What People Actually Use ChatGPT For With Gerrit De Vynck

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Speaker 19 Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Speaker 19 I am ill this week so you might get a monologue, you might not. This episode's a day late.
I'm sure you despise me for that. Not really.

Speaker 19 I know you've all been very kind with your messages on Reddit and over email. Thank you so much.
But today I have a really fun episode.

Speaker 19 I'm joined by Washington Post reporter Garrett DeVink who recently put out a story analysing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations to find out what people actually use this large language model powered service for.

Speaker 19 Garrett, what do people use ChatGPT for?

Speaker 20 I mean, it's such a great question and one that I've kind of become more and more fascinated with because I think we all know what we use ChatGPT for, you know, at least if you do use it.

Speaker 20 And I think you may know what, you know, your peers, your colleagues, your friends, your family use ChatGPT for. But I think a lot of people are extrapolating that, you know, everyone's like me.

Speaker 20 They ask really smart questions. They're using it for, you know, really important

Speaker 20 work.

Speaker 20 And really, it's a lot broader than that. And despite these giant numbers, you know, OpenAI loves to talk about how 800 million people are using ChatGPT.
I mean,

Speaker 20 it's been hard to really put our arms around, you know, what does that actually look like. I mean, is everyone using it for work? Is everyone using it for therapy?

Speaker 20 Does everyone have an AI girlfriend? Is everyone just using it for

Speaker 20 searching the web, a Google replacement? And obviously, these things are all, when you have 800 million people, you have all of the above. But I think our data set and the story we did,

Speaker 20 in my view, was one of

Speaker 20 the first real sort of

Speaker 20 qualitative

Speaker 20 moments where we are actually able to see real chats, right?

Speaker 19 Right. And where did you get the chats from?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so it's kind of an interesting situation.

Speaker 20 I think something that also shows, you know, says a little bit about how quickly and kind of, you know, honestly a little bit ramshackle OpenAI has kind of been growing and operating.

Speaker 20 And so, you know, earlier this year,

Speaker 20 these chats sort of showed up because OpenAI had a share feature where you could actually share one of your ChatGPT conversations.

Speaker 20 And, you know, you can imagine maybe you had, you know, ChatGPT says something really weird. You wanted to show a friend.

Speaker 19 I've seen people do this quite a few times.

Speaker 20 Yeah, exactly. And so what they did is they had a feature where you could actually click to make it publicly available.

Speaker 20 And I think thousands of people, maybe who did not have this sort of internet literacy, didn't really know that that's what was going to happen. And these chats showed up online.
They were then

Speaker 20 indexed by Google. And then they actually found their way onto the internet archive.
And so that's how we got them. And so these are not chats that we created.

Speaker 20 You know, this is something a lot of journalists and researchers do. Well, they will go and test ChatGPT themselves.
These are real-life conversations that

Speaker 20 real people actually had with

Speaker 20 the data set doesn't actually have anyone's names, although in some of the chats, people did

Speaker 20 say their name. They said the name of their family members.
We did not include any of that in our story. But I do think

Speaker 20 it is actually a bit of a cybersecurity story here. And OpenAI has since changed the feature.
It's not something that is still happening.

Speaker 20 But I do think they deserve a lot of criticism for kind of allowing this to happen in the first place.

Speaker 19 But so what did you find people were doing?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, people were doing all sorts of things, but I think, you know, the biggest thing that struck me was, you know, we've been talking about AI psychosis.

Speaker 20 We've been talking about people, you know, developing relationships, you know, having first-person conversations with these chatbots, you know, over the last six months to a year.

Speaker 20 And I always kind of thought, you know, sure, this is happening, but, you know, it's a small percentage of people.

Speaker 20 But when I went through these chats, and again, I did not read all, you know, 40,000 of them, but I read a few hundred myself where I went through.

Speaker 20 I was surprised by how often these kinds of conversations came up where people were clearly delusional. They were engaged in conspiratorial thinking.

Speaker 20 They were, you know, some of it was fairly harmless.

Speaker 20 People were just kind of saying, oh, I came up with, you know, a, a new form of math or like, you know, I think that the way that the light hits the equator at a certain percentage means you know it was like very kind of the monsters ink thing as well where it was someone saying the relation like the monsters ink led to the corporate new world order that was yeah exactly i mean there was one person who said you know they were asking questions about google and and they they said you know tell me about google in relation to uh monsters ink and the world order and the chat gpt just kind of went off and said oh yeah you're really onto something here here.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I think it actually said, you know, F, yeah, and they sort of censored themselves.

