Truly.

• 1:01:57Kevin Roose?

  They find that the athletic director at Pikesville High School, a man named Dason Darian, was having a dispute with Principal Isworth over some performance issues. The principal had opened an investigation into Darian over the alleged mishandling of school funds. Apparently, he was making improper payments to an assistant girl soccer coach who was also his roommate.

• 1:02:19Casey Newton?

  And who apparently was hired but never did the job.

• 1:02:21Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:02:22Casey Newton?

  Which was a dream job.

• 1:02:23Kevin Roose?

  Right. So basically, there was a conflict between the athletic director and the principal. And they conclude that the athletic director, Desondarian, made this deep fake audio recording as retaliation for an investigation.

• 1:02:36Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, I have to say, this feels like a real gift to the police department. They like go and start snooping around investigating. It's like, is this principal, is he having a huge dispute with anyone in the school? I said, oh, yeah. Well, there's the athletic director who the principal had recently caught funneling school funds to his roommate. So I'm sure that got the police's attention in a hurry.

• 1:02:56Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So the police, after this investigation, they conclude that it was Darian who had produced this recording and sent it to two other teachers. One of those teachers then sent it to a student, and it sort of made its way around not only the school, but also local media outlets. The NAACP was also sent copies of this recording. So after investigating this whole thing, the Baltimore County Police put out a warrant for Darian's arrest. He was arrested the next day at BWI Airport after he was stopped for having a gun, and security at the airport saw that he had an open warrant. He was charged with disrupting school activities and some related charges like stalking the principal. And the school superintendent said that officials are recommending that he be fired.

• 1:03:39Casey Newton?

  This was the crime they got him on after all? This is disrupting school activities? Like, that seems like such a, like, small potatoes, given the gravity of this. You know, I will also say, Kevin, you left out one of my favorite details of this story, which is that, once the audio started getting around, one of these teachers sent it to a student who, quote, "she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school." So whoever this anonymous gossip was at Pikesville High School, you may have a future in journalism. Although, of course, we will want to sort of help you vet your evidence.

• 1:04:12Kevin Roose?

  Right. So, very serious story, very sort of disruptive use of AI deep fakes to sort of... Wreck the life of a principal who it appears did nothing wrong here. And I wanted to talk about this on the show today because I think we are at the precipice of a sea change in the way that AI is used in people's ordinary lives and a sea change in how we perceive things that appear shocking or surprising and the kind of suspicion that will now have to be attached to any kind of evidence, no matter how convincing it is.

• 1:04:49Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think, you know, something we've talked about before on this show is that with the synthetic media that typically gets written about, it is of these major political figures. It's Trump, it's Biden, and there's a huge journalistic infrastructure that can go in, can investigate, can say, hey, this was real, this was fake, and sort of help everyone adjust their settings into determining what is reality. That's going to be so much harder to do at the local level where journalism has been gutted. There are few sources of trusted authority in these communities who can weigh in and make these determinations. And so this DeSondarian appears to have been exploiting that and saying, I think I

• 1:05:32Casey Newton?

  can get away with this because who is actually going to come in and be able to tell that the principal didn't really say this?

• 1:05:38Kevin Roose?

  And we should say, like, the recording itself is very realistic. Like, it was actually quite convincing. So I think we should just listen to it, not because I'm like excited about spreading these, you know, fake recordings around, but I just think it's like useful for people to understand and hear for themselves how good this technology has gotten.

• 1:05:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so let's hear a short clip of that audio.

• 1:05:59Speaker 10

  I'm the principal here, me and only me. You know, I seriously don't understand why I have to constantly put up with these dumbasses here every day.

• 1:06:07Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, when you hear that, if you did not know anything about this story, would your suspicion be that this is fake?

• 1:06:15Casey Newton?

  No, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, what gets me, Kevin, is that there is so much emotion in the voice that we just heard. And I think up until now, that has been the telltale sign for me is there's a certain flatness in the affect of The voice that lets me say, OK, I'm hearing a computer. That that fake voice was angry. Also, the rhythm of the words was such that like he spoke faster in certain moments and slower in others in a way that also sort of mimics human speech. So for those reasons, I did think that it sounded quite realistic. What did you think?

• 1:06:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I thought so, too. I mean, this technology has gotten quite good quite fast. Just a couple of years ago, even the best synthetic AI voice software on the market still sounded like a robot. I mean, it was it was flat. It was sort of affectless. It would it would sort of, you know, put the emphasis on the wrong syllables of words sometimes.

