Why Scott Shut Down His AI Persona, His Daily Routine, and When to Give Kids Money
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Welcome to Office Hours of Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursatpropgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one. Our first question comes from Pygmy Nuthatch on Reddit. Pygmy Nuthatch, where do they get these names? They say, I'd like to ask some questions about your Google persona. What were the original goals of the project? Do you have any future plans for PropG AI offerings?
I was lucky enough to get to use the persona. It helped me with a complex career question. The tool or something similar could do a lot of good, though we all understand and respect the reasons you gave for ultimately deciding not to move forward with an expanded launch. Thanks. So just some background here. I have students, and then the best students, I ask to be my graduate student instructors. I usually have four or five because I usually have about 180 students. And I say, you're running the class. I'm just the talent. And then one of my graduate student instructors went on to go to work for Google about seven, eight years ago. She's been very successful there. And she contacted me about a year ago and said, we're doing a bunch of profiles where we crawl a person's information or all of their IP and create a character AI for them such that people can ask them questions.
And they were doing some in the health space, some in the
Why did Scott shut down his AI persona?
business space, and then some of the academic space, and they asked me if I'd be interested. And I said, sure. And there was no commercial agreement, no money involved, but the impetus and the motivation was the following. I get between 20 and 30, that's conservative, outreaches a day from single mothers, from young men, from people in the mental health profession, from high school teachers, looking for help, advice, insight, basic questions. Where did you find this piece of information? Here's an idea. And I can't get to 1% of them. So I thought, how could I come up with something that would say, hey, here's my character AI, ask it the same question, and there's an 80% probability it'll get it 80% right.
And so we started working on this thing about a year ago. And then in that time, things changed dramatically. And that is character AIs became a thing. And it was discovered that a lot of young people people, miners, were engaging these character AIs and starting to develop these, not even parasocial relationships, but in-depth relationships that oftentimes led to very dark places. And so when it came out, it was launched, I went on it, and I just was so uncomfortable with the idea of contributing to the sequestration of young men from their parents, their mentors, and their friends. And I thought, if I'm in any way giving a young man an excuse to spend less time pursuing offline relationships, then that is bad and I don't wanna engage in it.
So it was up for about four hours. And the Twitter philosopher, I think his name's Naval, he said something that struck me. He's actually, I think, a venture capitalist, but I think of him as a philosopher. There's a few things I miss about Twitter, but he's one of them. I found his stuff was really interesting. He said that if you're having trouble making a decision, the answer is usually no. And I was just so uncertain and uneasy about this thing. And it had only been up four hours. And I felt bad because... the good people at Google, and they were good people. I think the world of this woman and my interaction with this team at Google had been nothing but positive. And they'd spent so much time on it, and I just finally, I said, I'm just not fucking comfortable with this thing.
And I called them and said, can you take it down? I just don't want to be part of the character AI dilemma right now until we figure out what the guardrails are and how to handle it.
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Chapters
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