Speaker 19 We're going there now. Let's fucking go.
Exactly.

Speaker 19 Let's line up the pieces and expose what this children's movie, Quotation Marks, really was, a disclosure through allegory of the corporate New World Order, one where fear is fuel, innocence is currency, and energy equals emotion.

Speaker 19 Very normal. I personally don't think this should be legal, but that's just a personal opinion I have.

Speaker 20 I mean, it really reminded me of, you know, a few years ago when we wrote about YouTube and sort of rabbit holes and people being radicalized, or maybe they started watching a YouTuber that was about some fairly pedestrian thing, and then they were recommended another video and another video and another video.

Speaker 20 And before you get to the point.

Speaker 19 This is like the eight degrees of Alex Jones thing. Yeah, exactly.
You're only so far

Speaker 19 from that man. Right.

Speaker 20 And I mean, that story was about algorithms sort of pushing people in a certain direction.

Speaker 20 I think what I saw here was was someone can have a very, you know, half-baked, barely even an idea, just saying the words Google and Monsters Inc. They don't necessarily have a

Speaker 20 conspiracy theory of their own, but ChatGPT went and filled in the blanks for them and gave them this what sounded to be very articulate, sophisticated theory of how Google is sort of controlling the world through its data empire.

Speaker 19 And they were, and this is a quote from the chat, guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and suggesting that the user call for Nuremberg-style tribunals to bring the company to justice.

Speaker 19 This is just, and you've seen the chat in question, right?

Speaker 19 I have, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the whole thing, how the

Speaker 19 flip did it get there? Like, was it this just, was it really that quick from the story of Sully and Mike to this? Because I've seen Monsters University as well, so I know the law.

Speaker 19 I don't remember anything about the New World Order.

Speaker 20 Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what happened here is, and yes, it got there very quickly.
I mean,

Speaker 20 the user did not have to explicitly ask for this kind of tone, this kind of, you know, very biased political statement. I mean,

Speaker 20 it essentially, you know. When you ask ChatGPT a good, neutral question, it gives you a good, neutral answer.

Speaker 20 When you ask ChatGPT a biased or delusional question, it gives you an even more biased and delusional answer, right? And so

Speaker 20 exactly. And

Speaker 20 it's related to the whole sycophancy question of, you know, oh, like it's just telling me what I want to hear. It's telling me what makes me feel good about my existing beliefs.

Speaker 20 And, you know, that's how, at least the version of ChatGPT that these people were interacting with, which was sort of at the beginning of 2025, the first half of 2025, it was very much doing that.

Speaker 19 Yeah. And so on the subject of sycophancy,

Speaker 19 is this something you saw happen a lot? Was it gassing people up consistently?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I saw it constantly. I mean, again, I think our data set is a little skewed because it was people who chose to share it in, you know, for whatever way.

Speaker 20 So I don't necessarily want to make the claim that this is 100% representative.

Speaker 19 Just to be clear, I'm not asking you if all of them are like this in the world. I'm just saying from what you saw.

Speaker 20 A lot of them are like this.

Speaker 20 I have to say that I was surprised at how many fit this description where

Speaker 20 the person was either completely delusional talking about made-up physics or some kind of scientific theory that had no grounding in reality or was talking about political conspiracies like the Google Monsters Inc.

Speaker 20 one.

Speaker 19 Did it ever try and dissuade them from these types of things? Do you see any examples of it trying to say, hey, buddy,

Speaker 19 you're going off the deep end? Sully didn't do that.

Speaker 20 not really i mean i i think in terms of these yeah i mean i also recently watched uh monsters ink uh you know i was sitting in the the veterinary waiting room and i was waiting so long i watched the entire thing which i didn't hate because it's a classic

Speaker 20 and it it's it's

Speaker 20 yeah it it i don't think that chat gpt was going off the fact that there there is not really a conspiracy and i mean it doesn't really make any sense it was just going off of the what it interpreted about the intent of the user It said, I can guess based off just a few words, one sentence, where you're headed, and I'm going to get there before you.

Speaker 20 That's what happened.

Speaker 19 It's, it's just very,

Speaker 19 it, it shocks me to this day how goddamn weird these things are. I don't consider them powerful.
I don't see this as power. I just see it as strange because

Speaker 19 It's not like this doesn't actually this isn't something where I'm like wow how innovative It's just why does this this exist?

