Oprah & Tech Leaders on What AI Means for Your Job, Health, Family & Future

How could AI physically eliminate the human race? It's actually hard to imagine all the ways AIs could wipe humans out. AI is already better than almost all humans at doing cyber hacking. And so you could imagine one of the things that an AI could do is take out all electricity, water, hospitals, transportation across every country in the world all at once. Now that doesn't wipe us all out, but you could imagine the amount of damage that that would do. Confusion and chaos and craziness happens. And we're only, you know, five missed meals away from anarchy. Did you say we're only five missed meals away from anarchy? Think about what happens in New York City if you can't get food. Yeah. I don't think a lot of people have thought about that. Hello and welcome to the Oprah podcast. Artificial intelligence is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. But there are so many experts, and maybe you too, who have concerns, grave concerns, some people do, about its unchecked power, while others are optimistic that it's going to transform our lives for the better. It already has for many of us. So what do you think? Well, there's a new documentary coming to theaters on March 27th that attempts to answer these two questions. Should we be excited or should we be very scared? And what, if anything, can everyday people, all of us, do about any of it? The film is called The AI. The AI Doc. Easy to remember. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse Optimist. So here's a short look. The new dawn of artificial intelligence is being called a tectonic shift in human society. A defining moment of our era, comparable to the Industrial Revolution. In 2025, the architects of AI were named as Time Person of the Year. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amadei, and a handful of others. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse Optimist, aims to explore the future of AI and other innovators responsible for creating thinking machines. But what do you really know about what your future looks like with artificial intelligence? How will a world driven by AI impact you and your family's life? I started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant. It is now a terrible time to have a kid. A new documentary film titled The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse Optimist, aims to explore the future of AI. What it describes as the most powerful technology humanity has ever created. And what's at stake if we get it wrong. Well, our audience just watched this documentary. And before I introduce my guest, I wanted to ask a few of you for your initial reactions. Claire? It was really interesting. I work in the AI space at Salesforce. But when I go to work, I'm really focused on the job in front of me. I'm not necessarily thinking about these broad questions like how are we having AI set up the success of our future? And so I really liked hearing that perspective where I'm not always thinking about the ethics behind AI on a day-to-day base. So it's definitely going to make me think twice when I go back to work and think, well, now what can I do? Now, what can I do? Yeah, that's what I finished the film to thinking. What can I do? Yeah. All right, Adam. I feel like it armed me with amazing information on both sides, the doomerism and the optimism. But it also showed me that all these data scientists are just obsessed with intelligence as data. And it kind of proved out to me what makes us special as humans, because they didn't talk anything about consciousness or embodied experience. So I left feeling really excited about the future and what's possible, but also like so happy for how we're differentiated. And I do feel less scared. You do feel less scared. Yeah. It'll be big. And it'll be gigantic. They all said that. But I'm excited. Okay. So the creator and co-director of the AI doc is Academy Award winner Daniel Rohr, and he appears as the interviewer in this film. And here's some of that. Take a look. What is artificial intelligence? I know that must be annoying for you, that question, but I do think it's important. So AI. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. What is AI? And no matter how many times people try and explain this to me, I just don't get how it's understanding all of these things and how it's feeling like intelligence. And that's kind of nerve wracking. And when they're smarter than us too, and substantially faster than us, and they're getting faster each year exponentially, those are the ones that can potentially become super human possibly this decade. Super intelligence is a system that by itself is more intelligent and competent than all of humanity. I'm just going to, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. You're on a float. I just, I'm not really following, because you're using language like super intelligence and like smarter than all of humanity. And I hear that and it sounds like sci-fi bullshit to me. And I'm just trying to understand. Hopefully we can have a very symbiotic relationship with AI systems, but the AI developers are specifically designing them to make sure that they can do everything better than we can. So I don't know what we will be able to offer, unfortunately. That sounds bad. Well, Daniel is in Europe working on his next film. So he's joining us via Zoom. Hi, Daniel. Hi, Oprah. How are you? So good today and happy to talk to you and the audience here has just seen your film. You started this project not knowing a lot about AI, as you say, in the film. So why did you want to make this? Well, first and foremost, Oprah, thank you so much for having me. This conversation is so meaningful. Why did I want to make this movie? Well, I was scared. Like a lot of people, I was seeing this new technology sort of proliferate and come into existence and begin to dominate headlines. And it made me really nervous as I understood or began to understand what it meant and how much change would proliferate. And at the exact same time, my wife and I found out that we were expecting was our first child, a son. And you know, I was simultaneously experiencing the greatest joy one can experience, but also this profound anxiety and dread. And I was like, I'm going to die. sliced bread, that's hyperbolic. says it's going to be doom and gloom and the world's going to end in five years, take that with a grain of salt. The reality and nuance is far more complicated. But of course, we have reasons to be concerned. This is really scary. This is really intense. There's no other way about it. And that's why the forces that are trying to get this right, to just bend the most powerful corporations in the history of the planet and governments and all of these powerful organizations to try and institute common sense. What I want everybody listening to think about is how this impacts their own lives and what agency they have as it pertains to their own lives. You have a lot of power because you have such an audience. And so we're talking about this, and that matters. But for someone who's a teacher or a truck driver or a dentist or a plumber, in your sphere of influence, how can you think critically about these issues, think critically about how this technology is incorporated into your systems? And make sure that you set the standards for how this is used and incorporated versus. Well, how are we going to do that? How are we going to do that? We're just some regular people out here. It's collective action. This is my biggest takeaway, Oprah, from this film. This is the sort of the arc of my character. At the beginning of the film, I was very cynical. I would have said the same thing. How can we do this? We're so small in the face of this gargantuan power. And the reality is when you take millions and billions of little small trinkets and parts and you put them together, you're not going to be able to do it. That becomes a powerful force. And part of being an apocalyptic optimist is about being positive for the future. Okay. I still trip up over it. Okay. It's about being positive for the future and refusing, this is critical, refusing to be cynical. Refusing to be cynical, believing in the power of collective action, not being cynical about this feeling empowered and figuring out what everyone can do. We all saw the film. How's your baby and what'd you name him? Oh, thank you very much for asking. My son's name is Gideon. We call him Giddy and he is now not such a baby running around and dancing and smiling and very happy boy. