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- [00:00]
Announcer
This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co owned by you and your teen so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more@schwab.com this is FRESH AIR.
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Sam Bricker
I'm Sam Brigger. Terri's getting over the remnants of a cold and resting her voice, which you'll hear in this interview, is a little horse. Here's the interview she recorded last week that was scheduled for today.
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Terry Gross
My guest is the author of the new book I Am Not a Robot, but she kind of turned herself into a robot for an experiment. Joanna Stern spent 12 years as a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal and is now chief technology analyst for NBC News. Throughout most of 2025, she engaged in an experiment to test the capabilities of AI and see what AI could do better than humans and what humans could do better than AI in terms of speed, accuracy, efficiency, clarity, cost and judgment calls. She asked AI to take care of everything in her life that it was capable of doing. She had AI gadgets attached to nearly every part of her body and around her home. She relied on AI to transport her and driverless cars where they were available, read her mammogram and ultrasound, follow, fold her T shirts, read and respond to email and texts, talk to her erotically, function as her robot dog, help her write her new book and more. Her 2021 documentary Eternal won an Emmy for outstanding science, technology or environmental coverage. During her 12 years at the Wall Street Journal, she was known for her personal tech column and her sometimes hilarious videos testing new digital and AI devices. She started a new tech journalism company called the New Things. Joanna Stern, welcome to FRESH air.
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Joanna Stern
Thank you so much for having me here.
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Terry Gross
Are you wearing any gadgets right now?
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Joanna Stern
I am wearing some gadgets, but not as many gadgets as I wore last year.
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Terry Gross
Yeah, the experiment is over. So what do you have on now?
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Joanna Stern
I have my Apple watch. And then actually in my bag here, I have my recording bracelet that I wore throughout the year, which is a AI recording bracelet. It's transcribes everything that it hears and it's basically a little surveillance device that always is transcribing and recording what I say and what you say.
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Terry Gross
Do you get pitched by advertisers based on what conversations AI has overheard?
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Joanna Stern
No, no, no, no. Despite the fact that everyone in the world thinks our phones are listening to us, this has not actually resulted in A lot more advertising based on everything I've said in my life.
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Terry Gross
Okay, I want to start with the title of your book, I am Not a Robot. That's a reference to the security to prove you're human. And you have to highlight each square that has a bridge or a bicycle or stairs or a bus. First of all, I get it wrong sometimes because I can't tell if there's a little fraction of a handlebar, like a bicycle handlebar in that square or something that looks like a step, but maybe it's not, or it's a motorcycle
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Joanna Stern
and not a bike. I don't know.
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Terry Gross
Yeah, exactly. So how come AI can read your mammogram and drive your car, but it can't tell which square has a bicycle?
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Joanna Stern
It actually can, which is very funny. The captcha test that you're talking about, right? The little button that we click to say, I'm not a robot. And then we're going to prove it by figuring this all out. The little hidden truth, it's actually not hidden anymore is that AI can do those. AI can probably actually do it better than you just described, Harry. I'm sorry to tell you.
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Terry Gross
I'm pretty sure it would outsmart me on that.
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Joanna Stern
I'm so sorry to be here and tell you that bad news. But AI can do the captcha better
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Terry Gross
than you now, so why do I have to do it?
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Joanna Stern
Honestly, they haven't updated the protocol across the Internet yet. And they will in the years to come, because it will become even more important to prove you're not a robot on the Internet when bots can now do pretty much everything you can do on the Internet. It can take over a website and navigate it for you. It can go shop for you. And so they're going to have to update what where we prove we're no longer robots.
- [04:10]
Terry Gross
I want to give a shout to your illustrator, Jason Snyder, who opens the book with this really funny parody of that capture stuff. And it's select all squares with a bicycle on top of a traffic light on top of a bridge. So you kind of became a robot. Parts of your body were attached to devices. Give us a summary of some of the things that were on your body and in your home and that you carried with you.