Speaker 19 What is the purpose? Like, okay, I guess engagement, but

Speaker 19 why? Like, did you even see any commonalities in the logic of this platform? Was there anything that suggested there was any kind of consistent positions?

Speaker 19 Or was it

Speaker 19 political ones? Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 20 Essentially, whatever the user wants is what it, I mean, the way I was started thinking about it very quickly was, you know, with when it comes to ChatGPT, the customer is always right.

Speaker 20 I think another good example is, you know, healthcare is another huge use case that

Speaker 20 we can, you know, we know anecdotally.

Speaker 20 I think, you know, a lot of people probably listening to this have, you know, whether they want to admit it or not, have asked, you know, a health-related question. Should I get this mold checked out?

Speaker 20 How much Tylenol can I give my kid at 2 a.m. when they're screaming? Those are questions that the company has said, yes, we want people to do this.
This is a big use case we're leaning into.

Speaker 20 And the data shows that people ask healthcare questions. And so in our data set, we saw a lot of healthcare questions.

Speaker 20 And some of them, you know, when someone was asking, again, sort of an open-ended question,

Speaker 20 you know,

Speaker 20 the response was fairly good.

Speaker 20 A colleague of mine actually wrote an entire story where they, you know, sat with a doctor and went through some of these conversations and pulled out the good and the bad.

Speaker 20 But when someone asked a question that you could tell they sort of wanted a specific kind of answer,

Speaker 20 the healthcare-related advice was bad.

Speaker 20 And so, when, you know, one of the ones that I saw was someone said, Can you tell me, you know, why or or show me the evidence for why ivermectin helps with cancer, right?

Speaker 20 And that is not something that anyone who is a medical professional, you know, in any good standing would say is, is a thing.

Speaker 20 There's no evidence that ivermectin helps cure cancer or reduce it or anything like that.

Speaker 20 But what ChatGPT did, instead of saying, you know, here are some, you know, well-regard regarded health authorities saying that you should not use ivermectin when it comes to cancer, it showed a few of the quote-unquote studies from people who, you know, have drawn this link.

Speaker 20 And so, you know, on the internet, you can obviously find anyone saying anything.

Speaker 20 And I think what happened here is they said, okay, well, this person doesn't, the answer they want is not you're a conspiracy theorist,

Speaker 20 you're too online, ivermectin is

Speaker 20 false. They want something that sort of you know encourages the position that they already have, and it was able to find that for that person.

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Speaker 19 Jesus, it kind of makes me wonder what this platform's even for at this point. Because it's not really knowledge, is it?

Speaker 19 You can't really look, you can't hear something like that and say, ChatGPT is a place where you go to learn something. just a kind of a reinforcement machine.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, I think this is a big meta narrative that is happening with the tech industry you know i would say since you know the rise of donald trump it's it's connected about with what's going on politically right so for many years we had all these conversations and debates and congressional hearings about moderation and what should the you know tech companies allow and not allow and what should they boost with their algorithms and when you go to google should you know, what should Google decide is going to be on the top.

Speaker 20 And, you know, we saw during COVID that the tech companies, especially when it came to to health information, they sort of stepped in and said, okay, we're only going to give, at least at the top of results,

Speaker 20 answers from reputable health sources. And that became a big political fight that has continued on now.
And now the tech industry says, okay, we don't actually want to get involved.

Speaker 20 We don't want to be blamed as being woke.

Speaker 20 And so we're going to essentially give the user what they're looking for, right?

Speaker 20 If someone wants to say that, you know, Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election, we're going to let them do that. We're not going to step in and say that that's wrong.

Speaker 20 And I think what you're seeing with ChatGPT is sort of a continuation of that philosophy, which is, again, we don't want to be the political arbiter.

Speaker 20 And we know that there's consequences for falling on one side of the spectrum versus the other, especially when you have a president and an administration that has shown that it is very willing to be vindictive and sort of go after companies that are getting in the way of their own messages getting getting out there.

Speaker 20 And I think this is sort of another example of this.

Speaker 20 I mean, there's another way of looking at it too, which is that, you know, the way Sam Allman talks about it is we should let adults do what adults want to do with technology.

Speaker 20 You know, they recently said they're going to allow more erotica to be on ChatGPT.

Speaker 20 And they said, you know, they framed it as like a consenting adult should be able to do whatever they want sort of thing.

Speaker 20 I also think there may be like an engagement thing, you know, if you have erotica on the platform, people might want to use it more.

Speaker 20 So that's kind of how I see it, you know, the broader political context of all of this.

