The Wirecutter Show: Tips for Using A.I. Smartly With Kevin Roose
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Well, Casey, here we are. It's the holiday season, and we've got a special Tuesday episode for our listeners.
We do. And boy, is this a special one, Kevin. And in this sense, I'm not really in it.
Yes, the best hard fork episode ever, they're calling it. No, I recently went on another New York Times podcast. This is the Wirecutter Show from the fine folks over at Wirecutter. And we had a wide-ranging conversation about which scented candles you should put in your house. No, it was about AI, obviously. They asked me to come on to talk about how to make AI tools work for me and for others. And we thought it might be something that Hardfork listeners might like to hear.
Yeah. And actually, recently, the Wirecutter named this episode the best option for people who don't like the sound of my voice. So something fun for you. And even as we bring you that today, Kevin, we have even more planned for you this week because on Friday, we will be back and I will be participating in our annual Hard Fork New Year Tech Resolutions show. And we're also going to be answering a bunch of your questions, listeners. So stay tuned for that.
How did this episode introduce Kevin Roose and the focus on using A.I. smartly?
Thank you so much, Hard Fork listeners and viewers, for being with us in 2025. It has been a real joy to bring this show to you, and we hope you are having a wonderful holiday break and that you have a happy new year.
And we hope you have an old Lang Syne as well.
We do. We hope you have an old Lang Syne.
And if your Lang Syne is looking too old, get a new one.
Does Wirecounter have any recommendations for the best Lang Syne?
This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed.
It's just that they had so little time to make it. The Last 12 Weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
I rely on Wirecutter before I buy anything. And I am desperate for someone to tell me which language models are good for which things. Because otherwise, I am spending so much money on these things. And I'm spending all this time trying to figure out what is good for what. And I would just love it if you all, who are the experts in the world at testing things and figuring out what they're good for, would do that work for me.
I'm Christine Zier-Closet.
I'm Rosie Garan, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show.
Rosie. Hi. Hello. Hello. I'm excited about our episode today. I am going to be chatting with Kevin Roos, New York Times tech columnist. He writes about many facets of tech and talks a lot about AI, both in the newspaper and on his New York Times podcast, Hard Fork, which he co-hosts with platformers Casey Newton.
Kevin is so great. The podcast is so great. I'm really, really excited you're doing this.
I am too. So Kevin and I are going to talk today about something that we haven't covered on this show before, AI, which of course everyone is talking about AI. But the reason we're going to talk about it on the Wirecutter show is because there is this intersection of consumer products and AI at this point. Absolutely. And especially with these large language models, LLMs, which are the chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, he knows a lot about all of these.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
7 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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