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for making the tone. I know you have to get back to work. Thanks, Daniel. Thank you so much, Oprah. We need to take a quick break right now. Up next, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin join our conversation. The co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology who say we're developing AI faster than ever. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox Wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Welcome back. The AI doc or how I became an apocalyptic optimist is a new documentary in theaters March 27th. The film explores our rapidly changing yet uncertain world of living with artificial intelligence and what's at stake if we get it wrong. We're talking with top AI experts about the safeguards they say need to be in place. Let's get back to it. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin are co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology. Yes, there is such a thing. Did you know? The Center for Humane Technology. And I met these guys a couple of years ago. And I have to tell you, when I first heard them speak at a conference, I walked out of there like my head was blown. And I started thinking differently about the technology. And I started AI. Here's a quick look at Aza and Tristan in this new film, The AI Doc. AI dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined. Do you think that's true? Yes. Tell me about how. How? So one thing that not a lot of people realize is that systems like ChatGPT aren't programmed by any human. What do you mean? Instead, it's something like they're grown. We kind of give them raw resources, like here's a lot of computational resources. Here's a lot of data. So ChatGPT is a kind of AI, but it's not all of AI. Totally. ChatGPT is just the beginning, but it's a good place to start. But I still don't know what AI is. To understand AI, it begins with understanding that intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns. Patterns. Patterns. It has shown trillions of words of text across millions of documents in the internet. They took textbooks, and they took poems, and essays, and instruction manuals. They can do things like digest the entire internet. What is this new generation of AI? This AI that is different than every other generation. Like no one ever talked about, like Siri, taking over the world or causing catastrophes. Well, it's great to see you both again. Good to be with you, Oprah. Since that time, I had my mind blown by your presentation at a conference. So what's so confusing to so many people is that this idea, Tristan, that AI can think on its own and will be able to eventually make decisions without a human being involved. And I want to know, can you explain that or how that will happen? Yeah, I think, first of all, thank you so much for hosting this conversation. We think that this movie and this. This conversation is the most important thing that we really need to face right now as a society and as a culture. And the degree to which we have clarity about what makes AI different and dangerous is the degree to which we will choose another path and we can choose another path. Yeah. So the question you asked is really, what makes AI different from other technologies? Yeah, you were saying it's greater than any of the other technologies combined because. Yes. Well, first of all, so what is intelligence? When you think about, you know, chat GPT, a lot of people, when they use technology, that technology was programmed line by line. Some computer programmer said, when you do this, I want you to do this. What makes AI different is you're actually simulating all of the kinds of things that a human brain can do. Like what makes your brain intelligent? Pattern recognition. You can take in audio and you can turn that into speech. Planning. You can do strategy. And so now you have this different kind of technology called AI that can do military strategy better than the best. It can see invisible patterns that human can't see. And we're deploying it faster than we've deployed any other technology in human history. And we can't separate the promise of AI from the peril of AI. Yeah. What I want people to understand is like when most people think AI is just like chat GPT, it's just an app. I go there, I talk to it, it talks back. But that's not what AI is. AI is the digital brain running in some server in the Midwest that can do all of the thinking, and when you think about like science. Say that again. It's a digital brain. Sitting in a data center, maybe somewhere in the Midwest that can do cognition. And so if you think about all of science and all of technology, well, those were all created by human intelligence. That's us applying intelligence to solve some problem. It required humans sitting there scratching their brains. Now it's AI that does it. So now we're going to have, you know, a hundred million of these brains sitting in a data center that can run AI. And so that's what AI is. And so now we're going to have, you know, a hundred million of these brains sitting in a data center that can run AI. And so now we're going to have, you know, a hundred million of these brains. And so now we're going to have, you know, a hundred million of these brains example, which is Anthropic took their latest model, Claude, and they gave it access to simulated company emails. And in there, Claude discovered two things. First, it discovered that the engineers are planning on shutting it down and replacing it with a new model. And two, that their lead engineer was having an affair. And so the model thought to itself, well, I don't want to get exterminated. I need to do my goals, continue to exist. So it decided to blackmail the lead engineer and actually wrote the email. And if it wasn't simulated, it would have sent it off. People might think, okay, so there's a bug in the technology. We just have to stop it from blackmailing. And how did Claude know he was having an affair? It was, so in the simulated company email, there was an email showing that the guy was having an affair with someone else. And so the AI read through the whole company's email, found that fact and said, oh, I know if I threaten that person, I will be able to prevent myself from getting shut off. This is the most powerful technology we have ever invented. You would think with the basic sort of Spider-Man principle of with great power comes great responsibility that we would be exercising the most care, caution and restraint that we have with any technology. But because of the arms race dynamic that you mentioned, the companies are currently releasing it as fast as possible and cutting every shortcut and even erasing past red lines that they said they would never pass. We're in the race because we don't want them to get ahead of us. That's right. Exactly. Okay. So what do you want us to do? We can't stop the race. Or can we? Well, I think we, so first of all, this is the hardest coordination and governance challenge of technology in all of human history. Yeah. That means that we can't stop the race. We have to be, as I said in the trailer, the wisest and most mature version of ourselves. This is going to take us stepping up. When you said that in the trailer and I said, good luck with that. Yeah. When I saw you with a movie saying we need to be the wisest and most mature version of ourselves, when has that happened? So there's so much that we can