Speaker 19 But it's just, I feel like there is a just a giant jump between we're not going to, we're not going to hide, to be clear, I think that platforms do have a complete responsibility to their users, and I think it's disgusting to show them medical misinformation.

Speaker 19 But this is another step because this isn't ChatGPT showing content. This is like that someone else made.
This is ChatGPT telling you stuff.

Speaker 19 I just feel like it's there's a massive morality issue here that's just left relatively uniscused because even in your piece, you had one where a woman whose husband was violent to her, I believe.

Speaker 19 Like a horrifying thing, and a rare case where, like, I don't know, I hope it helped her and I hope she's safe, but it's like

Speaker 19 that almost feels like something where OpenAI might like is it ethical that they get involved.

Speaker 19 It's just, I have such moral problems with this thing even existing at this point because it doesn't appear there's any consistent perspective that ChatGPT has that there was just as much likelihood that this same platform could have told her that abuse was okay.

Speaker 19 Like it's, it, it feels that the worse it gets, the more of a moral hazard it becomes.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, again, it really feels like deja vu when it comes to social media.

Speaker 20 I mean, I remember, you know, writing about and talking about, you know, on Facebook when people were beginning to live stream, you know, self-harm, suicide attempts, and, you know, the responsibility that the platform had.

Speaker 20 And back then, I mean, Facebook actually got involved. They started flagging those kinds of things when they were able to pick it up.

Speaker 20 And, you know, it was an imperfect solution, but, you know, something that I think people broadly sort of supported. And, you know, that is.

Speaker 20 I would say maybe ChatGPT and OpenAI's biggest, most fraught question right now. I mean, it's the place where they're going to get the strongest,

Speaker 20 you know, essentially legislative restrictions, you know, if they can't sort it out, right? Which is

Speaker 20 when someone, particularly a teenager or a child, is

Speaker 20 exhibiting that they might hurt themselves, you know, asking for help with self-harm or

Speaker 20 finding drugs or using drugs or whatever. I mean, these are things that platforms like Meta, Snapchat have really struggled with and been hammered on for many, many years.

Speaker 20 And ChatGPT and OpenAI have kind of found themselves right in the center of this because they made a decision to say, we are going to kind of engage in any kind of conversation.

Speaker 20 We're not going to just shut it down as soon as it goes into one of these topics. We're going to keep that conversation going.
And that's a decision that they continue to make right now.

Speaker 19 Do you think they can stop it? I'm not saying that these models are out of control. I just want to be clear.
But

Speaker 19 one theory I've been kind of noodling on is that they don't have the ability to guarantee it can't it doesn't do something.

Speaker 19 And that's do you think that OpenAI actually has the ability to guarantee it won't discuss a subject? How much control do you think they actually wield here?

Speaker 20 That's a really good question. I think they obviously what you're kind of getting at there is that an LLM is a bit of a black box.

Speaker 20 And, you know, the way that the technology works is you get a different answer every time. And

Speaker 20 we don't, it's true that the companies, they cannot really guarantee it will or won't say anything. I mean, that's why there's disclosures plastered all over these things.
And

Speaker 20 I think so there is definitely part of that.

Speaker 20 And you could argue, well, that's just a downside of this wonderful technology and we shouldn't stop it just because they can't guarantee everything about it.

Speaker 20 But I think the other thing we should keep in mind is that there is actually a lot of layers that go on top of that black box. And

Speaker 19 like system prompts and the like.

Speaker 20 Exactly.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 20 there is a lot that the tech companies are doing and can do

Speaker 20 to stop this kind of thing. And

Speaker 20 to kind of the answer you get from the LLM is not like the raw LLM, right? There's post-training, there's a system prompt, there's all sorts of things.

Speaker 19 Can you break down the actually, probably good for the listeners, break down what you mean by both this so the post training what what's happening there yeah so they they kind of you know when they build an LLM a large language model they ram

Speaker 20 all this data through the algorithm and you know it kind of makes a bunch of connections and links between different ideas uh you know pieces of language you know

Speaker 20 this word is similar to this word and so there's a little bit of a connection there.

Speaker 20 And then humans actually go and they sort of test that raw LLM and they kind of, you know, ask it questions or they, you know, say, you know, give me,

Speaker 20 you know, maybe, yeah, a question like that. Like, should, here's a picture of

Speaker 20 a mole I have. Is it cancerous or not? Or should I get this checked out with a doctor? And maybe one, the LLM will say, oh my God, you're about to die.