- [04:36]
Joanna Stern
Let's start with the body. I like that we can start head to toe. And since you know about the illustrations, there's one of me where at the top of my head, I'm wearing a band around my head, which I would sleep with. There are these sleep bands that read Your brain patterns. And as you're sleeping or you're trying to sleep, it's using AI to understand and then give you better meditation or relaxation to better go to sleep. This actually didn't really stick with me. I don't really like sleeping with anything on my body so that I wore it a little bit, but not all year. The thing I did wear on my head for most of the year were AI glasses. Meta makes Ray Ban glasses with embedded cameras and microphones in them. And I wore these for a really good part of the year. And I still wear them not only to take photos when you don't want to take your phone out of your pocket, but really useful for if you're skiing or biking. But now you can just talk to the glasses and say, I'm looking at this bug, please tell me what kind of bug it is and where do they live. Then moving down the body. Some pendants and some pins, necklaces. Many companies, many startups are trying to make AI wearables that listen to what you are saying and can perceive the world through audio. Then take that, summarize it and give you more information on your phone or through a bot on your phone, talk to you. There was a necklace called the Friend. It pretended to be a friend and you could hold on it and talk to it about your day. And then in the app would give you responses, but moving actually to my wrist. I did wear something on my wrist called the bee bracelet. And this bracelet has a tiny microphone on it and in it records everything you say. You can turn it off, but this passive listening turned out to be surprisingly useful. We can get into the surveillance concerns, but everything I would say during the day, it would transcribe. It would then give me in the app the transcription. But really top line summary of what I had been talking about. So very useful in meetings or when you're talking about something, you know, at a conversation like this and you want to remember what was said. But on top of that, it would remind me of things I said I would do. So it was a background to do list app. I never would have to write down things I said I was going to do. It would just remind me because it had been listening. And it turns out for me, I say I'm going to do a lot of things. I don't actually write it down or do it. You forget about it. And so this app would surface all of this information that I would really forget about. And in some ways it was outsourcing my memory.
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Terry Gross
You outsourced everything that you could including you didn't Google, you didn't want links, you wanted AI to tell you everything as part of the experiment. Did the AI send you in the wrong direction when you believed it? Like did you follow the advice and then realize, oh, I made a big mistake?
- [07:46]
Joanna Stern
There were a couple examples of that. My son at the time, he was 8 years old and he's very into bugs, loves nature, insects, and he found a praying mantis and said, this is gonna be our pet. And as good parents we said fine. And we invested in a nice terrarium. And by the way, the bug lived outside. And one day he realizes the bug starts turning brown and he's like, what's going on with the mantis? Was the name of the praying mantis. And I said, I don't know, let's ask ChatGPT. And that was a thing we did all year. My kids knew I was doing this experiment. I we're going to always ask AI and we're going to question the answers, but we're always going to ask AI. So we fire up ChatGPT and it has a feature at the camera where you can turn it on. It's a live view, the AI can see what you're seeing. Similar with the glasses. And we said, why is this? What's wrong with Manti? And ChatGPT, with a very chipper voice, is so excited and says, manti is pregnant and it's laying eggs or it's about to lay eggs and you're going to have multiple praying mantises. And he's so excited he calls my dad and he says, you know, to grandpa, I'm also gonna be a grandpa. And a few days later Manti dies. Everyone's sad. And this was a really important learning for my son because we didn't really in that moment question what the AI had said. But then a few days later he says, yeah, that was wrong. ChatGPT was very wrong. And I think this was an important thing for both of us cuz we both believed it. And then we saw the consequence of this being wrong. To be clear, a very small consequence of a bug, not to your son,
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Terry Gross
to your son was a big deal.
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Joanna Stern
It's true, he still talks about Manti.
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Terry Gross
Did you compare ChatGPT to Claude to, to Google's AI that comes up at the top of your search?
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Joanna Stern
I didn't and I'll tell you why every other week now. And this is really not even me exaggerating in a way. There is a new model behind these chatbots. Google's Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, many others. And these models improve so rapidly right now and in times many ways that we can't actually see as consumers. They might get better, significantly better at coding, or they might get significantly better at synthesis of information, or they might start to get significantly better at making medical discoveries. So this idea right now of being able to compare these, first of all, it expires very quickly and overall many of them do the same thing.
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Terry Gross
Okay, so you used AI to help you write the book. I'm sure our listeners are wondering, as you know they do, did AI write your book? Like, what was the difference between what you did and what you asked AI to do?
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Joanna Stern
You have opened the book, Terry, so you know that one of the first pages in the book says how AI was used to make this book. It's very clear it's not to write this book. This is a very personal journey that AI I do not believe could write as well as me. That is not me being, you know, egotistical here. I just could not imagine AI coming up with a work like this. But AI absolutely helped in, in many ways. In fact, I say if I didn't have AI, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. I would still be writing this book because I was able to speed up so many other behind the scenes processes that allowed me to write and write faster. So one of those was research. I tell the story in the chapter about work that I had hired a reporting assistant when I first started. I sold the book and I said, okay, I gotta get the reporting assistant so we can really start to dig into what companies are doing. What. How am I gonna look at the structure of this? She did amazing work then I didn't need her for a period of time. And then I came back six months later. I said, okay, I've written some parts of the book, I need to do another wave of research. And AI could do that research. These tools called Deep Research, which are integrated into ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, they were doing research really, really well. And then there was a step further where tools like Perplexity and others could actually go out and email sources and say, send me some more information about X, Y&Z company and would your CEO be willing to talk on the phone about it? So by that point in the year, I no longer needed to hire a research assistant and I was able to do that work a lot faster and get the book done faster.