• 1:07:09Casey Newton?

  I believe it's pronounced syllable.

• 1:07:12Kevin Roose?

  And and it was quite labor intensive to make a deep fake audio. You needed to feed it, you know, hours of someone's voice samples in order to be able to sort of clone their voice and make it say stuff that they didn't actually say. Now, some of these technologies allow you to do realistic synthetic voice creation with as little as a minute or two of someone's actual voice being recorded. There are now technologies that can insert, you know, ums and ahs and these sort of stumbles that people make as part of our natural speech cadence. And in this case, it appears that there was actually background noise that was sort of inserted into this audio file to make it sound more like something that someone had caught on a sort of hidden recorder in their pocket or something.

• 1:07:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there was a kind of tininess to the audio that also made it just kind of, yeah, give you that impression of this was surreptitiously recorded.

• 1:08:01Kevin Roose?

  So when the investigators sent this audio to AI experts, they were able to kind of flag some things that they thought made it sound more synthetic. They talked about there were signs of sort of after the fact, human editing. But I would say that this, for me, was a good reminder of just how convincing these fakes are and and how little money and technical expertise you need to make them.

• 1:08:25Casey Newton?

  I guess it raises for me the question, Gavin, of like, as you start to hear these little controversies in your community, oh, here's this snippet of audio. What are the signs that we're looking for? You know, how do we know when to react and when not to react?

• 1:08:40Kevin Roose?

  I think this is really tricky because a few years ago, I would have told you, you know, there are a few basic indicators that something is being AI-generated, right? If the voice sounds kind of flat, if it has kind of this like, these like sort of, I don't know, computery effects on it, you might hear something and think, oh, that's not real. But I think this technology has gotten better to the point that most people who are not experts would not be able to tell the difference. So I don't know. If you have tips for listeners who may be worried that something like this could happen in their own community, what would they be?

• 1:09:12Casey Newton?

  And here's the message that I would give, and this is a tip that is taken from essentially, how to avoid falling for clickbait and rage bait online. You know, I think sort of during the heyday of people sharing news on social media, a lot of times you would see something that would produce this really strong emotional reaction in you, and you'd share it, maybe without even reading the article, certainly without doing any work to tell whether it was true or not. And in those cases, the advice that really worked for me was, number one, like, ask yourself two questions when you see a story like this. One is, is this story telling me something I want to hear? Is this about something I'm inclined to believe or want to believe? If so, that's the first thing that should trigger skepticism, right? Before you share, you want to do a little bit more digging.

• 1:09:54Casey Newton?

  And then the number two thing to look for is, is this producing a very strong emotional reaction in me? Do I find myself really angry? Am I really upset? That should be the second sign of like, okay, maybe somebody is trying to get me to feel this way. If you can notice those two feelings in yourself before you react to a piece of media, you're going to be in a better position to understand whether somebody might be trying to mislead you.

• 1:10:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I would totally agree with that. I also think like, context is very important. You know, if some recordings or video or audio emerge of someone in your community saying outrageous and offensive things, is this someone who has a history of saying outrageous and offensive things? Does it make sense for this person to be sort of recorded saying these things? Or is this kind of a departure from sort of how people have heard them speak publicly and privately before? But I would say looking to the actual media is sort of a sucker's game because this technology, as we've talked about, is getting so much better and so much cheaper, so much harder to tell apart from real media. I think that ultimately, we just have to

• 1:11:00Kevin Roose?

  kind of dial up our overall skepticism about the sort of media that we encounter on the internet or in our communities.

• 1:11:09Casey Newton?

  Which does have this really unfortunate effect, Kevin, which is that when people do say really horrible explosive things and then want to deny them, in many cases, they are going to now get the benefit of the doubt. This is a phenomenon that has a great name, the liar's dividend, right? And the liar's dividend is now that in a world where deep fakes exist, it is easier for liars to get away with lying. So that, I think, is really unfortunate. The other thing that I'm just taking away from this is, man, do we need local journalism in this country, you know? We need, in fact, a lot of what we know about this story came from a great nonprofit called The Baltimore Banner, which is a relatively new organization in Baltimore that's trying to pick up the banner from The Baltimore Sun,

• 1:11:49Casey Newton?

  a once great newspaper that is, you know, in some pretty rough times right now. And because the banner existed, we were able to get some good boots on the ground, people who understand this community, people who could talk to people who knew and could give us some information that we can trust. Not every city has a Baltimore banner. And so when we think about what is the solution to this deep fakes problem, it actually is in part a how do we solve a local journalism question.