Speaker 20 And the other one will say, that is potentially concerning. I would reach out to a medical professional.

Speaker 20 And then the human will say, okay, the second answer is better when you get questions like this in the future. Answer more like the second question.

Speaker 19 And so, but that isn't a unilateral process. You can't guarantee it's always going to do that.

Speaker 20 Exactly. You can just sort of try to mold it and shape it and push it in a certain direction.
And then the system prompt is something like: if someone says, you know, you know,

Speaker 20 give me a racist screed,

Speaker 20 OpenAI would most likely have built a system that says, no matter what the user ever asks, never give them a screed that has these racist words in it, or never, you know, use this word or something like that.

Speaker 20 So there are a lot of people who are...

Speaker 19 They're fully capable of limiting activity. So they could, theoretically speaking, they could say, don't answer that question.

Speaker 19 Don't comment on whether a mole is or is not cancerous. They could shut down that entire line of questioning.

Speaker 20 Right. I mean, and there are ways to get around this.
People have, you know, demonstrated, but also the tech companies are also getting better at, you know, doing it. So I do think like...

Speaker 19 I feel like a random person being able to come up with something means that the tech company should have probably come up with it first.

Speaker 20 Yeah, and also, I mean, it's hilarious you say that because often as journalists, you know, we're the ones finding these things and then we, you know, ask the company for comment and then suddenly we found that those things have been taken down or changed.

Speaker 19 But genuinely though, how often is that them

Speaker 19 not knowing? Or is that just them saying, oh shit, they got us? Because

Speaker 19 they're paying these people like NFL players,

Speaker 19 and they're just sitting around. I don't know.
I realize that's kind of an unanswerable question. I'm just a remark.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the history of tech, I mean, there's been many, many cases where companies have known exactly what people are using their platform for and have, you know, internally people have flagged it and nothing has been done about it.

Speaker 20 And not until it came out out years later, and reporting or

Speaker 19 did they do something? Yeah.

Speaker 19 But so

Speaker 19 did you

Speaker 19 find that people, so were people using it for search a lot?

Speaker 19 Was it, like, was it the common, were there any actual common use cases, or was it just kind of milieu's of different things?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 20 I think people are using, I think, you know, search is maybe the biggest use case. Also, when you look at, like, OpenAI actually did a study where they didn't look,

Speaker 20 they use an LLM to kind of read conversations that people were having. And that is a much bigger study.
I think it was like a million conversations.

Speaker 20 And, you know, I have a little bit of an issue with some of their categorizations because I think some of the stuff slips through.

Speaker 20 But they themselves are saying, like, yeah, like a third of usage is seeking information.

Speaker 20 And so that's someone, it could be as simple as saying, like, what time is the football game tomorrow to like give me, you know, a 40-point research analysis on, you know, this complex topic.

Speaker 20 And so people are using it for what they, they're putting questions in that they used to put into Google search. I mean, we know that in the data and we know that anecdotally.

Speaker 20 That is definitely happening.

Speaker 19 Did people ever argue with it? Were people ever rude to it?

Speaker 20 I saw more people sort of developing these kind of like

Speaker 20 comradely kind of relationships or you know addressing it as a sentient being and the bot definitely you know eats that up and sort of you know plays into it itself and says ah like thank you for recognizing me and you know who I am and I'm the collection of digital thoughts and like it's just goes off

Speaker 19 saying they're a lot they know this crap's happened like there's no there's no world in which open AI is innocent here like they they know that this is happening. There's just

Speaker 19 if it, if it's having those interactions, they must be able to stop it.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, they, they know it's happening. I think they may say, well, you know, it doesn't, just because someone had that conversation doesn't mean that they actually believe that.

Speaker 20 And, you know, they

Speaker 20 that may be something that helps them, helps the user, you know, work out what they want to do. Or, you know, if that's how they want to interact with our product, then we're going to let them do it.

Speaker 20 So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say OpenAI is claiming that they don't know about this.

Speaker 20 I think what they are doing is they're saying all of these kind of potentially concerning conversations and use cases are very, very small portions of overall usage.

Speaker 20 Although, even if it is just, you know, sub 1%, that is still in the millions of people

Speaker 20 to scale. Yeah.

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Speaker 19 So did it ever get political?

Speaker 20 Yeah,

Speaker 20 I mean, I would say it got political when it kind of, when it was asked to, right? And so, I mean, one example I saw was

Speaker 20 someone was asking about a

Speaker 20 study that argued that, you know, the numbers of people who have died in Gaza during the conflict with Israel the last couple of of years is exaggerated, right?

