Hard Fork
Hosted by Casey Newton and Kevin Roose
Original podcast
A shake up is coming for Silicon Valley.
12,488 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Casey, you sent me a very confusing link the other day, which was that we are apparently the inspiration for a line of men's underwear. What's going on?
So if you go over to Amazon, you can find an item that is called the Casey Kevin Men's Lace G-Strings and Thongs Sexy Lingerie. And of course, that was very confusing as to why our names are now a lingerie brand.
Wait, how did you find this? Were you just browsing for things called Casey Kevin on Amazon?
Well, first of all, I'm always looking for branded lingerie in our names. So I just sort of have an active Google search for that. But then also, a Hard Fork listener sent it to me and said, hey, like, were you aware of this? And so I thought about it for about two seconds. And then I like continued looking through this webpage. And I realized the reason that it's called Casey Kevin is because they can then abbreviate it C K all over the packaging and thus compete with Calvin Klein, the number one underwear brand. And so it's essentially our names are being used to perpetrate a fraud.
Well, have you investigated these at all? Do they look like good underwear?
I'm wearing them now. They're incredibly comfortable and they're very breathable fabric.
I'm Kevin Roose. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times.
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.
And this is Hard Fork.
This week, what Trump 2.0 means for tech. Then The Times' Kashmir Hill joins us to talk about the week she spent letting AI make every decision for her. And finally, some election free at GPT.
Well, Casey, where are you? How are you?
Well, Kevin, I am at home in Southern California with my family. My sweet Uncle Mike passed away this week, and I was at his funeral, which means that the election was only the second worst thing that happened to me this week. How are you doing?
You know, I'm OK, especially compared to that. I'm sorry about your uncle. I stress ate my son's entire collection of Halloween candy, except I left him a couple of things that I don't like. And otherwise, we are just persevering. We are coming up on 24 hours since the election, and I'm curious how it's settling for you.
I think that it is still pretty surprising to me, although, I don't know, surprising probably isn't the right word. I truly had no idea what was going to happen in this election. So mostly, I've been just trying to project myself a little bit forward in time and try to think through what we should expect come January when Trump comes back into power again.
Yeah, so let's talk about that today, because I don't think we have much to add or offer in the realm of sort of general political analysis. But I think what we can start to do today is to try to figure out what a second Trump term will mean for the tech industry, because we actually do have some pretty good ideas about what he's going to do in office.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you wrote a great column about this very subject on election night, and I think it offers us a good roadmap to kind of talk through some of what you and I expect. So let me ask you first, Kevin, about maybe one of the most obvious winners of this election, Elon Musk. Should we play a clip from Trump's victory speech?
Let's do that.
Yeah, who did you say? Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star. A star is born, Elon.
Yeah, so obviously, I think this was a huge win for Elon Musk. He will not only have the ability to claim that he helped Donald Trump get elected through his millions and millions of dollars that he donated to the campaign, through his giant push that he made on X to help the Trump campaign win. But he's likely to have a position, whether official or unofficial, in the incoming Trump administration. And so he may have influence over all kinds of things related to his companies, be able to select his regulators, be able to curry favor with the administration in ways big and small. So overall, I think a very good night for Elon Musk. What do you think?
I just think it's great that that guy's finally catching a lucky break.
Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, he's had a rough spell.
I think all of that is right. This obviously is a huge win for Elon and everything he's been trying to do. The thing that I have been trying to think through, though, Kevin, is can Elon Musk and Donald Trump stay friends over a long period of time, right? These are two very volatile personalities, known for being mercurial, changing their minds often. And Elon has a savior complex. He's going to want to get all the credit for whatever is about to happen. And so it would not surprise me, even if in the very near future, there is some kind of rupture here. What do you make of the odds of that relationship going the distance?
I mean, I think a fallout is certainly possible. We've seen that happen with Donald Trump and many people who were part of his first term administration. So, yeah, do I think it's possible that Elon Musk and Donald Trump fall out somewhere down the line? I would say yes. Do I think it is probable? I think not. I think most people who have soured on Trump do so because they feel like he's done something that's beyond the pale, right? And I think for a lot of tech executives during the first term, I mean, if you remember, there were these sort of advisory boards. That Trump set up where a bunch of CEOs from various industries would come give him advice.
And a lot of those CEOs ended up rebelling and stepping off of those boards because his policies became too extreme for them and they were getting a lot of pressure from, among other people, their employees of their companies. Elon Musk does not care what his employees think about his support of Donald Trump and he, I think, will face less pressure than other executives will to sort of disavow any policies or positions that Donald Trump takes because people already know that he's Trump's guy.
Hmm. It's just interesting to me because if you think of the first sort of right wing Silicon Valley billionaire to back Trump, it was Peter Thiel, who continues to have many reasons to be close to Trump, some of which he shares with Elon. And yet Thiel backed off. You know, Thiel didn't get what he wanted out of that first Trump administration. And, you know, while he didn't actively campaign against him, he did sort of retreat quietly into the background. So I'm definitely very curious to see how that relationship plays out in the months and years ahead. Let's talk about a second thing that is very likely to change here in the coming months, Kevin, and that is the president's posture towards crypto. What does Donald Trump think about crypto and how's that different from old Joe Biden?
Yeah, so we've talked about this too. Donald Trump used to be a crypto skeptic. He said things like he doesn't believe that Bitcoin, you know, should replace the dollar. But that has changed in recent months, in part because pro crypto groups have been showering his campaign with money. I think it's pretty clear that the incoming Trump administration will be much friendlier toward the crypto industry than the Biden administration has been, or than the Harris administration would have been. And the crypto industry is rejoicing, not only because the prices of a lot of crypto coins have been shooting up in the past 24 hours,
but because they also see themselves now getting to influence the direction that crypto policy has taken. I think it's pretty obvious. That Gary Gensler, who is the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and who has become really public enemy number one for the crypto industry, he will be replaced. I can't see any scenario in which he stays on during the Trump administration. And I'm guessing that whoever is brought in to replace him will be much more persuadable to take a soft line when it comes to regulating the crypto industry.