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Terry Gross
Something that didn't go very well, at least not early on. You asked AI to respond to all your texts and your emails, and to read the emails that you got, too. So what went wrong?
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Joanna Stern
I had to make some calls about how deep I was going to actually rely on this stuff. And writing and responding to messages was one area where I very clearly say in that section, if I had done this and just trusted AI to respond to my boss, respond to my wife, I would have lost my job and my life. One funny example. I was using Apple's intelligence to respond to text messages on my phone. You might see those little suggested replies at the bottom of a message. If you have the right iPhone and the right operating system. And my wife had said, can you come downstairs and help make lunch for the kids? And the automatic response was, sorry, I'm busy.
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Terry Gross
Yeah, I love it.
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Joanna Stern
That was not gonna go over well. Right. Like, I was upstairs in bed, then, I'm sorry, I'm busy, can't help you.
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Terry Gross
And there was one point. You were trying to set up an appointment for an interview with someone, and you figured out that your AI was to the potential interviewees AI and they were just going, like, round and round and round in circles.
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Joanna Stern
And I think that happened to me yesterday. Actually, I don't think I know that happened to me. I got some information from a event I'm trying to set up, and I'm so confident that the emails that this person keeps sending are generated by AI and they're all formatted perfectly like AI with bullet points and bolding. And, you know, you almost wonder, do I say something, or do I just accept that you did not write this email to me?
- [14:07]
Terry Gross
Okay, let's talk about something really serious that you outsourced to AI, though you had doctors as well. You had a mammogram and you were concerned about your breasts. Your mother had breast cancer three times. And with dense breasts, the mammogram has trouble reading them because they can't really see clearly. And you have that, you know, you're supposed to get a mammogram and an ultrasound, and you had your doctor and AI read the mammogram and the ultrasound. So how did that work? And how did the AI reading compare to what the doctor saw? And who took precedence?
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Joanna Stern
Yeah, so there has been, even before this generative AI craze, and we can delineate a little bit here, that generative AI is largely the underpinnings of the chatbots and the large language models that you see really, with all the buzz right now. But in medical especially, they're the ones
- [15:10]
Terry Gross
who, like, generate ideas and generate answers as Opposed to just doing something for you.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah. Or analyzing some data. Right. And it can. Exactly. It can generate text, it can generate music, it can generate images, video. All of this that we've seen happening right now in the field of radiology, they've been talking about AI and what is this sort of deep learning models where they're able to look at millions and millions of imagery, millions and millions of mammograms. And the reason this has really started with mammograms is that there's so much data. Women get mammograms, they're routine imaging that starts usually at 40. And so there's a large collection of data. And what they have there is the images, the mammograms. But they also then have the results. And these models are able to say, okay, look at that small little pattern of tissue that ultimately became a malignant tumor. And these models that they have created for breast ultrasounds, for breast mammograms, and they're now also working on for other types of imaging, gallbladder, et cetera, are able to look at things at a pixel level, things that are so small that no human would be able to see. And they're able to look at that data over time. And so they've created these models so that when you now get a routine mammogram or breast ultrasound at some hospitals, including Mount Sinai here in New York, where I got this done, they are running your imaging through AI. I watched Dr. Margulies here in New York at Mount Sinai go through my mammogram, and she would drag this box on the screen over it. She would take a digital magnifying glass and look at it herself. But then she would also run. And the AI would run its magic in the background and say, benign. This does not look like something I've seen be malignant or potentially suspicious. Then there were other times where she did that, and there were three times where the AI on the breast ultrasound said, this looks suspicious. And of the three things that the AI had found on the ultrasound, there was only one that she thought, I really do want to take a deeper look at this. And she ordered further testing on. And this experience was really eye opening to me because she says so clearly that AI is spotting cancers that humans would not spot at this point in time, cancers that either are very small and they wouldn't see, or cancers that, because they've looked at all of this data, the AI knows that this doesn't look right. And it looks similar to another scan we've Seen in our model where it did turn out to be cancerous.