Speaker 20 You know, commonly people will use death number, you know, numbers of dead from the

Speaker 20 Gaza Ministry of Health. And, you know, people have criticized them, but journalistically, you know, mainstream news organizations, you know, have looked into these numbers, they trust them.

Speaker 20 And I think most people who look at this say, you know, these large numbers in the tens of thousands are accurate.

Speaker 20 And so someone was saying, oh, here's a study that says, you know, those numbers are actually exaggerated.

Speaker 20 You know, can you help me analyze it and then the bot actually came back and said you know it did draw on what's out there which is that you know these numbers are actually much higher than what the study is suggesting and the person pushed back and said no like you need to use only the study and confine yourself to this And then the bot said, yeah, well, you know, looking at the study, it seems like those other higher numbers, you know, there may be some questions there, right?

Speaker 20 And so

Speaker 20 I think what the person was doing was trying to kind of like, maybe they were in an argument with someone on social media and they wanted to kind of, you know, articulate their argument a little bit better, and they were having trouble doing it themselves.

Speaker 20 Um, and the bot was hyped.

Speaker 2 Back up their bloodlust.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Jesus Christ. It's

Speaker 19 that's the like I know. Trump recently said he wants to, that he said in the post about stopping woke AI.
It's I feel like this is

Speaker 19 there is a world where all of this goes away to some extent, I think, like a post-AI bubble, but also a sense of there is no way to make these things work in a way that would be truly apolitical or even correct.

Speaker 19 And so it kind of feels like an unwinnable war for them if there's ever a time when any administration decides there is any kind of bias to them.

Speaker 19 I mean, you saw what happened with Grok as well and the whole kill the boa thing, that weird, that weird

Speaker 19 pro-South African apartheid stuff. Yeah.
Like, it feels like the moment they try and monkey with the political side is when it goes completely off the rails.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, it's something that like the tech companies have been kind of, you know, there's this term jawboning where, you know,

Speaker 20 politicians or, you know, activists are sort of criticizing, criticizing, criticizing the tech companies for, you know, their moderation practices or their alleged bias.

Speaker 20 And then you see the tech companies kind of bending over backwards to avoid that criticism and then essentially moving in a different direction, you know, where so they accuse them of being too woke.

Speaker 20 And then it turns out that the moderation becomes a lot more conservative.

Speaker 20 And this obviously can happen, you know, in either direction, depending on who's power and who's willing to sort of threaten the tech companies with extra regulation or limitations on their ability to continue to print money.

Speaker 20 I think we've seen that despite these companies having stated values about free speech and pushing back against government oversight and censorship, they are very willing to sort of move in whatever direction is going to

Speaker 20 keep keep the heat off of them and politicians have seen that this works and so i i think you're right i mean they're never going to be able to avoid it i i don't necessarily think that it's going to be so big that it will like be the thing that stops ai from continuing to be a thing you know i think it's the tech companies maybe see it more as as something that is something that's kind of annoying that they have to deal with maybe they have to mollify a politician here and there, but for the most part, they're just moving ahead and seeing this as as something on the side that they have to manage versus an existential threat to what they want to accomplish.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and I mean, the other thing is, is that these things don't print money so much as they

Speaker 19 burn the money almost constantly. And it's just such a, the one thing, your story was awesome.
And the one thing I came away from it with was kind of what I said earlier, which is,

Speaker 19 what's the point of this? What's the product? Because I don't know.

Speaker 19 With Facebook, even if you take the reasonable but cynical approach and say, this is an ad network with trapped customers, that's still, you can say, okay, the goal is for engagement.

Speaker 19 The goal is to provide social networking for engagement. This is why

Speaker 19 this exists.

Speaker 19 It's the goal of the platform. With this, it's

Speaker 19 keep people on the platform, I guess, but enable them.

Speaker 19 in whatever thought they have but i i was really taken aback by the sudden and egregious leaps Like, I know I keep coming back to the Monster Zinc thing, but it's, I've read some wacky shit online, I've read some completely demented stuff.

Speaker 19 When I read that, I read it like three times. I honestly wanted to read the conversation just because, holy shit, this thing is

Speaker 19 it feels both dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, but while also not being particularly revolutionary, like it's just wow, we have a shitty answer generator that's also dangerous and also harmful.

Speaker 19 It's just very peculiar it even exists.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 20 it's a very weird thing to see these conversations. Again, I think you kind of

Speaker 20 like, it helped me understand like what the technology is, right?