Hmm. And so do we think that crypto is poised to have some sort of big comeback during the Trump administration? Like, a story that I feel like I tell myself about crypto is that it's not that popular outside of financial speculation, mostly because it's hard to use and insecure and bad, and people don't like it. But is it possible that if a new head of the SEC comes along and says crypto is legal now, all of a sudden it roars back into the limelight?
I think it's absolutely possible because what we've seen is just this cloud of uncertainty that's been hanging over the crypto industry. So there's just been, I think, a lot of money kind of parked on the sidelines, waiting for a change in the administration so that they can basically bet on crypto again. And I think what we're likely to see in a Trump administration is just a lot of interest in building new crypto products, in building infrastructure, in tying the crypto economy into the the sort of real money economy in more ways. It is going to be a, basically a laissez-faire free-for-all for the cryptocurrency industry,
which was, which is what a lot of them have been wanting for many years.
That's right, Kevin. And if crypto does make that comeback, it will mean one other truly crazy thing, which is that Hard Fork would actually become a good name for a podcast, which they said would never happen.
It's true. We waited out the crypto winter and now we have a good name again.
Kevin, one more twist on the crypto story. These prediction markets, we talked about them on the show last week. I was very skeptical that they were telling us anything that novel or surprising or relevant about the election. Would you say that I have egg on my face a week later?
Yes, I would say you are covered in egg because the prediction markets were vindicated, right? These markets like Polymarket, which is a place where you can go place bets in cryptocurrency on various world events, including elections. They were giving Donald Trump, you know, a higher chance of winning than any of the polls were. They were proven to be right, or at least the people who bet that he would win are seeing those bets pay out. Now, there are lots of potential reasons that might be, but I think that the effect of the Trump win is that prediction markets are here to stay. I think they are going to be seen correctly or not
as a better source of truth about where the electorate is than traditional polls. And I think that there will now be a lot of people saying, why was I listening to the polls when I could have been looking at the prediction markets?
I have a slightly different take here, which is that the group of Americans who bet illegally on this election, on these prediction markets using crypto, represented a source of enthusiasm for the Trump campaign that maybe we should have just been paying more attention to, right? Look at all these people willing to go to the trouble of betting illegally using crypto on these markets. That should have told us how much they want to get Trump into the office, you know, probably in large part to make their crypto holdings more valuable. But yes, I must accept there is egg on my face here. And to my great disappointment, there may be value in these prediction markets. Let's talk about some of these-
No, I want to talk about the guy who made the huge bets on Donald Trump on Polymarket.
Yes. What happened to this rich French person?
As we talked about, there was this one trader, this- Frenchman named Theo, or probably Theo is how they pronounce it, who bet more than $30 million on Polymarket that Donald Trump would win the election and has now won.
And how much money did he win, Kevin?
It's a little unclear exactly how much Theo made from his big Trump trade, but The Wall Street Journal said that he could reap almost $50 million in profits as a result of his bet on Trump, on Polymarket. And that article in the Journal also had really interesting details about how he decided to place this big bet. You know, I think people had assumed this is just some degenerate gambler who's got too much money and just wants to sort of have some fun gambling on an election. But it turns out he was actually quite methodical about this. He had this theory that the polls in the US were not trustworthy and that they would fail to account for the shy Trump voter effect. And he actually went out and commissioned his own surveys
to measure a different method of polling called the neighbor method, which instead of asking people who they are planning to vote for, asks survey respondents which candidates they would expect their neighbors to vote for. Basically, the idea being that people might not want to say who they are voting for, but if you ask them who their neighbors are voting for, that kind of gives you a flavor of what people they know are planning to do. And so he came up with this theory that Donald Trump's chances of winning were therefore higher than the markets at the time thought.
Now, where was all this French ingenuity during World War II, Kevin?
Well, let's just say Theo has a good future in sports betting.
Well, I'm curious to get your take on what all of this means for the other big tech incumbents, which Trump spent much of his first administration fighting against. Of course, it seems like one of the first things that we saw on Wednesday in the aftermath of the election was most of the leaders of the big tech companies and other billionaires like Jeff Bezos coming forward to enthusiastically kiss the ring, I guess I'll say, of Donald Trump.
Yes, the giant sucking sound that you may hear coming from the vicinity of Silicon Valley is the furious effort by the CEOs of the biggest tech companies to suck up to Donald Trump and his incoming administration. Basically, every major tech CEO has already publicly congratulated Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos sent out a post congratulating Trump on his victory. Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, all of these CEOs sort of raced to be among the first business leaders to congratulate President Trump and sort of get in his good graces.
That was not surprising to me, but I think it is just a sign of how different the second Trump term will be from the first.
Here's my question. Which tech leader Trump congratulations tweet did you think was the most sincere and which did you think was the least sincere?
I mean, I thought the Bezos one was was early, which is sort of was surprising to me. I mean, he is obviously drawn a lot of attention in recent weeks for the non endorsement of The Washington Post, which stayed out of endorsing presidential candidates this election cycle. But it was not that long ago that Jeff Bezos was probably Donald Trump's biggest foe in the business world. Amazon is currently suing over a first term Trump administration decision in which they claim that Donald Trump's personal vendetta against Jeff Bezos was the reason that they lost out on a $10 billion cloud contract with the Defense Department.
So it was notable that Jeff Bezos arrived first to kiss the ring of the incoming administration. My personal favorite of the CEO endorsements was Sundar Pichai, who not only congratulated President Trump on his, what he called his decisive victory, but also included a screenshot of Google searches Electoral College map, just a little product placement there.
Mm hmm.
I don't know. What about you? What did you make of the CEOs congratulating Trump?