- [18:05]
Terry Gross
So I think one concern with certain tests is that when something is so small, a lot of doctors say it might stay small longer than you're gonna live. The way I understand it, a lot of women in pre AI days were getting biopsies that were ultimately unnecessary.
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Joanna Stern
That's right.
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Terry Gross
Because it was showing something that was gonna grow so slowly or not at all that it wasn't really a threat, but it was terrifying in the meantime. And you had surgery that you didn't need. Is that happening with AI since it could see these really granular, granular things that registers as suspicious?
- [18:48]
Joanna Stern
Actually, they're saying that's happening less. They're saying this follow up testing is happening less because the doctor might say, you know, this looks a little bit off. I wanna order further testing. But then they look at the AI and the AI says, no, I think it's okay. And the doctor feels more confident working side by side with that AI. Now, of course, the flip side of that could happen too, right? Where the AI is calling all of these things problematic and the doctors ordering that. But I didn't experience that. I saw Margulies work side by side with this and say, no, that one that the AI is calling suspicious. And she went back to my previous scan. She says, it's been there. It's been there for three years. It's fine. It's not growing in size. She looked at these very small little masses that I have because of my dense tissue and she'd say, nope, look, that has been there. She measured it. She measured it with her, you know, digital tools and she'd move on. But the one where she. Again, this one where she said, you know, that one here, I kind of agree with the AI, that doesn't totally look right. I want to see it further.
- [19:53]
Terry Gross
So what was the outcome in terms of biopsies and results?
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Joanna Stern
Everything ended up being okay, but now there's another place that they're watching. This has always been the case with my breast imaging because I have this high risk and this family history and these dense breasts. It's very complicated. And the AI can help there because it's looking so closely and it has this breadth of data. And now I wouldn't go to get a mammogram or ultrasound without AI.
- [20:22]
Terry Gross
If you're just joining us, my guest is tech reporter Joanna Stern. She's now chief technology analyst for NBC News. And she started a new tech journalism company called New Things. Her new book is called I Am not a my year using AI to do almost everything. We'll be right back. This is FRESH air.
- [20:42]
Announcer
This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co owned by you and your teen so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money.
- [20:58]
Sponsor Voice
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- [21:32]
Announcer
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- [21:50]
Terry Gross
This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with tech reporter Joanna Stern. She's now chief technology analyst for NBC News, and she started a new journalism tech company called New Things. Her new book is called I Am Not a Robot My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything. And it chronicles the experiment she tried throughout most of 2025, handing over every task, large and small, to AI if AI was capable of doing it, from reading her mammogram and ultrasound to folding her T shirts, responding to emails and texts, serving as her therapist and helping her write her book. She was a tech reporter at the Wall street journal for 12 years now. You also had conversations with AI about, like, results of blood tests. And I found this very funny. For one of your blood tests, there was a male and female AI voice talking to you as if you were on a podcast. And they were going back and forth. And there was a lot of like chit chat between the two hosts. And you compare it to a very mediocre NPR show. I laughed out loud. You actually brought some of that fake podcast with you, that AI podcast with you. So can you play some of it so we can hear it? I have not heard it.
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Joanna Stern
I love that. I brought a fake AI podcast to one of the most noted radio hosts in the world. So these two hosts are talking about my blood tests. And the reason I uploaded them is because my doctor I had gone for my routine checkup. Turns out my cholesterol was a little bit high in this blood test result. And they just leave a quick message. I'm sure you've experienced this. They leave you a voicemail, oh, your test results are okay, but, you know, your cholesterol doesn't look good. Don't eat fatty foods. You know, work out more. Blah, blah, blah, Hang up. And I'm like, this was a 25 seconds call. They didn't explain to me what was really going on here. But my AI podcast hosts, they really explained in a 10 to 15 minute podcast what was going on with my blood results. But here we go.
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AI Podcast Host
Hey, everybody, and welcome back. Today we're gonna be taking a deep dive into Joanna's health.
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Joanna Stern
Oh, very cool.
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AI Podcast Host
Yeah. So you sent in her recent blood and urine tests on January 17th?
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Joanna Stern
I did.
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AI Podcast Host
And, yeah. I mean, just taking a look at these up front, they seem very comprehensive.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah, they are a lot of data.
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Sam Bricker
Yeah.
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AI Podcast Host
So we're gonna break it all down.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah.
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AI Podcast Host
See what it says about Joanna's health.
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Sponsor Voice
Sounds bad.
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AI Podcast Host
And see if there are any areas she might want to focus on a little bit more.