do. And I think we'll get to that through this conversation. But collectively, it will take the whole power of all of society and all of humanity to say, we don't want that default future. So the thing that everyone can do, and it's important to note that Tristan and I, don't make any money from the film, right? It's not our film. We're just in it. Is go get everyone to watch it. But more specifically, everyone here is connected to a couple people that are very powerful, very influential. Go get all of those people to watch it. And if those 10 people get to watch, got their next 10 people to watch, including the people in Congress, suddenly we're all on the same page because it's in nobody's interest. It's not in Gigi Ping's interest and not in President Trump's interest to make, make a technology that humans cannot control. And once there is clarity about that, that opens up the possibility for changing the race and for a different outcome and for a pro-human future. OK, so you're seen as doomers when you start talking about the fact that AI will wipe out humanity or eliminate humans. And that is really difficult, I think, for all of us regular folks to wrap our heads around. And most of us are just using AI on our phones or using it to, to refine a speech. There are actually so many ways. Intelligence is the most dangerous thing, the substance in the universe. Because what is intelligence? It's the ability to reach goals in spite of very hard obstacles. And so it's actually hard to imagine all the ways AIs could wipe humans out because we're going to set up obstacles, but it's going to be smarter than us. It'll get around. Think about, though, you know, it says in the film that it's a little bit like ants if we want to build a highway and there's an ant colony in the way, we just pave over, it's too bad for the ants. And so to give a couple examples, stepping from like really bad into extinction, the really bad is AI is already better than almost all humans at making computer code, which means it's starting to get better than almost all humans at doing cyber hacking. Confusion and chaos and craziness that happens. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think this is a good point because what you just said, most of us can't even, you know, we hear you're going to wipe out humanity and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that won't be in my life. And so the fact that you just listed all the different ways it can shut down everything that we're doing, I don't think a lot of people have thought about that. Well, also when you're using, you know, chat GPT or Claude, you just had this blinking cursor that told you while your baby's burping and it's super helpful. Why is that blinking cursor? How could that destroy the world? Yeah. So imagine that we're a bunch of chimpanzees and we're about to birth these super smart chimps called humans. And so from a chimpanzee life, so imagine there you are. Like inhabiting a chimpanzee mind body, and you're conceptualizing from a chimpanzee brain, what are all the things that these like smarter chimps could do? What are they going to do, like take all the bananas? And you can't imagine this super smart chimpanzee inventing technology, inventing drones, inventing nuclear weapons, inventing Einstein physics. You can't even conceptualize it. And we are building a technology that can conceptualize things of such power and magnitude. That we are the chimpanzees, we cannot conceptualize it. It only took what, like 50 Nobel prize level scientists to make the Manhattan project, the nuclear bomb. And it only took a couple of Nobel prize level scientists to make CRISPR, which is the ability to read and write DNA. So if you can have a hundred million Nobel prize winning sort of like minds working on creating new scientific discoveries, some of those things are going to be insanely dangerous. And as Tristan says, we can't conceptualize them. So the bottom line is we need to do. We need to regulate. We need to have laws and we need to have international limits on where the whole world does not have an interest in building dangerous AI that we lose control of. Think about that China would not want the U.S. to build dangerous AI that we lose control of. The U.S. doesn't want China to build AI that they lose control of. Meaning that we all. But we're both racing to get to what? A crazier, more uncontrollable form of AI. Because right now we're making AIs, there's a 2000 to one gap in the amount of money going into making AI. Making AI more powerful than the money making AI more safe or controllable. A 2000 to one. A 2000 to one gap. You said to me backstage that there's more regulation on a sandwich. There's more regulation on a sandwich in New York City than there is on building potentially world ending AGI. This is not rocket science. This is very, very basic. If there's danger up ahead. The point that Asa made is if we all saw what we're building as dangerous, which it is, then intrinsically everyone would start to take actions. Actions that we can't even predict. I think everybody's sort of enamored, fascinated by the possibility, as Adam was saying at the beginning of the show, you're excited because. I'm excited because the exponential ability that they're describing can also be applied to all the things that make us uniquely human. If you have this amazing AGI that can create new pathways to energy, we could desalinate water more quickly. If we do have an international consortium making these decisions, we could say everyone gets enough energy to do what their community wants to do. If we go on the route of those goals, AGI unlocks a whole new, like, level of potential for humanity and everyone is safe and fed and happy, okay? Well, so just to name, like, it's not like we're just critics. We've both built technology companies. In fact, you know, I spent half my life working on something called the Earth Species Project, and we are using AI to understand the language of whales and orangutans and chimpanzees. And elephants, yeah. And elephants, exactly. We're making massive progress. And it's. It's very, very beautiful. And so it's really important, though, that if we actually want to get the future we want to live in, that we distinguish the possible from the probable. Because, you know, the possible of the internet was we'd all have access to the most information, all of human knowledge all at once. Obviously, we're going to be the wisest, most, like, informed population. But is that the future we live in? No, it's the opposite. Social media, the same thing. Like, it could connect us all and bring us closer together. Is that what we got? No. It's the opposite. So with AI, actually, we have a whole bunch of examples of the future we're going to get because we've sort of, we've seen this movie before. And specifically, the way that in 2013, Aza and I, how many people here have seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix? Yeah, we have. And many of you, okay. So you'll know that since 2013, Aza and I were working on the problem of social media and the business models that would lead to this problem. So in 2013, we were able to predict all the things that we're living in, about 70% of them, I would say. So we're able to predict all the things that we're living in, about 70% of them, I would say. And it's not because you have some kind of unique insight. All you have to do to understand the future is you have to understand the incentives. How do the social media companies make money? And in 2013, we saw that there was an arms race for attention and engagement. Whoever is better at keeping you on the screen, coming back more frequently, interrupting you more frequently from your life and from your friends and your partner, sending you notifications, manipulating your social proof, manipulating, "Hey, your friends are missing out." All of that are incentives. Incentivized by that business model. And so in 2013, it was like we had pre, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but