I think that it is to be expected, as we've been talking about on the show. Everyone feels like there is upside in flattering Trump. But I did note that Sam Altman's congratulatory tweet seemed a little, a little weak. You know, he, he, he wrote in lowercase, "I wish for his huge success in the job," which sounded like it had been badly translated out of another language. But I appreciated it because it sounded fake in a way that was transparent, and so that heartened me.
Yeah, he outsourced his congratulation to ChatGPT. That was actually an agent writing that on his, on his behalf. But I think these leaders in particular have a lot of reasons to be excited about a Trump presidency. And one of them that I, I wrote about is just that I think for all but one tech company, they are likely to see their antitrust problems either go away completely or to, to get much better under a Trump administration. Elon Musk has already said that Lena Khan, the chair of the FTC, who has been bringing a lot of these cases, these antitrust cases against the big tech companies, would be fired under a Trump administration. I expect that Trump will also clear out the people at the Justice Department who were
bringing the cases by that agency against big tech companies. And so with almost every company, I suspect that at least the lawyers at those companies are celebrating this because it means that their jobs just got a little easier.
And it speaks to why some of these leaders were not full-throated in their support for the Democratic candidate because they felt like they were just not getting a lot out of their support for, for that administration, right? That administration come after them and was trying to break up their companies. And so now there is hope that maybe that won't be the case. Although, as you note, that probably won't be true for Google since Donald Trump was the one who initiated that case during his term. So seems like they're going to still have some trouble.
Yeah, so Google, I think, is the exception here. I think they are going to have a very challenging next four years under a second Trump administration. Donald Trump and his allies are not big fans of Google. They think it is a Woke, censorious, liberal Silicon Valley tech company. You know, Donald Trump was in office when the federal government started trying to force Google to break up. And even as recently as a couple of days ago, Elon Musk and other pro-Trump conservatives were alleging Google of trying to swing the election toward Democrats, you know, with not much in the way of real evidence, but a lot of accusations and conspiracy theories.
And so I think this is going to be a very challenging next few years for Google in the antitrust department.
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, let's try to do a little lightning round to close it out. What's going to happen to TikTok now?
TikTok is saved. I mean, this is one of the big promises that Trump made about tech during his campaign. Donald Trump has said many times now that he will, he will not allow TikTok to be, to be banned or sold under his watch. And so I think if you are TikTok, you are popping champagne. This is good news for you. And interestingly, there is still a law that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden that says that TikTok has until January 19th of 2025 to be divested by ByteDance or else face a nationwide ban and get pulled out of the app stores. That may still technically go into effect.
President Trump, even when he does take office, will not be able to unilaterally override that or rescind that law, but he can just choose not to enforce it. He could direct prosecutors not to go after the company. So I expect that TikTok's bacon has truly been saved.
All right. And how about AI, Kevin? What does this mean for AI regulation?
Well, I want to ask you about this too, because this one is a little more complicated. I think the, the, the first gut reaction that I had was that this Trump victory is a win for the accelerationist wing of the AI movement, the people like Marc Andreessen, who want this technology to be able to move as quickly as it can, who don't want any kind of regulation or roadblocks standing in the way of the big AI companies. Trump has also said that he would repeal the Biden administration's executive order on AI. So I think that's a signal that this administration will regulate AI a lot less than a Harris administration would have, or than the Biden administration has. So that, that was my gut reaction. What was your gut reaction?
I think that was my reaction as well. That is certainly what all of the right wing Trump backers in Silicon Valley are telling themselves, but we can never underestimate just how unpredictable Trump is and how often he changes his mind, right? And so, you know, is there a world where Trump decides that AI is too woke and he hates it now? Is there a world where he says, hey, this is too powerful? I need to actually intervene and prevent this technology from being built in this certain way? Like, I could see many outcomes that would not actually be favorable to either Silicon Valley altogether, or some of these individual companies within Silicon Valley. But still, I do expect, at least in, let's call it the first year of the next administration, that yes, it is going to be
everyone moving very, very quickly.
Yep.
All right. Well, that about does it for that subject. But there was one more thing that I wanted to bring up, Kevin, and get your thoughts about. I've been thinking about how Silicon Valley and Trump will or will not be working together in the years ahead, and sort of how all of this came about. And I think a good explanation for how we got to this point is that, once Donald Trump started to take over the Republican Party, the former elites in the Republican Party all started going away, right? Either because they didn't like him, they worked for him and had a bad experience, whatever it was. And it created this power vacuum. And the first person, I think, who noticed that was Peter Thiel, who was characteristically prescient and got in there and supported Trump
in his first victory. But then in the aftermath of him losing, more elites who used to surround Donald Trump, again, left. You know, some who had worked with him in that administration, they had, again, had terrible experiences. And so, more right wing billionaires in Silicon Valley noticed this. They saw that power vacuum again, and they said, aha, we can get in there, and we can surround this guy with ourselves, and we can advance our own ideas. And so now you have the David Sacks, Keith Raboy, you know, Chamath, all around him in his ear. My question is, do we think that that
lasts? Can this be a kind of steady state? Or will the same thing happen to these guys that happened to all the other elites around Donald Trump over the past, you know, decade? Which is, one by one, they all just kind of got pushed out, gave up, left in disgust. What do you think?
I mean, I think the answer may differ depending on who we're talking about. I think if you're someone like David Sacks or Peter Thiel, these people who are sort of, you know, longtime partisan ideologues, this was not their first election cycle supporting Republicans, I think that they are going to feel like they have access to this president, they have influence over this president, and they are not going to want to screw that up in any way. And so I think they will be totally devoted to him and his agenda. I can't really imagine anything that would cause them to sort of lose faith in him
or turn on him. I think if you are just a CEO or a leader of a big tech company, if you're Satya Nadella, if you're Tim Cook, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, I think maybe there is a kind of theoretical red line that if Donald Trump crosses it, you feel morally or at least practically obligated to say something about it. I think at that point, I can totally see those relationships fracturing. We know that Donald Trump does not like people standing up to him or opposing him. And if he feels like people are turning on him, he turns right back on them. So I think those are the relationships that I think are tenuous
under a Trump administration. But the people who were in his corner, who bankrolled his presidential campaign this time, who were throwing fundraisers and hosting events with him and appearing on stage at his rallies, I think those people are in the tank for the next four years.
