Your A.I. Questions Answered
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Winna Loo. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you.
I'm Sam Azersky and I create the game Spelling Beat and Letterboxd on a daily basis. And I have this thing called chromesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music.
New York Times games are made by people like the ones you just heard from. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at nytimes.com/slash join games.
From the New York Times, I'm Tracy Mumford with a special edition of The Headlines.
Why are people asking questions about AI’s benefits and risks?
It's a you ask, we try to answer episode on all things AI.
This is a great technology and it has lots of positive use. So let's just start with that. AI is an existential threat to humanity. We've got to make sure that we don't lose our edge in the global competition on this with China.
With the debates raging and developments coming fast and furious, we put out a call for your questions on the technology. And now we brought in two of my colleagues who cover AI for answers. We will get to the whole are the robots gonna take over in a minute, but to start, we got a lot of questions about how AI seems to have become a part of everyday life right now, whether we like it or not. Here to field those is Mike Isaac, who's reported on Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Hey Mike.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Does using Google Search mean you’re using AI?
I wanna kick things off here with a question from Emily S, who I think is very much not alone when she asked, Am I inevitably using AI every time I use a search engine?
I mean, for a lot of people in the world, search is kind of synonymous with Google. And I would say it's very hard, if not impossible, to turn off AI in Google search at this point. If you really don't want to use AI in any sort of searching, there are other companies like DuckDuckGo and Brave that offer a specifically non-AI search engine. So you have options. It's just if you're using Google, you are basically using AI to do searching.
So we're getting to the point where you might have to do work to not use AI.
That's right. And that's just yeah, that's Google's whole thing, is they really believe AI search is the future. So you can decide to be a part of that or not.
How does AI affect water use and electricity costs?
Mike, we got a bunch of questions about how to think about the environmental impact of using AI. I think we have all seen some version of the warnings that, you know, typing a question into a chat bot is like pouring a gallon of water down the drain, like things in that vein. How should people be thinking about that?
Well, look, I think it was probably more of an issue early on in AI development. These companies have developed pretty advanced systems to try to tamp down on waste. They've developed what are sort of closed loop cooling systems to try to recycle the water. After it becomes warm, they cool it down again, they keep it going. So water is less of a problem now than it was before. And I actually I think that the energy use is more of a real concern, in particular because of how it can drive up rates for people in different communities, as well as just, you know, this stuff is very power hungry. And that I would argue is perhaps a more pressing concern than water consumption.
All right.
Can information shared with AI chatbots become public?
So we also inevitably got a lot of questions about privacy. This one came from Matthias J, who asked whether personal info that he might type into the chat bot, is it possible that that info could then end up popping up in answers that the chat bot gives to other users? Like could his personal information be spread that way?
So, as you might imagine, these companies have toggle switches to turn off data sharing or at least like how that your information can be used, but they are very much buried inside of the apps and not easy to find. I mean, that's just like tech company par for the course at this point. I will say a lot of the data is anonymized. They do use this stuff internally to train their systems. And detach your personal name from it. But at the same time, I still think it's just a good practice to not put anything crucially detailed about your life into these AI engines because they don't particularly know how all of these work in a lot of ways.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:36
2
Why are people asking questions about AI’s benefits and risks?
0:36–1:25
3
Does using Google Search mean you’re using AI?
1:25–2:21
4
How does AI affect water use and electricity costs?
2:21–3:23
5
Can information shared with AI chatbots become public?
3:23–5:26
6
Can AI hack your accounts, devices, or critical systems?
5:26–7:59
7
How could AI pose an existential threat to humanity?
7:59–10:01
8
Could we shut down AI with a kill switch?
10:01–13:48
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Headlines
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