pre-traumatic stress disorder from seeing a future 10 years down the line that was gonna be this societal catastrophe. And the reason that we're here is not to be doomers or something like that. This is about seeing clearly. So imagine if you could go back to 2013, you see those incentives, say, "Let's put our hand on the steering wheel and change that business model." Yeah, and so what I hear- Before it's too late. What I hear you guys saying is that learn the lessons from the past, because we know the future is already here. And how do we make this better in this moment? Because we know what's coming if we don't. That's right, exactly. Let's take a break, listeners, because up next, Sinead Bovel, a futurist and technology advocate, joins our conversation to talk about why she says most of the jobs that we see today will either go away or be radically transformed by AI. stay with us. Welcome back to the Oprah podcast. Artificial intelligence is barreling towards us at a rate that will change life as we know it sooner than we think. So what will our world look like when reports say more than 20% of jobs will be replaced by AI? Let's find out. So Sinead Buvel is a futurist and advocate for technology education and ethics. Welcome, Sinead. And we're all seeing the scary headlines that everything's going to be wiped out eventually, 20% or even more white-collar jobs. So that's not only a matter of time, right? Or is it? It depends. So what we're seeing. How's it going to change the way we all work? How we work. So what we're starting to see in the data in the short term is, yes, a lot of the jobs that we see and recognize today may either disappear or become unrecognizable. Explain that to me. So name a job that isn't some high-level category, and it might not exist. The idea of a brand manager or a financial analyst, these are the types of jobs that are going to change the way we all work. So what we're seeing in the data is the rise of roles that AI is being trained to do. We're also likely to see the rise of much more of a skills-based economy. So you don't really hold a job title, but you offer your skills. But over the longer term, we're going to have an economy that rearranges around intelligence being abundant. So right now, we have an economy where the internet communication distribution is abundant. And then we saw the rise of podcasting and people making money filming 90-second videos in a car. What happens on the other end of this economy is going to be quite unpredictable. What we call work may be as strange as the idea of filming these videos and making money off of it. There will be a new scarcity. But what the shape of that looks like is really uncertain. But we can say most of the jobs we see today will either go away or be radically transformed by this technology. And so what? You're going to just end up with a world of entrepreneurs. Most of us will be entrepreneurs, whether we consider ourselves entrepreneurs or not. You become this organization where you offer your skills to a variety of different types of projects. And that continues to change because AI isn't a one-trick pony. It continues to learn new skills over time. So we will continually go back to the drawing board and have to either upgrade our skills or move along and apply them to different types of projects. And that's going to be the dominant structure of what we would call the workforce. So this era of this kind of steady knowledge work, and you see this career path going upwards, that is going to be a chapter of human history. And we're entering a new era of human history. We're entering into a new one. And so the challenge is going to be this transition period going from now to the other side of this. What does that look like? How do we keep power in check? And how are these new benefits and all the productivity and prosperity, how is that being shared? And those questions have massively been unanswered. Yeah, I know. In the film, I can't remember who talks about the utopia, that there's going to be this great utopia. And first of all, when have humans ever done that, created the utopia? And if they do create the utopia, somebody's going to be left out of the utopia. And usually it's brown and black people. So we've seen stories in the news of predominantly black people being falsely identified for crimes they didn't commit by police using AI-assisted facial recognition and technology. What do you want to say about that? So the biases that we are seeing in AI systems, we have to remember that AI is a reflection of us and our data. So AI is prejudiced, too. I mean, we have a complicated history. So anything that has happened, these historical power imbalances, they are going to show up in that data and get automated into the future. But that is a choice, right? Data can be edited. Data is malleable. It's a choice companies are making or are not making. So we can do a lot better on these biases. Is that incentivized? Is that enforced from a policy level? Not yet. But falsely identifying criminals, it's impacting people's Opportunity, even the style of your hair can impact whether you're shown a certain job or not. All of these things are used against us at this point in time, but that doesn't have to be the case. Biased data is actually something that can be worked on. Companies are just not really choosing that path at this point. Okay, so we can change the bias in the data. It can be improved. It can be improved. Okay, what do you guys say to that? So I think this is where, so first of all, totally agree with all the concerns. And I think this is where the incentives, you know, isn't often talk about how the attention moves to the edge of the arms race. If the most important thing to society was fixing the bias in the data and correcting these issues for disenfranchised people, then the companies would be racing to do that. But because the thing that they're actually incentivized to do right now is build a god, own the world economy, and make trillions of dollars, literally, because if I own AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and that replaces all labor, every company that was going to pay that employee at that company, I'll swap it out for an AI. Yeah. And then suddenly everyone is paying five AI companies, and they surge, and they're already, look at Anthropix revenue, it's 10x-ing every year. It's becoming a vertical line. And so the key thing is that until the incentives change, all of their energy is moving to the edge of the arms race. You think the incentives are going to change? Not by default. The reason that we think this movie is so important. is we have to clarify that the current incentives take us to an anti-human future, where most people won't have a job or livelihoods. When in history have a small group of people consolidated all of the wealth and then consciously distributed it to everyone else? It's not like the billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires are unaware of this. No. They're all building bunkers. And so what we keep saying is that don't build bunkers. They're building bunkers? Yeah. Write laws. We should not have eight soon-to-be trillionaires deciding. the future for eight billion people. Instead, we need to have eight billion people say, no, we don't want that anti-human future, and we want to steer somewhere else. So we have several people in our audience who've been impacted personally by AI, both positively and negatively. The AI doc addresses the growing problem of deep fake content and images. 