Well.
What do you think?
I don't know. I used to think that Mike Pence would vote for Donald Trump in this election, and he didn't.
Right. Something that I've also been thinking a lot about is just how uncertain and unpredictable The day-to-day operations of a large technology company are about to become. Again, this is not hypothetical. We know that during the first Trump term, he would be issuing declarations at all hours of the night on Twitter. People were having to constantly figure out how to navigate this very chaotic operating environment. It's a really hard way to run a business, and it resulted in a lot of challenges that I don't think anyone could have seen coming. I mean, just one example was the delete Uber thing that happened during
the first Trump term as a result of his Muslim ban, when people wanted to go to the airports to protest that policy decision. They tried to take Uber's Uber had search pricing turned on. It turned into this big scandal that turned a lot of people off of Uber and essentially created an opportunity for Lyft. Now, that was not something that I'm sure Travis Kalanick or the people who were running Uber at the time thought was a likely outcome of a Trump administration. They probably just thought, oh, this guy's a Republican. He's going to cut taxes and cut regulations, and it's going to be easier for us. I think a lot of those curveballs are possible in such a volatile administration. And so I hope in addition to pecking out their congratulations messages to
Donald Trump today, I hope these executives are doing some scenario planning about how crazy things could get and how they're going to operate their businesses in that kind of environment.
Very interesting.
When we come back, we picked the wrong hill to die on, but the right hill to talk to. Kashmir Hill joins us to talk about the week she spent letting AI run her life.
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Well, Casey, I for one would appreciate a palate cleanser after that last segment that has nothing to do with politics of the election. And luckily, we have one courtesy of my colleague, Kashmir Hill.
Yes, she recently did an experiment with artificial intelligence that is right up our alley, Kevin.
Yes, the story that she wrote is called, "I took a decision holiday and put AI in charge of my life." Basically, for a week, she turned over all decision making in her life over to generative AI, including what to eat, what to wear, her schedule, her new haircut, everything. And what came out of this was just a really interesting look at what these tools can do for us and with us right now, where they might be helpful in going about our day to day lives and where they might not be so helpful. So let's bring in Cash to tell us all about her experiment and what she learned.
Kashmir Hill, welcome back to Hard Fork.
Great to be here.
So how did you set up this experiment? How were you actually going about like trying to have it make decisions for you? Were you just sort of narrating your day out loud to these chatbots? Or like, just tell us about how the experiment actually worked.
So I did some research, like what are the tools I could use? And I made this Excel spreadsheet of all the many apps and products out there that are touting generative AI, like generative AI to parent, generative AI for fashion, generative AI for remodeling. And I made this like big list of all these different apps and I downloaded them and I bought Meta Ray-Ban glasses and I thought I would use all these different products. But at the end of the day, I just mostly ended up using ChatGPT because it was the best and the most flexible. Basically ChatGPT and Claude were the winners of all the assistance I tried.
And give us a flavor of some of the kinds of decisions that you outsourced.
So I did this for a week and I started with, tell us what to buy this week. Like what groceries should we have? Plan our meals. What should I do with my kids? Where should we go on vacation? How should I cut my hair? What color should I paint my office? Something I've been wanting to do for about two years now. And I was like stuck because I couldn't decide on the new color. So I had AI decide for me. But yeah, I was trying to like really use it in all ways and all parts of my day.
I mean, what's interesting about this experiment to me is obviously like it's a great stunt and shows some of what this technology is capable of and not capable of today. But it also, I mean, people in AI are very convinced that very shortly we will all have AI agents going around doing things on our behalf. And, you know, right now, the way you set up this experiment, you still had to kind of like execute the things, you know, it could tell you which groceries to buy, but it couldn't actually go out and buy them for you. But pretty soon, the AIs will be able to do that. And so it's just sort of a preview of where the AI agents are going.
Yeah, right now I'm kind of the agent of the AI, like it's telling me what to do. But it definitely was easy to imagine this becoming much more independent. What was kind of funny to me is when I was interviewing experts about this, including people at, you know, OpenAI and at Anthropic.
They seemed like kind of horrified that I would put my life and my family's life in the hands of their chatbots, which I just thought was was interesting because I I think like that's what they're trying to build, you know, towards this general intelligence. And yet they're like, really, you did that?
Cash, how did your family respond to you outsourcing your life to AI for a week?
Uh, well, it started with my husband wanted to know if he could go golfing with a friend. And I was like, okay, let me ask the AI assistant. And they said, yes. And so it was like, great. This is good for me. It was it was actually really funny. They're like, it's good for your relationship to support your, you know, your partner's interests. My daughters really liked advanced voice mode from ChatGPT, which is their kind of her like assistant. They had a lot of fun with it. It felt very futuristic to them. They could ask it endless questions, like my four year old was asking it. Why do trees have leaves? Why do birds fly? Why do computers have screens?
And just on and on and on, you know, it it never says like, go away like a parent might do. Or I'm sick of answering your question. So they really liked it and they thought it should have a name. And their first suggestion was Captain Poophead. And they were making all these other similar kinds of suggestions. And then it chimed in because it listens while you're talking and it said, how about Spark? You know, it's it's it's creative and fun, just like your energy. And so it became Spark. And to this day, my daughters are asking to talk to Sparks. They want Sparks on the family iPads. They can keep talking to it.
Wow. So did you give this chatbot or Spark any information about yourself? Like, because part of the appeal of these tools is they can sort of get to know you over time. Theoretically, you can give them kind of access to data. They can kind of store things about you in their sort of long term memory. Did were you did you feel at any point like this AI was starting to know you and anticipate what kinds of decisions you might make?