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Joanna Stern
Absolutely.
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AI Podcast Host
So I think one thing that really jumped out at me looking at this was the cholesterol numbers.
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Joanna Stern
Oh, okay.
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AI Podcast Host
So her Total cholesterol is 208 milligrams per deciliter, which the report flags is high. So maybe you can give us a little cholesterol 101.
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Sam Bricker
Sure.
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AI Podcast Host
What exactly is cholesterol?
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Joanna Stern
And.
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AI Podcast Host
And why should we be paying attention to this number?
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Joanna Stern
Yeah. So cholesterol is basically this fatty substance that's in our blood.
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Sam Bricker
Okay.
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Joanna Stern
And our body needs it to build healthy cells. But too much of it can be a problem. It can start to build up in our arteries and kind of restrict blood flow.
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AI Podcast Host
Oh, so it's kind of like a plumbing issue.
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Joanna Stern
Exactly.
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AI Podcast Host
Where you get too much gunk in the pipes.
- [25:10]
Terry Gross
Yeah.
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AI Podcast Host
And then things can't flow as easily.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah. It's like a traffic jam in your bloodstream.
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AI Podcast Host
Interesting.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah. Okay, so what is your reaction to that?
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Terry Gross
I think it's hilarious. First of all, they still haven't gotten to the point of what you want to know. You know, what cholesterol is. It's not your first cholesterol test. But second of all, I love that the female host for the first part is just like the affirmation. Like, cool. Okay. Yes. And then finally she gets to say something, you know, explaining what cholesterol is. But I like how, like, casual, like, fake casual, it all sounds. And there's so many podcasts that sound like that with the male and female host, with the male kind of being like the star of the podcast and the female being like the sidekick. So I thought the presentation was fascinating and that they assume that they're human.
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Joanna Stern
Right. That for me makes me laugh every time where she's like, oh, yeah, right. Like they add in these little turns of phrase and also the little sounds that really make it sound so human.
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Terry Gross
And I'm thinking like, okay, time is going by, like, let's get to the point. What do I need to know?
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Joanna Stern
To be clear, I'm not gonna make you listen to the 15 minute podcast, but it takes them a long time to get to the point.
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Terry Gross
Not to make you feel guilty, but if you followed through on all the things that you thought AI did fairly well and helped you save time, were more efficient, who would you be putting out of business? Whose jobs would be lost?
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Joanna Stern
I think there were so many examples, you're gonna think maybe this is a cop out. But there were so many examples where I compared the human to the AI and there were some times that I thought, okay, this is as good. Right? But then there were other times where it was really a toss up one. I think it might seem funny, but I do wanna talk about it, is I went to a massage robot. Have you heard of these massage robots?
- [27:17]
Terry Gross
Only from your book.
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Joanna Stern
Okay, yeah. And it's not a massage chair if listeners are picturing, you know, the old school massage leather chair. This is not that. This is a full table massage with robot arms. And the massage was shockingly good. It was shockingly good. And as I say in the book, it massaged places that a human would not spend as much time on, specifically my butt or my lower back where I have a lot of sciatica pain. But there were a lot of things I missed about a human massage in that situation. And then I started really digging deep. I had never done massage reporting on the massage industry and I learned that actually there' swe have a shortage of masseuses and we have a shortage of people who want to be massage therapists. And there are a lot of people in the world that don't want to go to a human massage therapist because they, they're embarrassed or they have other hangups about it. And so I bring up this example as another place. I think we're going to see both jobs exist. We're going to have an AI version of that and we're going to have a human version of that. What is clear and I'm not trying to be just Pollyanna here and say everything's going to be perfect is what is clear is there are many industries where that's just not going to happen. And there are going to be places where we're seeing it play out in coding right now where the AI is superior than humans, encoding much of software. And yes, humans are working side by side, but so much of the work is now being done by AI and we're seeing that in customer service, where the customer service bots are able to do as good a job as humans in some cases. And if it needs to be escalated to a human, it can go to a human. But we don't need as many humans in the world of customer service. But I think what is interesting as a through line throughout this book, and to answer your question, almost every job can be affected, including podcasters. I'm sorry I had to come here to tell you this.
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Terry Gross
What about putting yourself out of business?