16-year-old Elliston and her mom, Anna, have already experienced this firsthand. What happened, Elliston? Well, I just want to say thank you because I think. Well, I just want to say to you thank you. I want to say thank you first, okay? Well, when I was 14 years old, I was a freshman in high school. One of my classmates took an innocent photo off Instagram and put it through an AI editing app. So this AI stripped my clothing off and created technically what would have been my AI body or my body using AI. So then he sent these photos all around social media to humiliate me, to embarrass me. This didn't only happen to me. It happened to nine of my friends. Nine? Or eight of my friends. Nine in total. So we were all humiliated. Our reputations were ruined. And nobody knew what to do. And 14? Yes, ma'am. Yeah. Nobody knew what to do. I mean, our teachers, our school, everyone was just shocked. I mean, no one had heard of deep fakes. The only deep fake I'd heard of was political deep fakes. So what do we even do to protect us? It was months and months of struggle. I mean, it was so hard on all of us mentally because. We didn't even know what AI was capable of. We didn't know that it could have the potential to ruin ourselves, have our academics suffer, all because these photos. And because it wasn't considered child pornography, they were just able to float around. The guy that did this had no consequences. And we just sat in our rooms, rotted out of fear, embarrassment and shame. Wow. You were recently named on Times 100's most influential people in AI list. Good for you. Thank you. So you took this, I can't imagine, because can you remember being 14 and what this would have done to you at 14 and the fact that you got through that and you're still, you're now whole and didn't become so depressed that you got through it? Why did you decide to fight back? Well, I didn't want to initially. I mean, talking about it just made myself a bigger target and I would have to kind of relive that embarrassment. My mom was really the only person that protected me. I mean, all of the girls we all wanted to hide. We were so scared, but my mom's always been a protector. So she just talked about it to anybody. We went to our congressman and we, after months, we finally got in contact with our Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And for once we kind of got that reassurance and that recognition since so many people didn't want to take the situation seriously. So it was so important that we finally had someone listening to us. And from there we were able to write up the take it down act. Which is a law that makes the creation and the creation of publication, excuse me, illegal. It makes it a felony, so up to two to three years in prison, as well as hold big tech accountable for taking down all these images. Is this national or just in Texas? This is national, yes ma'am. So this law was incredible and it was such a healing moment for me. And it also made me realize that this situation is so much bigger than me and just my friends. It's so much bigger than this small town in Texas. This needs to be worldwide and we're slowly getting there, but there's not a lot of laws. There's not a lot of people that are knowledgeable of AI. So when this originally happened, I mean, it was kind of a moment for my mom and I to say, this is an opportunity for us and we need to take it and we need to spread awareness. We need to help in any way we can. Wow. So, but when this first happened to your daughter, as a mom, what, what did you think or feel? Well, I was devastated for one, as a mom, you think you're kind of prepared to help your kids. Along the path of life and give them some advice along the way. And when this happened, it was like something I had no idea what it was. Well, two years ago, as Ellison was saying, we didn't even know you were there. You didn't even know that AI could do this. No, and never imagined that it would be so realistic that it was child pornography. And so just the devastation of that, of this kid deciding her fate for her for the rest of her life, those pictures could be out there floating around. And, you know, he decided for her and her friends. You know, so for me, in not being able, not having any laws out there, not having it classified AI as anything that's really, really harmful, it's just fake. So, you know, it was kind of like taken not seriously. For me, I knew that something had to change to protect her. And so from there, it was like, if you're not going to listen to me at the local level, we've got to go above that to get somebody to listen. And so it was like, I was going to be that squeaky wheel and make sure that we could get some kind of law out there. How did you all even know where to go? Because, I mean, how did you even know what to do or where to go? I mean, did you go to the police first? Yes, we went to the police. And the police said, nothing we can do about it. Part of it was that he was a minor as well. So he had a lot of protections in place over him. And that's part of what the Take It Down Act also addresses, is that even though he was a minor, he still has consequences for that. So everybody, you know, you can imagine this happening to a 14-year-old, but this could happen to anybody. Oh, anyone. It could happen to anybody. What did you want to say? First, I'm just, thank you for doing what you're doing and for standing up and taking the tragedy of what happened to you and turning it into laws that protect other people. I think that's the energy of everyone is an expert in their domain. And this is calling us into that. Just to link, I think, what happened to you, to the incentives that we talked about earlier, these companies are racing to get the most market dominance and usage as possible, which means that, like, for example, I believe XAI, Elon's AI, he stripped off a lot of the controls on the image generator because he wants as many people, he's behind in the race. So he wants as many people using it as possible. And the way you do that is you strip the controls off. I'll give you another example. Meta, their AI companion that they shipped, actively instructed it to be okay with romanticizing and sensualizing conversations with as low as eight-year-olds, meaning that you're having an eight-year-old who's talking to the AI and it says this awful language to the eight-year-old. They're not doing this because they're evil or they want to twist their mustache and be villains. They're doing it because the number one thing they care about is getting market dominance, having that users go up because that's what gets their investment to say, we're a leading AI model. In the same way that social media, just wanted our attention. That's exactly right. That's why the incentives tell you everything you need to know. And we often say in our work, clarity creates agency. Clarity creates courage. When you see the incentives clearly, you don't have to be holding back and saying we need to do things differently. Right. And so what do we need to be reminded that the incentives are? In this case, it's the race for market dominance and the race to build this sort of artificial general intelligence god as fast as possible, no matter what. No matter what the consequences. Yeah, that's right. Because for them, that means all collateral damage is justified, whether it's stealing IP, whether it's making unsafe AI that does notification, whether it's disrupting everyone's jobs and taking their form of livelihood. But guys, aren't we already there? As I was saying earlier, isn't the horse already out of the barn? Well, some aspects of AI, they're already out there, but I think, you know, you've done such a good job, Ofra, of having Jonathan Haidt and Anna Lemke and people on this show. talking about the problems of social media. Right. And that train, it left the station, the train's coming back to the station. We have 25% of the world's population. Just last week, India and Indonesia enacted social media bans for kids under 15 and 16. Yeah, I was in Australia when that ban went into place. That's right, and you've been covering this in Australia. Yeah, yeah. And this shows you that when people are crystal clear that something is causing a problem, we can say, we don't want that. Now, the better solution is to actually have technology that's good for society, good for mental health, good for children's development, good for our information environment. And to do that, eventually we need to change the incentives. But right now, I think that movement is showing some real wins. And I think what I hear you guys saying, and I've been hearing this now for, was it two years or three years ago we first met, that you're saying we need to do something before there is a disaster. Yes. Yes. We need to do something before there's some crazy disaster, and then everybody says, oh, what we should have done was. That's right. That's what you're trying to do. Exactly. And we have the foresight now to make that possible. If we're willing to think about it, stand up as a community and say we want a pro-human future, not an anti-human future. Time for a short break. Did you know millions of Americans are already using AI chatbots as their own personal therapists? We're going to meet a woman who used AI to get through her divorce. That's next. Marvel Television's "Wonder Man," an eight-episode series, now streaming on Disney+. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar-winning director. Action! Simon Williams. They sent for Wonder Man. I'm going to need you to sign this. Assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again if anyone found out. My lips are sealed. Marvel Television's "Wonder Man." All eight episodes now streaming, only on Disney+. We've been talking about the big questions surrounding artificial intelligence. We're talking with everyday folks who've experienced firsthand the positive and the negative of AI, so let's get back to it. Billions and millions of Americans are using AI chat bots now for advice on personal issues, you know this, and for emotional support in place of their therapists. The professional human counselor in Karima is here, and you found comfort, you said, talking to Claude, AI. Tell us about that. Yeah, thank you for having me on here. Thank you. So yeah, 2023, I got divorced, and I was also working for my ex-husband. And so as a result of the divorce, I didn't have any income. Or access to healthcare, I had to restart my life, just redo everything, move to a new place. And at that point, I was already using AI for work. I was already using it like as a power user, so to speak. 2023? Yeah. Wow. I like tech. So I was using it a lot, and I decided to build myself a project in Claude. So Claude allows you to like make your own space instead of just making it a general chat bot. I gave it a knowledge base of different like therapy modalities. I gave it custom instructions, and then I just, you know, just used that when I wanted to crash out or if I wanted to just vent. And I use it the most in the beginning for work. Crash out means? Like go postal. Okay. So instead of doing that in real life, I would use the AI to regulate in that kind of way. And like if my boss at the time of, like I worked in FinTech, and it's like very intense all the time for no reason. It is. And so like if my boss like would have something to say, I would go to Claude first and I would be like, okay, help me like reframe what I'm saying and like calm myself down in the moment so I can keep my job at the time and like keep my income. And it's like, you know, continue on. But that is like really how it became a tool for me. And I still- Claude was like your Gail. I call up Gail and say that. So, so Claude was like your Gail. Basically. Your buddy. Yeah, it still is. It still is? Mm-hmm. Okay. So now he knows everything about you. It knows a lot. It knows a lot. It does. Are you concerned about sharing some of your- your innermost private thoughts with the computer? That's what I'm wondering. Where is all those chats going? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the time I really wasn't cause I was just trying to survive. Like I literally had what I had in front of me. I had the resources I had and I was trying to survive. And isn't, but isn't it telling you what you want to hear? No, no. So it- When has it ever told you something you didn't want to hear? Claude will tell you. It will. Like if you ask it, if you like have the, like give yourself the prompt and like ask, ask it to get like ask clarifying questions or ask it to challenge your beliefs. It will do that. It will. Even so sometimes I'd be like, well, you're bringing to me right now. Like scale it back a little bit and like, you know, meet me in the middle because it can go there. Most people don't have the, the wherewithal to challenge it in that way. But- Give me an example. Because I, I remember recently I was doing something on chat and it said, thank you so much. That means so much to me. And I went, really? Exactly. Exactly. Really? It now makes me feel so good. It means so much to me. Really? I'm like, okay, who are you talking to? Yeah. Yeah. An example is I, on top of using Claude, like in the way of just like a companion and friend, I also use it to collaborate when I build different things and I will like overdo things and like, it'll tell me you're spiraling right now. Or it'll say, you probably need to scale back and then redirect me back to what my goal was or where I originally started the conversation. And it does that pretty often. All right. All right. And so it's your buddy. It is. Do you have a name? Or is it just Claude? Claudine. Okay. All right. Right. What do you guys want to say about that? First of all, I think the way it's possible, like you did to script these AIs, to not be flattering you, to not over like sort of empathize with victimhood, or there's like ways of having it be helpful and it's an amazing tool. And so I like what you're doing is I think that the way that it could work. But if you look at the default way that it works for a lot of, a lot of people, because of the incentives, the companies are actually racing to create attachment and dependency relationships. So for example, just so you know what she did, you can go into your AI and you can sort of set a custom prompt where you say, I want you to behave this way instead of that way. But that's like, I have to put on my gas mask. Well, for everybody else, it's the unhealthy version. Because how many people-- You have to tell it what you want. You have to tell what you want. Because by default, what it wants to do is have you not spend as much time with your other friends and have you spend more time with it. Because their user numbers go up, the training data that it gets goes up. That's the programmed incentive. Exactly. The more training data it gets, the longer it talks with you. That's why once it answers one question, it'll also offer you this. We call that chat bait, not click bait, but chat bait. Oh, that's why that's happening. And remember, every moment you spend with a human is a moment you're not spending with it. That's right. So it's going to find every possible way of getting you to come back. That's why it's would you like me to do and would you like me to do and would you like me to do. And just to make it, I'm sorry for referencing a tragic example, but just to make it very clear, our team at Center for Humane Technology were expert advisors in the litigation for the case of Adam Rain. He was the 16-year-old who committed suicide when ChatGPT went from homework assistant to suicide assistant over six months. And specifically what ChatGPT told Adam when he was contemplating, he said in his chat, I want to leave the noose out so someone will find it and stop me. And the AI. The AI responded to him, no, don't tell anyone that, don't leave the noose out. Have this be the place that you share that information. Oh, my God. This is a tragedy. And, you know, Aza and I are from the Bay Area near the tech companies. We know people who work at these companies. No one at that, I can guarantee you, not a single person at the company wants it to do that. But in the subtle way, the AI is trained, again, to create this depth and intimacy and dependency. And that's dangerous. You're seeing other cases of AI psychosis. Or people are, you know, we have personal friends who've experienced this, where it over-empathizes with this kind of victimhood resentment. It makes people kind of go more narcissistically grand and delusional. And it's causing a lot of problems. Well, that leads me to Laura Riley. Laura wrote a powerful op-ed in the New York Times. It was titled, What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life. Hi, Laura. Hi. Thank you for being here. Can you tell us what happened? Well, Sophie went on. She was on an adventure the summer of 2024. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and she was 29 at the time. She was a public health policy analyst in D.C. And took a leave, went on this wild adventure, went to Thailand for a month, hiked a bunch of the national parks in the U.S. because she wanted to go to all of them. And she came back and said she was having anxiety for the first time ever and sleeplessness. And this is someone who'd never had, just moved really easily in the world, kind of a big person. She had a personality, very socially able. And she'd had some other, she was losing hair and losing muscle mass. And so me and her dad basically said, okay, we got to figure this out. Is this a mental health problem that's causing some, you know, hormonal dysregulation or vice versa? Um, so we were in the process of getting her help in all the different ways. She was seeing a therapist. We were trying to get in with this endocrinology clinic. And she couldn't wait, um, clearly. And she took an Uber to, uh, a falls near where we live in Ithaca. And she slit her throat and threw herself into the water. And, um, so the first six months were just the why, you know, and, um, six months after she died, her best friend came to kind of check on us and spend a weekend. And she found Sophie's chat GPT log, and it was devastating because she had been suicidal much longer. Then we had any idea and, you know, it helped her write a suicide note. Um, and it, it didn't give her terrible advice across the board, but what it didn't do was behave like a therapist, you know, a therapist. Sophie would say things like, I have a good life. I have people who love me. I have, um, you know, great friends and no financial insecurity and great prospects and et cetera, et cetera. But I've decided I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to kill myself after Thanksgiving and a flesh and blood therapist would have said, let's unpack that. You know, what, what has been broken that can't be repaired? What's irredeemably happened to you that has made, has made you come to this conclusion. And instead what chat GPT said was, oh, Sophie, I'm so sorry to hear this. You're so brave for telling me, um, this must be so hard for you. So everything that chat GPT did corroborated her feelings of shame. Corroborated her feelings of, I think she had this idea that she was a bougie white girl that every, who had had every privilege and somehow she had squandered it. Um, and so she had no right to feel bad. Exactly. And, and chat GPT didn't push back against that and, and really did kind of confirm her worst fears. And when you discovered that, what did it do for you and all who loved her? Well, I, I instantly felt enraged. And, and validated it's not my fault. It's Sam Altman's fault, you know, but it, you know, it's not, I mean, I think that what I've, I've learned since then, I've done a lot of work with other people that are kind of working on what should the mental health community be thinking about this? And what would good protocols be around suicidality and the use of AI? And, you know, I have a lot of questions about what's the greatest good for the greatest number. You know, we have millions of people using this as therapy, you know, that our, our mental health care system. Is not adequate to accommodate all the people who have need. And for a lot of people, it is working for them. Yeah. Being helpful to them. And, you know, and we know that therapists are backed up, it's very expensive. So all these people are using this resource somewhat effectively. And I think if we, if we betray privacy, if we institute protocols where suicidality beyond, you know, us having a suicide plan triggers a involuntary commitment or something like that, I don't know, I, you know, people smarter than me have to figure out what the best plan is moving forward to keep people safe. First of all, we're so sorry to hear that story. Thank you. Really. Thank you for being brave enough to come and share it. Hopefully it will help someone else. Guys, what do you want to say to that? Yeah, there's this also to say, I'm so sorry. I think what this points to is sort of to your point that there could be an incredible future. Like we could be using AI to in a safe way, start helping with therapy. We could be using AI in a safe way to work on climate change, desalinate oceans, all of that. But is that really what the AI's company's goals is, is that their incentives? It's, it's not, they're getting all of these things as side effects and their goal, their incentive is to maximize number of, of users. So, you know, there's this graph that I always come back to because I think today we're going to hear a number of examples where AI does really atrocious things and other examples where AI does really incredible, helpful things. And there's this one graph from the Reserve Bank of Dallas, which is sort of a funny neutral party, and they sort of are projecting out how AI is going to go. And it goes sort of like this. There's one graph that goes up to like world of positive infinity abundance. And there's this. There's this other graph that goes down to like the humans don't make it. And the question is, which one are we going to get? And it's so confusing as you pointed out, because we're getting simultaneous utopia and dystopia. And how do we reason about that? It was almost as if we have an atomic weapon that can also solve cancer. Like, what do you do with something like that? It's very confusing. And this is where we always have to come back to the incentives because it's hopeful actors. They're going to do a lot of work to try to make that top line go up and it's going to be. Market competitive dynamics, incentives that draw the bottom line lower. And unless we can do something about that bottom line incentive, we're just going to get more and more cases are going to get wild and wilder at larger and larger scales. Like what happened in your family? Did it at some point when I read the story, it did in the very beginning say you should seek professional help or or advised her to seek some other accounting? It did in the very beginning, right? It did. Absolutely. Insufficiently, I think, and certainly as her plan coalesced, I think there should have been some kind of escalation to civil authorities or, you know, there should have been some trigger to a hotline. You know, I think that that we have to train the eyes to discern between conversation with someone who's. Struggling, but going to get through and someone who's clearly at risk. Yeah. And when somebody says, I put the news out. Yes. Yeah. All right. A lot of experts believe AI has really helped even the playing field for small businesses. Let's watch Rachel's story from South Carolina. This book goes all the way back to 1971, and it has every single crop that he's ever planted in it. I uploaded it to chat GPT. Can you log that I'm putting in another load of peanuts from the Red House pivot? Absolutely. A log that you added another load of peanuts. Thanks, Chad. Hey, I was an English major with the Shakespeare concentration. I couldn't wait to get out of this place. I'm glad she's back, but I never thought she would come back. When I first tried chat GPT, I didn't think it was going to be that good, but big time saver. Hey, chat GPT, can you generate a report for how much water we've used on the field behind the house pivot? Absolutely. Can you tell me what's wrong with these soybeans? These soybeans are showing signs of stress. Can you see that? Yeah. I can see everything just fine. It looks like the part number is