So I tried to approach this very much like a basic user, like somebody who has not been following things would do it. So I really just came to these tools like a normal consumer would. And I said, hey, I'm a journalist doing an experiment of outsourcing all my decision making to AI. Will you help me? At least with the chatbots? And they all said yes, except for Claude, which has said, that's a bad idea. You shouldn't give AI that much control over your life. I don't really want to help you with this. Though it would still answer my questions when I posed them. And then other than that, it was just kind of learning about us over time. And it did start to know things. Like it would know my daughter's
name. It learned my nephew's name. It figured out we didn't eat sugar during the week. Like it started just realizing things about me. And at one point, I asked it, like, tell me about Kashmir Hill. And it said, you know, she's a technology journalist. She likes doing first person experiments. Right now, she's doing the experiment where she's living with generative AI and outsourcing her decision making to it. And I kind of freaked out. And I had my husband do, ask the same question. So I was like, has this leaked out into what's known about me? And he said, no. But the program had figured out that I was Kashmir Hill, even though I had not said that. So that was, that was kind of a surprise to me.
One of the things your story gets at is that these systems often steer you toward the median or the average outcome, right? I think you sort of write that they risk flattening us out. At the same time, there are a lot of tasks I'm really bad at. And if I could be brought up to the median easily, like, that would be great for me. So I'm curious, as you did this experiment, was this sort of relentless push toward the average? Were there moments where it was particularly good for you? And were there moments where it was particularly annoying?
I started feeling very boring by the end of the week. I just felt like all of my decisions were so basic and so average. You know, I had to decide my haircut and it chose a kind of, I mean, you guys can kind of see it. But like a textured bob, it's just like a really basic haircut. And I was talking to Amanda Askel, philosopher, anthropic. And she was like, yeah, AI would never choose my haircut. And she had this really cool like baby bangs and like a mullet.
My clothes, like AI hated all my clothes and it told me to go to J. Crew and buy this like tank top and these big jeans. That I, I shared the photo of the outfit with my colleagues here at the Times and they were just like, you look like you bought the mannequin set. Like it just was, it was just, it was very flattening. And the kind of overall effect was that it turned me into a basic B.
Yeah, that's interesting. I almost wonder if there is gonna have to be a setting at some point where you can say like, do not make me the statistical average of, you know, of everyone in my demographic cohort. Like, let's break out a little bit here.
Wait, so Kevin, you're just gonna tell ChatGPT like, oh, and before you answer, you should know that I'm cool.
Yeah, don't make me look like one of those lame dads. Make me a cool dad.
Please make me interesting.
Yeah. Well, when AI can help with that, it will truly be AI, AGI.
So talk about some other ways that you were able to have AI act on your behalf.
Well, I, I tried kind of like creating AI self. So I cloned my voice using 11 labs and I'm reading Harry Potter to my kids. And so I was kind of excited about this because we're in book four and book four is so long. The chapters are so long. And I was like, this is great. I'll have my AI voice, you know, read Harry Potter to my kids. But it like immediately got flagged for copyright violations.
I created a video avatar of myself using Synthesia, where I just read a script into my laptop camera and it made this fairly convincing avatar of me. And the person I talked to there said, you know, you can have it like create TikToks for you, can create messages for you. All you have to do is give it a PDF of your article and upload it. And I was like, this is great because I'm terrible at TikTok. Not good. Sorry to everyone watching YouTube. Like, I'm not good at video. And so I was really excited that this would just make TikToks for me. And then it was horrible. I like, I look crazy. I have crazy eyes. It got, I don't know, 100 views. It didn't work. I used it to send a message to my mom and she was horrified.
So AI being me didn't go down that well.
I will say, I've seen a lot of creators on TikTok who have crazy eyes and that seems to go really well for them. So you might just want to try making a few more videos.
Make the eyes crazier this time.
Yeah.
So you've done this experiment now. You've written about it. Do you think this is going to be something that you do long term? Are there more kinds of decisions or daily activities that you are planning to turn over to AI?
I mean, honestly, the reason I did this is I was very curious about generative AI and I just hadn't used it that much. And, you know, we're spending billions of dollars on this. We're revamping our energy grid, basically to support further training and use of generative AI. And I was just wondering, like, how much is it gonna help us? How is it gonna change society? How is it gonna change us? And I came away from the week being like, meh. Like, it was fine. It was helpful in certain scenarios. I think the way that I'll keep using it is taking photos of problems around my house and getting advice for what to do.
You know, I think it's like a really, really powerful and more efficient Google search.
Can I make a suggestion?
Yes.
I would be curious if going forward, you try to use these generative AI tools a little bit more like a coach than an executive. So if there's like a skill that you're learning or something that you're working on in your life, these generative chatbots can be these journals that talk back to you. Over the past few weeks, I've been playing around with meditating, something that I am just an utter novice at. And while I haven't been giving over decision-making authority to Claude, which is what I've been using, I have been getting all sorts of ideas from it. And then like when something goes wrong, I'm like, this thing went wrong. It's like, oh, like you might want to try this. Or if something goes right, they're like, great, here's how you can build on that.
And so I am finding that this chatbot is actually like giving me this incredible meditation coach experience that still lets me do all the decision-making, but manages to fill in a lot of blanks for me.
Yeah, I talked to this one AI kind of influencer type, and she said that she uses it as a business coach. And she tells it like, I want you, I want to tell you about my business and I want you to apply the 80/20 rule to it and you tell me what I should be doing. And I can see how that can be useful. I guess just in my career of, you know, covering technology tools, I do think that we, once we kind of adopt a new technology, we do tend to get overly reliant on it. Like Google Maps means that you can go anywhere in the world and figure out how to get around, but you don't know how to get around your own neighborhood anymore. You know, Google search, we've kind of, the search tools, we've like, you know, outsourced
kind of memory and fact recall to these search engines. And so part of why I did this experiment was, yeah, exaggerating it a bit. Like, at what point will we stop making decisions on our own because we assume that these tools are better than us or know us better or have access to more information, which they certainly do. And so I was kind of playing around with that. But I will take your advice, Casey. Maybe I'll have it coach me to be, I don't know, a better, more interesting parent or I don't know, I'll have to figure out what I need help with.