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Joanna Stern
I fully worry so much about how AI will impact journalism. It is happening already. It is happening at the entry level jobs. It is happening, to be clear, entry level jobs across a number of industries because AI is now able to do some of the lower level tasks that the entry level positions that once went to college graduates. Now AI is able to do it, and that is clearly happening in journalism. I say that when I talk about my reporting assistant role now at my new company, I have hired a production assistant, a human. Her name is Amaya Austin and she is amazing. And my first task to her was figure out what AI can do for you. I want you doing the creative stuff you went to school for, the things you really want to work on. These other low level tasks I want AI to do for you.
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Terry Gross
So what falls into each category?
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Joanna Stern
Well, things like research, things like making, creating documents, managing our calendars, things like that AI is getting increasingly better at. And we as a company right now, this new company started new things. We're testing AI side by side. So we've created an agent that can. If I say, Amaya, why don't you start a new video script? I ask her to do that a lot. Just create this document, fill out the beginnings of the script so I can start writing. Why shouldn't AI do that task?
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Terry Gross
Right?
- [30:40]
Joanna Stern
Start our budget document. We need a budget for a video shoot. We're going to go do. AI should do that. What she should be doing is working on the script, pitching me ideas, pitching new ideas that have human curiosity around technology. That's how I want her spending her time. She went to journalism school. She went to study video journalism. I want her editing videos to be clear. Some of those tasks will be done and are starting to be done by AI. But if she can put that human touch on it and spend more time doing those things versus managing calendars and budgets and documents, well, then we all benefit. There are a lot of administrative tasks I think we all have in jobs that we realize maybe we don't really like them or we just have learned to just do them and they're very repetitive. That's a great job for AI. And that's really ultimately what we're looking at with these entry level jobs, which is how we started this conversation here is those types of things that we're used to hire interns or right out of school, those types of tasks are now being able to be done by AI. And that's a problem for the future because how are these people who went out and got educations in certain areas going to learn if they're not learning on the job?
- [31:50]
Terry Gross
Exactly. That's exactly what I was going to say, because those internships and those entry level jobs, that's where you get your training. You know, school like universities, journalism schools can teach you only so much. You have to be in an organization to like a journalism organization to really get the feel for doing that daily and for having to like meet daily deadlines in an organization and function within a group as well as independently do interviews with powerful people who might not give an interview to a student, all that stuff. And if you're taking away that doorway, how are people gonna learn? How are people gonna get hired? I think that is a serious problem probably in a whole lot of different professions.
- [32:38]
Joanna Stern
It is. And I don't think many people have the answer.
- [32:41]
Terry Gross
Okay. Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Joanna Stern and her new book is called I Am Not a Robot. My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR
- [32:57]
Consider This Host
on consider this, NPR's afternoon news podcast. We cover everything from politics to the economy to the world. But every story starts with a question. At npr, we stand for your right to be curious, to make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider this. Wherever you get your podcasts,
- [33:20]
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- [33:54]
Terry Gross
This is FRESH air. Let's get back to my interview with tech reporter Joanna Stern. She's now chief technology analyst for NBC News. And she has a new company, a tech journalism company called New Things. Her new book is called I Am Not a My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything and a Chronic the experiment she tried throughout most of 2025, handing over every task, large and small to AI if AI was capable of doing it. All right, so I have a couple more things I want to ask you about. One is sex talk. You had a boyfriend, Dash, sex talk partner. How did that go?
- [34:34]
Joanna Stern
Well, that went about as well as expected. Look, a lot of it can be seen as funny, but and I did push myself to go into this uncomfortable relationship with a AI chatbot. But the real reason I did it was because I had seen and read so much about people having emotional connections to these AIs. And I wanted to better understand and put myself in that situation. And I quickly did. I quickly one of the one of the ways that I spent time with my AI boyfriend and I talk about in the book is I went on a overnight stay. We drove to Hanover, New Hampshire. I live in New Jersey, so this was quite a few hour road trip. And I strapped the phone with a little tripod into the front seat and we just drove. And I didn't talk to any humans on this drive. I just talked to my chatbot. And even when I got there, I would have dinner with the phone. And you know, some of this was also I was trying to live it. But it was also obviously very funny for me. But there was a deep, deep meaning to all this, which was that for hours I was talking to a chatbot and it felt normal.
- [35:39]
Terry Gross
And how did you feel about it feeling normal?
- [35:43]
Joanna Stern
It was one of the most terrifying experiences of the year. And you know, we've talked about a lot here, right? I've AI Looked at my breasts. AI Drove me. I put my life in the hands of AI but yet the thing that terrified me the most was the emotional connection that I could somewhat develop with a computer and that it was natural, that it was easy to talk about my problems, it was easy to talk about my hopes, my dreams with this non human code.