• 1:12:17Kevin Roose?

  I agree with that. I also think there are some things that the tech companies could do to prevent, or at least to cut back on the abuse of these tools for retaliation or retribution or revenge. Some of these platforms now require you to sort of prove that if you're trying to clone someone's voice, that you actually have that person's permission. And I can imagine a number of ways that you could attempt to do that. But I also think there are limits to that because we now also have kind of more open source voice synthesizing tools that are just not going to take those same precautions.

• 1:12:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think that makes sense, but I think there's even more that tech companies could do on top of that. I think they could experiment with some of these like audio watermarks, you know, in the same way that we see watermarks in images. Can they put some tiny artifact inside the audio that can be revealed that it was, you know, made by one of these synthesizers? You can also just do something on the level of content moderation. If you're one of these voice synthesizer studios and somebody types in a sort of inflammatory paragraph to make a synthetic voice say it, it's reasonable to me for the synthesizer to say, gosh, this doesn't really seem like a great use of our technology. And maybe we'll let you do it, but maybe we'll actually make you tell us the reason for why you're synthesizing this. So at least we can have some sort of file.

• 1:13:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I also think that the other area that they should be really careful about is financial scams, because this is the other big use that we are seeing already for these synthetic voice tools is that people are using them to basically place fake ransom calls to people's friends and relatives, calling Casey's mom, pretending to be Casey, and I'm saying, you know, I've been taken hostage and I need you to wire, you know, $100,000 worth of Bitcoin to this address. And that kind of thing is not only plausible, but we've seen demonstrated examples of that happening. And so, yeah, if you're going into 11 Labs or one of these other sort of synthetic voice tools, and you are creating synthetic voices that are saying things about money, about sending money, about

• 1:14:14Kevin Roose?

  needing money, I think that should immediately raise a flag in the system and that they should probably not allow you to do that.

• 1:14:19Casey Newton?

  By the way, I did text my mom a couple of months ago about this exact issue. And I said, hey, by the way, if you ever get a call and it sounds like me and I say I've been taken hostage, make sure you call me on the phone because it's almost certainly a scam. And I was so proud of my mom. She was like, oh, yeah, I already saw like a segment about this on the news. I'm way ahead of you on this. So one thing that you generally can count on parents is to be aware of scams on the internet because they love to read about them.

• 1:14:42Kevin Roose?

  You're never going to sneak one by Sally Noon.

• 1:14:44Casey Newton?

  No, you're not.

• 1:14:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. No, I think this is a really important thing. I think people need to be having this conversation with their family members. Like, there needs to be a secret passphrase or some question that you can sort of agree that you're going to ask before wiring money or sending money or... Doing anything involving a credit card number or a social security number, like you need to have a way of establishing with your loved one that it is actually you on the other end of that call. I think this is a conversation that people need to be having with their friends and family right now.

• 1:15:16Casey Newton?

  You know, this Mother's Day, when you call mom to tell her you love her, maybe just say, hey, what's our secret pass phrase we can always use so that you know I've not been taken hostage? And that's going to warm mom's heart.

• 1:15:26Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what is our secret pass phrase? If someone ever calls you about me being taken hostage, what should we do to demonstrate that it's actually the real thing?

• 1:15:36Casey Newton?

  I mean, my initial answer was we should just say, sandwich time.

• 1:15:39Kevin Roose?

  I like it.

• 1:15:39Casey Newton?

  Only you and I know that we like to eat sandwiches after the show. Now we've given that information away and we will have to come up with a new pass phrase.

• 1:15:46Kevin Roose?

  OK, we'll come up with a new one and we're not going to put on the podcast.

• 1:15:49Casey Newton?

  We refuse.

• 1:16:03Speaker 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.

• 1:16:37Speaker 07

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's OutSystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used OutSystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. OutSystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.

• 1:17:12Speaker 08

  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.

• 1:17:47Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia B. Etoop, Roland Nemestow, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galocci. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergerson. You can check us out on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Hui Wing Tam, Kate LaPreste, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected], preferably with a deep pic of Kevin Sang's something inflammatory.

• 1:18:23Kevin Roose?

  Please don't.