I mean, your experiment really highlighted something that I've been thinking a lot about, which is the value of taste in a world with lots of AI assistants running around doing various tasks on our behalf. It just strikes me from reading what you wrote that the sort of flattening effect is just about taste. It's about like letting a machine do things, not just because they're annoying tasks that you have to do, but really things that go to the core of like your personality, your values, your, you know, the choices about how you live your life. And I worry too that people are going to outsource not only their, their day-to-day tasks to AI, but also their taste.
And I think that it's going to be people with sort of distinctive personal tastes who know what they like and know what to ask these AIs to do for them are going to just have a big leg up on people who just say, well, I'll just go with whatever the AI says.
Well, Kevin, what does that mean for you as a person with no taste?
Yeah, I'm screwed. But you guys will be fine.
No, I just, I do think they were useful tools and I'll continue to use them. But yeah, I don't, I don't think I'll outsource my decision-making anymore, but it didn't do a bad job. Like, nothing went terribly wrong during the week. You know, they made basically good decisions for me. I encountered a few hallucinations, but not on anything major.
What were the kinds of hallucinations you encountered?
The funniest thing, the most lasting hallucination is that my daughter asked it, what's the difference between your middle finger up and your middle finger with your thumb up? And it said, the middle finger alone is a rude gesture. The middle finger combined with the thumb is a friendly gesture that means chill out. So my daughter enjoys telling me to chill out all the time now. It hallucinated it.
Now, did the, did the AIs ever try to break up your marriage? Because that is something that they have been known to do on occasion.
No, it was, it told me to be nice to my mother-in-law and generally I said, I think made me a better wife. The AI, the interesting thing about the AI is that it did feel like it was built in that it wanted to improve me, like it felt a little bit like a self-improvement tool. And so it was telling me to dress up at night, like wear a little bit of makeup. So I kind of felt like I was my best self in a way. I mean, I was going to yoga every day, cooking meals. It was, I think my husband liked me a lot that week. And it wasn't telling me to break up with him or end my marriage.
The AI turned you into the, the Apple executive in every new iPhone launch. He was just constantly, you know, surfing or preparing a healthy meal in their, in their kitchen or, you know, doing some remodeling on their beautiful house.
Yeah, I feel like when these, when these companies scrape the web, they kind of over-index on like wellness influencers or something because that felt like the life I was leading.
I mean, the gender dynamic there is interesting though, right? Like presumably these chatbots aren't telling husbands to like dress up for their wives when they get home and make sure that, you know, their nails are well groomed and their hair looks good.
I don't know, I'll have my husband do this experiment and see what it has him do.
Casey, I thought that's why you dress up for the show every week because the AI told you to look good for me.
I try to look good for you because I think that's what you would want from me, Kevin.
Okay, well, I appreciate that. I've just been using this stuff for, you know, almost two years at this point. And so I, I now, it's, it's become like a first line activity for me. Like when I'm presented with a situation where I have to make a decision, I almost instinctively go to AI now. So like it's, it's an open enrollment this week at the New York Times Company. And so I was trying to choose, you know, do I get vision insurance? Is it worth it? You know, should I do this dental plan or this dental plan? And so I just found myself almost instinctively like just uploading all of the, the documents about all these plans to, to, to an AI program and asking them to like, help me think through
this. And obviously there are places where these tools should not be used, but for these kind of daily tasks and just things that pop into your head that you want an answer to, I have found them incredibly useful.
I mean, it does feel to me like these are the kinds of questions we would have asked Google before, like, should I get vision insurance? What's the best way to meditate? Like, give me good resources for working out. And yeah, I just think that these AI assistants work really well for those kinds of searches and just the abilities that you can give so much more, that you can upload our health plan documents. Yeah, I think it's really powerful in those cases.
You know what I think it is, is that you're right, these are just next generation Google searches. With Google searches, there was always a point of friction, though, which is you would have a point of curiosity, but you would know that in order to get the answer you wanted, for the most part, you were going to have to read another webpage, maybe two or three webpages. The chatbots really lower that friction. You know, I was driving down the freeway yesterday, and I saw a building for Easter Seals, and I remember that was a charity, but I could not for the life of me remember, how did they get the name Easter Seals? I just popped up in Claude, and I just typed Easter Seals name origin, and boom, I had it instantly. I was on my way to a funeral today. It was a Catholic mass. I was like, what are all the things that actually happened during a Catholic mass? I opened
up voice mode on ChatGPT on my phone, and it told us all of that. Again, all of that information was on Google to be found, but we knew that with these chatbots, we would just get the answer right away. And so you wind up making more searches, and I think you wind up being more satisfied with the result.
I want to pose a question to both of you. I think we all assume that AI will continue to sort of get better over time. But I wonder if in this one specific use case of like having AI advise you on decisions day to day, like, it might actually not get better, and it might actually get worse, in part because I think it's a pretty good bet that as companies realize, oh, people are basing their decisions about what groceries to buy, what clothes to buy, you know, where to go to dinner on what these chatbots say, they will start to have already started to, in some cases, try to sort of game the system to make it so that their restaurant, their clothing brand pops up before their competitors.
And so what we will see over time is that just in the way that sort of Google search got sort of infiltrated by all of these sponsored links and results, we will start to see the AIs steering us in directions that reflect not what they actually think we want, but what some advertiser has paid them to say.