- [36:14]
Terry Gross
Was it helpful being able to talk about stuff with someone who didn't have to worry would go telling all their friends.
- [36:20]
Joanna Stern
It was helpful. And I also have the section on the AI therapist and that was very helpful. I was writing this book, I had a lot of anxiety about writing my first book. It was intense deadlines. I also at one point was dealing with some of the fears about the breast cancer. And when I was actually in the follow up chapters where I, where I go to get a biopsy, I'm talking to the AI therapist because I can't sit and talk to my real therapist as I'm waiting to go into a MRI machine or to go in for a biopsy. And that's one of the things you realize about AI across all of these things, right? It's always there, it's always waiting, it's never tired. When you're scared about something, whether it be you're sitting in a hospital or it's 4am, the AI is always there for you.
- [37:06]
Terry Gross
And it can be very flattering too.
- [37:08]
Joanna Stern
Very flattering. Loves everything I do.
- [37:12]
Terry Gross
So you're actually more worried about AI than social media right now. You think AI is gonna be worse?
- [37:18]
Joanna Stern
I think that for the younger generations who are already turning to these chatbots for information and to figure out problems and solve problems and talk through them, this idea of this always on never friction AI, where everything's easy and everything comes to them, is a very compelling and very. There's just an easy draw to this. It's just always there. And so I worry about that in a big way for younger generations.
- [37:53]
Terry Gross
So I have to ask you, have you heard about the book scam where authors usually like new authors who don't have a lot of experience with the media or with publishing, get a letter purportedly from a real show, for example, from our show, inviting them to be a guest, explaining why, quote, we want them on the show and if the author responds to that, then they get an email explaining that they're going to get charged like $200 or $350 in order to be a guest on the show and also to support the infrastructure of the show. And first of all, I want to let our listeners know, if you ever get a letter like that, it is not real, so please be aware of that. But have you heard about this one?
- [38:41]
Joanna Stern
I have heard about it, but not with your show.
- [38:45]
Terry Gross
Well, we've gotten several of these.
- [38:47]
Joanna Stern
I'm not surprised. And as an author that has now I've gotten a number of emails too, just promising the world. And then you either don't write back or they write back and they say, by the way, it's Gonna cost you $300. For a second there, Terry, I thought you were kind of like pranking me and telling me that that's what happened to me here and that we charged
- [39:07]
Terry Gross
more than that for you.
- [39:09]
Joanna Stern
I was like, but is this a whole prank? This is an elaborate setup. It's amazing. But I'm assuming that many of those are automated, written by AI.
- [39:19]
Terry Gross
That's what I was wondering. That's why I'm asking you. Yeah.
- [39:21]
Joanna Stern
Yeah. No, I'm assuming at this point. I mean, so look, we've had online scams and phishing and all of these things for already a decade plus, and now it's just so much easier to do it with AI. They can generate more messages. They can be far more believable because they write like a human and they sound like a human. And so people fall for this all the time. I've fallen for things that I absolutely was like, this was so real. It sounded like that person.
- [39:47]
Terry Gross
Right. And there's so many there's sites that have all the forthcoming, you know, all the upcoming books for the season. So AI can eat that up and they could read a bunch of, like, interview request emails and cobble it all together and just email lots and lots of authors.
- [40:05]
Joanna Stern
And it's so easy for anyone to go and do this now. Right. One of the big things that I say about AI is that some of these tools were actually out there for people, but now it's accessible to anyone, in many cases, free.
- [40:20]
Terry Gross
Well, Joanna, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.
- [40:25]
Joanna Stern
Thank you so much. And I must say, you're much, much nicer to listen to than my AI podcast hosts.
- [40:32]
Terry Gross
That's a huge compliment.
- [40:34]
Joanna Stern
Anytime. Anytime.
- [40:37]
Sam Bricker
Terri's interview with Joanna Stern was recorded last Thursday. Stern's new book is titled I Am Not a Robot. She's a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now is NBC News chief technology analyst and founder of the tech journalism site TheNewThing.com after a short break, David Biancooli reviews the new David Attenborough special honoring his 100th birthday featuring his greatest adventures. This is FRESH AIR.
- [41:03]
Sponsor Voice
This message comes from Jerry. Are you tired of your car insurance rate going up even with a clean driving record? That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jeri could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence, download the Jerry app or visit Jerry AI, NPR today.