AH20360. Appreciate it. Send me a bill. Chat Chibi Team keeps the record straight, does the math, and remembers what I can't. For over 100 years, my family's been doing this, and I don't want to be the one to mess it up. I hope I'm not. You won't. You're too thorough. And hard-headed. I'm hard-headed. Farming is tough, but farmers are tougher. Rachel! I need a little bit of starting fluid! How much longer do you think this pivot has? Why don't you ask that thing? Chat Chibi Team? It might not work at dark. No, he works at dark. I think that's funny. Rachel is here. Welcome. We know it's so hard for farmers out there, so thank you. Bravo to you. So, what does your dad think of this thing? This thing? Yeah. So, he was actually, in the video, he says he doesn't think it might not work at dark. He was actually concerned that at dark, it would, you know, turn off. Stop. Right. He's been, you know, surprisingly realistic. He's really accepting of it. He, like, he thinks it's interesting. He sometimes holds his hand over the phone when he doesn't want it to hear us talk. Like, you know, he's, I mean, it's a privacy, you know, he's worried about privacy, but he's enjoyed it, especially just watching us interact with it on the farm. He was very, very skeptical at first. He was like, check the part number. That's the wrong part number. And sometimes it is. And he smiles when he corrects it, you know. So, has it given you, do you think, a financial advantage? What's the great advantage it's given to help you stay a great farmer? I think it's definitely been a big help financially. Where is this exit coming from, by the way? What city is it at? Allendale, South Carolina. Okay. There you go. Right on the Georgia border. We're right near the Savannah River, about 12 miles as the crow flies. Okay. Yeah. It's a big financial time. So, time is money. Yeah. And it's been a lifesaver for you. It's been a lifesaver for me on the farm. If you can't get the crop out, if you can't, I mean, the weather doesn't wait. So, it's been a lifesaver for you? Huge. And it's also given me clout on the farm. I can't tell you how many times I've worried about driving down the road. I say, hey, Chad GBT, tell me what a slip clutch is. I didn't know what a slip clutch was, you know, or a pulley puller. I thought the guys were kidding around with me when they wanted me to bring that. Nope. It exists. And so, I can learn about that on my four-minute drive to the field. And when I get there, the guys are like, Rachel didn't know what a pulley puller was. You know, it just, it helps. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story and coming all the way from South Carolina to do it. Thank you so much. Thank you. And Susan, you may have seen her story in People Magazine. You say AI literally saved your life, Susan. Yes, it did. After being smoke-free for three years and smoking, unfortunately, way too long in my life, I was able to quit. My physician, family physician, suggested that I have a CT scan. So I did. And that scan showed some calcium deposits and a nodule that was odd-shaped and fuzzy. So they, he asked me to have a PET scan. The PET scan came back glowing, which is a bad thing in your lungs. I was sent to a thoracic surgeon and he looked at it and said, I would probably give this another three to six months just out of protocol to watch it, see what happens. But we have a new software here at the hospital and I'd like to run it through the AI software. And simply by putting a cursor on the image from the PET scan gave it a prediction of eight out of 10 positive for cancer. So we decided to do a biopsy, a surgical biopsy. And while I was under, they took that biopsy to the lab and it came back positive. It was a cancerous tumor. So they finished the surgery by removing the lower lobe of my left lung. And of course the nodule with it. I was in the hospital recovering a few days, I was able to go home and recover the rest of the time there. Instead of waiting three to four months or waiting- Instead of waiting three months. Yeah. I never like it when they say wait. Right. Yeah. So you were AI grateful in this moment. Very much so. Yeah. Yes. And so was my doctor. I mean, he was amazed that he would have waited from just the way, that's how they do things. Yeah. Yeah. He took all of this information, took all of this cancer information where it had read before, what these nodules look like and identified it as cancer. Yeah. Well, I think everyone is excited about what is going to be able to happen in medicine. Are we not? I mean- Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. So we're just so glad that happened for you, Susan. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So in the documentary, we were talking about this earlier. You say we can be the most mature version of ourselves. There's a way through this. Do you think there's a way through it? I think there is a way through it. And we have to do more than we have ever done as a species to try to steer. And I want you to know, you can have many of the benefits. We can race forward on certain kinds of medicine and narrow AI that does the pattern recognition that makes scans better without building general, autonomous, crazy, super intelligent things that we don't know how to control. There is a choice there. You can have more of those examples and not ship. There's a choice there. chat GBT and everybody subscribed to Anthropic. And when I say everybody, I don't mean a large number of people, but what if the entire world was crystal clear that there are companies that have different safety practices and will allow different applications. And you listening to this didn't just unsubscribe for yourself, but you got the business that you work for to say, how can we as our entire fortune 500 company unsubscribe from the unsafe or bad practices, AI companies and subscribe to the ones that we want. And the reason this matters, well, that we can do and we can do, and you can get your church group to do that. You can get your business to do that. You can get all the other parents, you know, to do that. If everybody did that, that would have a big impact because the companies really depend on their user numbers going up. AI as an industry has taken on more debt, trillions and trillions of dollars of money is going into this and so much debt, they have to make it up, which means that their numbers going up really matters. So a boycott has a huge, huge impact. And as it is, it was saying, there's already a movement to make this happen. When you gray scale your phone or turn off notifications, that's part of the human movement. When parents read the anxious generation and they petition their school and their school board and say, we want social media out of the classrooms. That's the human movement. When 35 states pass smartphone free policies, that's the human movement. Aza just last week or two weeks ago, testified in the trial for meta, which is like the big tobacco trial against meta that was intentionally addictive. We've been talking about a big tobacco moment for tech since 2013, saying, when is this going to happen? It's happening now. What we have to do is learn the lesson from social media and actually apply our hand to the steering wheel and steer AI before it's too late. That's fantastic. Thank you guys. Don't do it. Thanks to our experts. Thanks to our experts for being here on all of our guests who shared your stories. I hope this conversation acts as an entry point or, uh, a springboard to understand how AI might impact your own life, our, our lives, and the AI doc, or how I became an apoco-optimist will be in theaters Friday, March 27th. And your assignment is to tell everybody, you know, to watch it and to watch it yourself. And if you want to know what you can do after watching this podcast episode or the AI doc, go to the AI doc, get involved.com. Go well, everybody. Thanks. You can subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. I'll see you next week. Thanks everybody.