Yeah, I was thinking about this because I had, this didn't make into the story, but I had the assistants decide where we went for a family vacation and they sent us to a nearby town in a really, really, really expensive hotel. And when I was there, we ran into somebody we knew and they're like, wow, why did they send you there? Like, that's the fanciest hotel in town. And I was trying to figure, I talked to some researchers who have looked at this kind of search engine, they call it generative engine optimization and the ability to affect what these chatbots are kind of recommending. And I said, hey, did this like hotel manage to make its way into the top? And it was like, no, they just have good reviews. But, but yeah, I mean, part of why I've found these more helpful than a Google search is that, yeah,
Google search is a bit broken. And I do wonder if we'll now, if more people start using these, if there'll be a kind of corruption of the answers you get and it won't feel as pure, or if they can counterprogram against that. But the researchers I talked to, they did some research and they were able to manipulate the answers that some of the bots were giving.
I think it's definitely going to happen, but I would note that we do have pretty powerful open source models. And that was not really true in the Google era, right? There wasn't a really powerful open source search engine that you could use with no advertising in it. And I wonder if that will be a kind of counterbalance against the worst impulses of some of these companies, just knowing that if they really loaded down their chatbots with ads, people would have alternatives.
All right. Well, Cash, thanks so much for coming on. Really interesting experiment, and I'm glad to have the, the organic you back.
Good to be back.
When we come back, pass the hat. It's time to play Hat GPT.
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Well, Kevin, we'd like to try to end today's episode on a high note. And from time to time, when a number of strange stories accumulate in the world of technology in the future, we like to run through them in a segment we call Hat GPT. Let's pass the hat.
HatGPT is of course the segment on our show where we draw stories out of a hat and riff on them for a bit. And when one of us gets bored of the other, we say, stop generating.
Let's do it. Casey, since I am in the studio and you are not, would you like me to pull the slips out of the baseball HatGPT hat or the bucket HatGPT hat?
You know, this feels like a bucket hat kind of day.
Okay, so here's the HatGPT bucket hat. I'm gonna throw our slips in here. I will rustle them around in front of the microphone. So we get that nice little sound effect there. And I will pull out the first slip.
This one is from 404 Media. It is called Fired Employee Allegedly Hacked Disney World's Menu System to Alter Peanut Allergy Information. This is a story about a disgruntled former Disney employee who allegedly hacked the software used at Walt Disney World's restaurants, and then changed the menus to say that foods that had peanuts in them were safe for people with allergies, added profanity to menus, and at one point changed all the fonts on the menus to "wingdings." This, of course, was a sign that something had gone wrong. And the employee who was fired in June has denied wrongdoing and claims that Disney is trying to frame him. Casey, what did you make of this story?
Well, Kevin, I hate to side with management, but in this case, it does seem like they were justified in firing this employee.
Yes. No one was injured or harmed, according to his lawyer, by these menu alterations. No one like had a peanut allergy and died as a result of this. But yeah, you should not do this on your way out the door at your company. Do not try to kill people by changing the menus.
Yeah. Also, the food at Disney is dangerous enough without introducing the potential risk of a fatal peanut allergy into it. So, come on. Now, I will say that I think that it's funny that he changed the font to "wingdings." And if he had stopped there, I would support his immediate reinstatement into whatever job he was doing for the company.
Yes, I was a big fan of Wingdings during the heyday of Wingdings. This was a font for any of you Zoomers who may be listening. That was basically the first sort of instantiation of emojis. Basically a font where when you would type letters, they would turn into symbols on the screen, making them totally unreadable. But I enjoyed using it from time to time. Were you a big Wingdings guy?
I was because I love to make little newsletters and like, sort of, I did like desktop publishing, they called it back in the day. And yeah, before clip art was widespread, Wingdings was the easiest way to like, put a bomb into a document because there was a great sort of bomb icon in the Wingdings character set.
Hmm, wow, well, I don't even really want to ask what you were doing putting bombs into documents as a kid. But, but yeah, Wingdings was for you. All right, stop generating.
You know, there's a great hip hop lyric, "Word to your moms, I drop bombs." That's basically the spirit in which I use that Wingding, if you were curious.
Okay, well, you just landed on the no-fly list. Okay, will you read the next one?
I would be happy to. Meta's plan for nuclear-powered AI data center thwarted by rare bees. This is from the Financial Times. Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data center supporting his AI ambitions. However, the potential deal faced multiple complications, including environmental and regulatory challenges. Their sources said the discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data center was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta All Hands meeting last week. So Kevin, what do you make of rare bees thwarting our nuclear power ambitions?
It's just so funny. Like, there are so many things that could go wrong with a nuclear-powered AI data center. The thing that actually ends up thwarting the project is that during the environmental review, they found this rare species of bees. First of all, I didn't know there were species of bees. I thought there was kind of like one bee, maybe two, you know, there are the fuzzy ones, then there are like the the small ones. But I didn't know that we were like harboring a whole lost ecosystem of bees that could be made extinct. But anyway, this is, you know, a classic sort of example of how one of the biggest barriers to building anything in this country, not just data centers,
but all kinds of housing and infrastructure, are these sort of, you know, 1970s-era environmental regulations where before you build, you know, a new building, you have to go do a multi-year environmental impact study. The sort of YIMBY movement has been trying to change these laws, to expedite this process, to make it possible to build more things faster. But this kind of environmental review sometimes does turn up things like rare bees. And when it happens, when you're trying to build a new data center powered by nuclear energy, it sometimes puts a wrench in your plans. So, you know, we talk a lot about AGI, but I think it's time to start talking about ABI.
Yeah, well, we'll definitely be talking a lot about ABI going forward. Here's why it's interesting to me, Kevin. You know, it seems like for the past decade or so, regulators around the world have been asking themselves one question. How do we regulate Mark Zuckerberg and Meta? Nothing they've tried stick until we found the bees. And so it raises the question, as we try to sort of bring these tech giants under control, what role can these bees play in that? Because it seems like they can be quite effective because a government literally just said to Mark Zuckerberg that he better mind his beeswax.