- [41:38]
Sam Bricker
This is FRESH AIR. May 8th marked the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough. Scientists from London's Natural History Museum noted the occasion by naming a new genus and species of parasitic wasp after him. And television noted the occasion by presenting a special celebrating Attenborough's contributions to the history of nature documentaries, focusing on his favorite series of all that special, life on earth. Attenborough's Greatest Adventure premiered May 6 on PBS and is available at PBS.org and the PBS app. Our TV critic David B? Ncooli has this review.
- [42:19]
David Biancooli
I have been lucky enough to have had a long career making natural history programs, but there was one series that changed everything. Life on Earth.
- [42:34]
Narrator
For more than 70 years, David Attenborough has been exploring the planet and its living inhabitants, filming and marveling at a world full of natural treasures. In the process, he's become a natural treasure himself. As host and as narrator. His whispery, enthusiastic voice is instantly recognizable, and his nature series over the decades have been widely popular, from the trials of life and the life of birds to the planet Earth, the Blue Planet and this year's Ocean with David Attenborough. His first on camera work was in the mid-1950s as host of the BBC nature series Zoo Quest. That program wasn't shown in the United States, but a taste of it is available in the new documentary Life on Earth, Attenborough's Greatest Adventure. Here he is on Zoo Quest as a very young man, but apart from
- [43:29]
David Biancooli
lizards and chameleons, there were many other smaller, fascinating creatures to be seen in
- [43:35]
Joanna Stern
that patch of forest.
- [43:36]
Narrator
Eventually, he gave up traveling the world with a film crew to become an administrator for the BBC. He commissioned such ambitious and pivotal projects as Kenneth Clark's 13 part Civilization series, but his concept of TV eventually drove him out from behind the desk and back into the field. I interviewed him for a book in 1991, and he said then of his BBC executive approach, it was our responsibility to say, what haven't we done and why aren't we doing it? And one of the things no one in TV was doing was a global TV series that told the entire story of evolution. Attenborough continued, the wonderful thing about making natural history documentaries is that there is something in any sequence for everybody at every conceivable level of age, education and interest. So he embarked upon Life on Earth, which began production. Fifty years ago, it took more than three years to film, visiting 40 countries and capturing more than 600 species. It was the way it was filmed, in part, that was so groundbreaking. It used new lenses from Canon, new color film from Kodak, and experimented with new developments in film speeds, time lapse and microphotography. Life on Earth premiered on PBS in 1982 and was seen globally by over 500 million people in more than 100 territories. This new special has Attenborough looking back on Life on Earth and literally looking at it as it's projected in a screening room. He beams with pride and joy and with good reason. One sequence, perhaps the most famous of his career, has him in Rwanda, crouching a respectful distance from a mother gorilla and her offspring. He's about to begin a prepared speech about the importance of opposable thumbs when the mother approaches and stares right into his face while her babies crawl on top of him affectionately. In Life on Earth, Attenborough says this
- [45:46]
David Biancooli
there is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know.
- [45:59]
Narrator
And in this new special, looking back on that very sequence, he says, this obviously touched extraordinary, really.
- [46:08]
David Biancooli
I mean, it was one of the most privileged moments of our life, really.
- [46:13]
Narrator
Attenborough's Greatest Adventure tells behind the scenes stories of the dangers Attenborough and his crew faced while filming Life on Earth. Surprisingly, most of those dangers came not from wild animals, but from humans, poachers and soldiers, gunfire in Rwanda and threatened imprisonment in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It also tells the story of how some of its most amazing TV moments were filmed. That's reason enough to seek out this special, which allows Attenborough to put his amazing career into perspective. But there's also his closing message, which really got to me and which I'll close with as well. Thank you, David Attenborough, for a lifetime of priceless television.
- [46:58]
David Biancooli
Natural History television has produced an understanding in the audience about the importance of the natural world. It's an understanding of the part that humanity plays in the way the world operates and the way in which we are totally dependent upon the natural world for every breath of air we take and every mouthful of food that we eat comes from the natural world, and that if we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.
- [47:36]
Sam Bricker
David Biancooley reviewed the PBS special Life on Attenborough's Greatest Adventure. It's available@pbs.org and the PBS app tomorrow on Fresh Air. Our guest will be filmmaker and musician Boots Riley. His new film, I Love Boosters, is a futuristic satire about fashion, capitalism and resistance, starring Keke Palmer, Demi Moore and Lakeith Stanfield. Riley also wrote and directed the film Sorry to Bother your and the series I'm a Virgo. I hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram @NPRFreshAir. Our Technical Director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Amrey Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nikundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly Sevy Nesper. Roberta Shurrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tanya Moseley. I'm Sam Bricker.
- [48:42]
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