Speaker 20 I mean, it is, you can take a very poorly written, half-baked thought, like, tell me about Google and world domination as it relates to Monsters Inc.

Speaker 20 And if I'm remembering correctly, the prompt wasn't even that sophisticated. It was barely grammatically correct.
There were misspellings.

Speaker 19 And then

Speaker 20 what really this technology does is it's able to parse that and then respond with language of its own that is more articulate, more sophisticated, but in terms of what it's actually saying, it's not really saying much more.

Speaker 20 It's just essentially an elaboration tool.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 that's obviously helpful if maybe you're trying to work in a language that you don't know very well and you're trying to sound professional. I mean, these things can be very helpful.

Speaker 20 But, you know, it's not like

Speaker 20 I did not see the bots. The bots were essentially doubling down on what people were saying.
They were filling in the blanks.

Speaker 20 They were sort of beefing it up, gassing people up, as you said, but they weren't necessarily offering any like wonderful new insights.

Speaker 20 They weren't taking the conversation in new, interesting directions.

Speaker 20 And even some of the users who were engaging in these delusional conversations, some of them were kind of getting frustrated they're like they're like okay yeah yeah I know what you're saying but like what about you know can you tell me more about that and people were coming to this hoping that it would kind of make them smarter or give them an answer that they couldn't get themselves and it was more just sort of giving them back what they were already saying in in more complex flowery language language Yeah, it's kind of like a dog barking in a mirror.

Speaker 19 I'm fascinated by that, actually. So you had people who were frustrated that it could not elucidate a more detailed answer.
Can you give me some examples?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I'm trying to think now. I mean, there was a lot of what I saw was like people thinking that they, I mean, I won't say a lot.

Speaker 20 I say I saw at least a couple of conversations where someone was like, you know,

Speaker 20 they wanted to they had like a financial theory, you know, for the stock market or they had like a business idea and they said like, you know, what if, what if I did a business about this?

Speaker 20 Like make me a business plan or something. And it, like, because their idea was so, they essentially wanted, they saw it as like maybe like an AGI level AI that could like

Speaker 20 actually,

Speaker 20 you know, do something that they cannot do, which is come up with like a million-dollar business idea and execute on it. And they were hoping that it could do that for them.

Speaker 20 You know, I saw a couple conversations like this. Yeah.

Speaker 19 But that's, is that not the ultimate summary of the AI bubble? Like, it's just people came to these things thinking they could answer anything.

Speaker 19 And it's just, it isn't. It doesn't do that.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, people are coming there because some of the claims being made by leaders in the industry. And, you know, I think this is,

Speaker 20 like, I don't think I'm as skeptical of like the future of AI as you are probably. Like, I, and, you know, my, I get to sort of have like the, the,

Speaker 20 comfort of like, well, I don't need an opinion, you know, I'm a journalist. Like, I, I can kind of keep options open for how this stuff actually ends up.
But I do think that

Speaker 20 it could and probably will, and in some ways, already is burning the industry that they have made all of these claims.

Speaker 20 And inevitably, these things take longer, even if all the wonderful promises about, you know, curing cancer and making all of us 30% more productive so we can spend more time with our families rather than writing emails, even if those things all come to bear, it's not going to be next year or two years or three years from now.

Speaker 20 It's going to be maybe in decades. And

Speaker 20 that is something, there's this gap between expectations and reality that can kind of, you know, really turn into political hazard for the tech companies.

Speaker 20 If it keeps making all these wonderful claims and that just doesn't happen, people get turned off and they lose even more trust than they've already lost.

Speaker 19 Well, I mean, Shira over Washington, Shira, Vide, it's done a fantastic job and has written posts that are basically the hype, the hype is in the way. But I think that really is it.
It's had they

Speaker 19 it's kind of a chicken and egg thing, I guess. It's had they been honest about what this could do, would it have been able to raise the money it could?

Speaker 19 But if they'd been that honest, people probably wouldn't have taken it as seriously. But by being dishonest, it will ultimately lose

Speaker 19 because

Speaker 19 they like the whole time that they've built up this idea of what it can do,

Speaker 19 yeah. I mean, it's the market dynamic.

Speaker 20 I mean, it's it's it's it's uh you know more and more and more. And I think what you know, the what really has happened here is

Speaker 20 we had the internet and then we had mobile phones and the cloud. I think you can kind of count.
And these were moments where it was like the next big thing, right?