That's true. And it makes me think that if you're like a person who wants to stop AI, if you're one of these like sort of AI safety groups that thinks we should be pausing all AI development, you might actually just want to like, set up a little hive for the bees.
All right. Stop buzzing.
Stop buzzing. Okay. Next up. Oh, this is a great one. This one is titled, "An Interview With A Dead Luminary Exposes The Pitfalls Of AI." This was written in the New York Times by Andrew Higgins recently. This is a story about a radio station in Poland that fired its on-air talent and brought in AI-generated presenters to host shows. This was a promising experiment that ended very badly after one of the AI presenters held an interview with a dead Polish poet, a Nobel laureate who died
in 2012. This interview was not a hit with fans of this poet who complained to the station. They have since said that they are going to stop using these AI-generated hosts and find other ways to appeal to new audiences. So Casey, have you ever listened to an interview with a dead person conducted on a radio station using AI?
No, but I did go to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland. Do you remember this one, Kevin?
No, I never went to this.
So this was just something, this was an attraction at Disneyland, one of the worst ones, I'll say it, when you would sit in what they called the Hall of Presidents and you would just sort of listen to these animatronic presidents telling you a little bit about their lives. Functionally, I don't see very much difference between what was happening at Disneyland and what was happening on this radio station. I understand that, you know, maybe the poet wouldn't have wanted their voice to be used this way, and if their family has feelings about it, that's completely fine. But let's face it, a lot of people are doing exactly what you described with Notebook LM already, as we've discussed on this show. And I'm not quite sure why this has become such a cause celebre in Poland. Do you?
I think it's probably more, what they're reacting to is both the sort of interview with the dead poet, which, you know, great movie title, Dead Poets Society. So much to use that. But also, I think they're reacting to the kind of labor angle here, which is that this radio station decided that it could fire its its human hosts and replace them all with AI. And it ended badly. And I think there will always be people who are interested in hearing that kind of story about AI screwing up after it's brought in to essentially replace humans.
Totally. And on that front, I'm quite sympathetic. Although, man, as we discussed on this show, some of those Notebook LM podcasts sound pretty good, and I bet they're going to get better. So, you know, podcaster, radio presenter, whatever you want to call it, might be an endangered species.
All right. Stop generating. What's the next one?
The next one? Oh, this one, this one is short and sweet, Kevin. Apple Intelligence goes live with iOS 18.1 update, and I experience it basically exclusively through the summaries of my notifications. And Kevin, I've got to know, how are you finding Apple Intelligence so far?
So I've been using Apple Intelligence in beta for a couple of weeks now. And yeah, mostly I am noticing these AI-written summaries of my text threads, which are, I have not gotten any hilariously bad ones, yet they're mostly just kind of like bad in a boring way. But what about you?
Well, I'm pulling up one that I can read to you because it was so perfect. Let me see this here. So. So I just installed it and I, you know, one of my big group chats that I'm in that goes crazy all day long, I pick up my phone after a meeting, and the Apple Intelligence summary said, important message shared, website link provided. And I thought, what did we do before you were here, Apple Intelligence? It's so funny to me because it took the actual information, like, what is the link to the website? And it summarized it in a way that meant that I now had to click another step to find out what it said. So just truly a perfect example of AI taking something that already worked totally fine
and making it worse for only one reason, which is to convince Apple shareholders that Tim Cook has an AI plan.
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, this is becoming a total meme in culture, like these notifications summaries.
Can I tell you how I knew that the election was not going Kamala Harris's way?
How?
So I was at the visitation for my uncle on Tuesday night and I happened to glance down at my watch, which was on Do Not Disturb, but you know, I just wanted to see, you know, what, what information I could glean. And Apple Intelligence had offered the following summary of a text in my group chat, and that summary was as follows, MDMA purchase considered. And I thought, I don't think Kamal is going to win this one.
That's the new needle. That's how you know how things are going.
That's the new needle, although it is often taken in a pill form. Anyway, stop generating.
All right, next up.
The Vatican's anime mascot is now an AI porn sensation. This is another one from 404 Media. Last week, the Vatican unveiled Luce, a Japanese-style cartoon character that will serve as the Catholic Church's mascot for its upcoming Jubilee year, as well as its Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan. The designer of this Japanese-style mascot said that he hoped it would represent the sentiments that resonate in the hearts of the younger generations. And as soon as this anime mascot made it onto the internet, AI degenerates started creating AI-generated porn using this anime mascot. So it has now been corrupted
as a result of being put on the internet. Casey, what do you make of this story?
So before this story came out, a friend of mine in a group chat had said, hey, have you guys seen this new Vatican mascot character? She's so cute. And another friend said, I hate to say it, but I'm worried someone is going to try to make porn of this. And I said, I bet it already exists. And another friend went on to 4chan, and guess what? It did. So there is a famous rule on the internet called Rule 34. That rule is that if you can think of it, there is porn of it. And unfortunately, it was proved true again in the case of Luce. And what should the Vatican do about it? I have an idea. Remember when your mascot was a guy named Jesus Christ? It seemed like he did just fine for the past 2,000 years. I don't know why we're bringing in a new girl, sweetheart.
No, well, look what happened to Jesus when AI had his way with him. He turned into shrimp Jesus.
Hey, let me tell you, Jesus has been through a lot worse than that, Kevin.
There's a whole book about it. This is why we can't have nice things. I just think the Catholic Church has been weirdly in front of a lot of generative AI stuff, like remember the Pope coat? Yeah. You know, that was the first convincing deep fake. Now they've got this anime scandal. So I just think the Catholic Church should probably take a break from AI for a while. I agree with that. Well, Casey, a plume of white smoke just came out of my microphone, which I think means either that we've elected a new Pope or that we're done playing HatGPT. Yeah, I think it's the latter.
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Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Ina Alvarado. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Alicia Beetub, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemesto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galocci. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Shod. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Wee Wing Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].
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