Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For a growing number of women, single motherhood feels like the right choice. She locked eyes with me and that was the moment that I knew we were about to have one hell of a life together. On the Sunday Story, how these single mothers are making it work. Listen now to the Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Sam Brigger. Terry's getting over the remnants of a cold and resting her voice, which you'll hear in this interview, is a little hoarse. Here's the interview she recorded last week that was scheduled for today.
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 A.I.,
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 in driverless cars where they were available, read her mammogram and ultrasound, 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's started a new tech journalism company called The New Things. Joanna Stern, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me here. Are you wearing any gadgets right now?
I am wearing some gadgets, but not as many gadgets as I wore last year. Yeah, the experiment is over, so what do you have on now? 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 an AI recording bracelet.
It 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. Do you get pitched by advertisers based on what conversations AI has overheard? 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. Okay. I want to start with the title of your book, I Am Not a Robot.
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Chapter 2: What experiment did Joanna Stern conduct with AI?
That's a reference to the security protocol 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... 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 and not a bike.
I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So how come AI can read your mammogram and drive your car, but it can't tell which square has a bicycle? 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 that'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 that. I'm pretty sure it would outsmart me on that. I'm so sorry to be here and tell you that bad news, but AI can do the CAPTCHA better than you now. So why do I have to do it?
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 where we prove we're no longer robots. 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. 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 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, 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 smartphone.
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Chapter 3: How did AI assist Joanna in her daily life?
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, it would give you responses. But moving actually to my wrist, I did wear something on my wrist called the B bracelet. And this bracelet has a tiny microphone on it, and 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, 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. 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? There were a couple examples of that.
My son, at the time, he was eight years old, and he's very into bugs, loves nature, insects, and he found a praying mantis and said, this is going to 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 manti 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 said, 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, 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 to grandpa, I'm also going to 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. The chat GPT was very wrong.
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