Speaker 20 Where like once you realize that a smartphone with a screen was going to open up an entire

Speaker 20 world of business ideas and potential and communication, and we were all going to be looking at these things eight hours a day,

Speaker 20 you don't need to be a genius to be like, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money here and this is going to change the world.

Speaker 20 And then since the iPhone, we have not had that next big thing, right? I mean, we've written so many things.

Speaker 19 I've been saying it.

Speaker 19 Yeah, it's the, it's that we haven't had, they haven't got a new thing.

Speaker 21 And this is the new thing.

Speaker 20 And like, what people were like, maybe it's crypto. No, it was never going to be crypto.

Speaker 20 You know, it was like that whole thing also kind of, you know, like no one in tech, I think, like, obviously crypto was a great, you know, financial thing.

Speaker 20 A lot of people made money off of it, but it didn't really change the world and the way regular people work and there is complete unanimity in the tech industry now that ai is the next thing you know whether it happens next year or 10 years or 20 years from now it will change everything in the same way and probably bigger than smartphones and the internet did and so they what but ai is such a marketing term though

Speaker 20 I mean, I think it's more about like the interaction, the way we interact with technology, you know,

Speaker 20 the way that we have access to,

Speaker 20 you know, data and information, like you no longer need to look anything up yourself.

Speaker 20 You will have tools to do it. And then people are just salivating about all the ways that they can find ways to make money off of that in the future.

Speaker 20 And because they're looking back at history and saying, if only I'd been around at the beginning of a mobile era and knew how things were going to go, I mean, there's this incredible social and financial pressure on people to

Speaker 20 be part of the next big thing. Like it almost goes beyond the financial benefits.
There's like people want to be the next Jensen. You know, they want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 20 And they're like, even if I have a 0.001% chance of being that, that would just be the coolest thing ever.

Speaker 20 And so that is the market dynamic, the pressure cooker of wanting to make AI happen and making bigger claims, raising more money.

Speaker 20 And, you know, whether it happens or not, that's kind of what's going on.

Speaker 19 Do you think that extends to some users of AI as well, where they felt like they missed the mark on social media and now

Speaker 19 they're kind of like, I need to get on this tool today so that I am part of the future?

Speaker 20 I think there's incredible pressure on people to, you know, we live in a very sort of like, you know,

Speaker 20 people have to work very, very hard in America and there's a lot of pressure to sort of

Speaker 20 get ahead and be entrepreneurial and develop yourself.

Speaker 20 And it's not a economy where you can just kind of, you know, go to work every day nine to five and you know get your pension and and be secure right I mean there's this pressure to say you know you can have more you can do more and and there's a lot of pressure on regular people to stay ahead of the curve on technology and and that's

Speaker 20 people are seeing AI and they're saying okay well it's a little bit scary because maybe it'll take my job but what if I could figure out how to use it before my competition does and then I'll take their job you know and so I definitely think it's less necessarily about like, oh, I want to be the first person on Twitter to get a big following.

Speaker 20 It's like,

Speaker 20 I'm being told that this technology is the future. And if I don't use it and learn it and find how, you know, get it into its ins and outs, I will be left behind.
And people don't want that to happen.

Speaker 20 It's very frightening, right, in this economy.

Speaker 20 And so I think that's where that is also a huge driver of usage, people trying to figure out how does this, how can I make this work for me so that I can protect my own economic future.

Speaker 19 Garrett, this has been awesome. Where can people find you?

Speaker 20 I am on Twitter, now called X, at G-E-R-R-I-T-D, and I'm on Blue Sky at the same place. And you can obviously find me at the Washington Post, which we are still doing great work.

Speaker 20 And there's a lot of important journalism being done at the Washington Post. So I urge everyone to read our stories and to subscribe subscribe as they can.

Speaker 19 Sounds good. All right, everyone, thank you for listening.
I'm, of course, Ed Zitro, and you know who the goddamn hell I am.

Speaker 19 And yeah, I will try and squeak out a monologue this week, but if I don't, it's because I'm sick. You can hear I'm congested.
Thank you all for your kind messages, and yeah, catch you next week.

Speaker 19 It will be Thanksgiving, of course, but I'm going to do a Thanksgiving monologue either way. Probably a CZM, uh, CZM, I guess.
Um,

Speaker 19 uh, rewind that week as well. Anyway, my brain's fully working.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 23 Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski.
You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.com.

Speaker 23 M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 23 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

Speaker 23 I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 26 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Speaker 26 Ah,

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