A.I. Goes to War + Is ‘A.I. Brain Fry’ Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey’s Identity

24:39And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. So, Kevin, I feel like there is this new genre of blogs and social media posts all devoted to the idea that using AI is making people feel completely exhausted. Yes, and insane. there's a spectrum and it starts at exhausted and it goes all the way to insane.

25:24Sidant Carr, who's an engineer who builds tools for AI agents, wrote a blog post that I saw all over social media recently called AI Fatigue is Real and Nobody Talks About It. And he said that on one hand, he felt like he'd have the most productive quarter of his entire life as he uses all these new agentic coding tools. But on the other hand, he said he had felt more drained than ever before in his career. Yeah, I think people are starting to sort of use these tools more and come to grips with not only the effect it's having on their productivity, but also like on their brains and on their ability to kind of make sense of how quickly things are shifting.

25:59I really liked this essay that a venture capitalist wrote a few weeks ago about what he called token anxiety, which was this feeling that if you don't have a bunch of cloud code agents running parallel tasks for you while you sleep, you're feeling like you're missing out. And people at dinner parties in San Francisco are now talking about, bragging about how many agents they have running at all times. So there's something psychological happening to the people who are using this stuff a lot at work. Absolutely. And recently, we have begun to see some actual empirical research on the subject. So last month, researchers at UC Berkeley published some findings in the Harvard Business Review from an eight-month study observing workers at one 200-person tech company.

26:42And they found that AI was just making work a lot more intense. Workers were having to multitask a lot more. They felt like if they were not using a lot of AI tools, they were not keeping up with expectations. and that they used to have little breaks during the day where, you know, you go to the water cooler and talk about, you know, what's going to happen on Survivor this week. Well, that doesn't exist anymore, at least not at this company. And then last week, a group of researchers at BCG shared some similar findings in the Harvard Business Review. And this one really caught our eye because they found that under certain conditions, workers are experiencing what the researchers are calling AI brain fry.

27:23And to be clear, that is different than AI brain rot, which is what you get on TikTok when you start looking at videos of ballerina cappuccino. That's right. You know, and actually, they thought that Emmanuel Macron might have this, but that turned out to be AI French fry. So anyways, here's what AI brain fry is, Kevin. They're defining it as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity, which I think is kind of a funny idea. It's almost like you got a new coworker and they're really, really smart and it's sucking your life force out of your body. Yeah.

28:02So we want to know more about this study because I think it gives shape to a conversation that we're seeing rippling out across the economy as more and more managers are telling their workers to start using AI tools. It is clear that not all is well out there. People are starting to feel kind of bad, and they're maybe going to be less productive and likely to leave their jobs as a result. So to learn more about the findings in this study, we've invited the lead author, Julie Bedard. Julie is a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, as well as a fellow at the Henderson Institute, which is an internal research group and think tank at BCG.

28:42So let's bring her in. Let's do it. Let's get fried.

28:51Julie Bernard, welcome to Hard Fork. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about the study. You surveyed 1 ,488 workers in January of this year from all different disciplines, lots of different companies. What kind of questions did you ask these workers? Yeah, we asked them all kinds of questions around how they use AI, how they feel at work, you know, traditional burnout metrics. We asked some, you know, sort of proxies for cognitive ability. And we did throw in a question about AI brain fry. we said specifically, like, what do you think about this thing that could be AI brain fry? Like, are you feeling that?

29:30And tell us how you define AI brain fry and what the survey results told you about it. I mean, we defined it as really like a type of cognitive strain. So we said it was mental fatigue. It was related to excessive use of interaction with or oversight of AI. And it was about being beyond one's cognitive ability. So it's sort of like, I'm using the tool, but it feels beyond my ability to process it. So 14 % of people who use AI said that they felt this. And I was especially surprised by the extent to which they told us about it. We asked, you know, free-ended, like, just tell us, what is this thing?

30:09What does it show up? How does it feel to you? And people wrote a lot, right? Like, they wrote all these things about, feels like I have 12 browser tabs open in my head. Or it feels like I'm working so hard to manage the tools, I'm actually not really doing the work. Like I'm not actually managing what I'm supposed to be doing. I thought this was so interesting because on paper, if you told me, hey, we're going to give you a brilliant new assistant. They can answer all of your questions. They can do many of the tasks that you prompt it to do. That would sound very exciting. You know, sometimes I think, what would it be like to have like a really great podcast co-host?

30:44You know, somebody who kind of came in really prepared, asked a lot of great questions, had a great energy. You'll never know, buddy. And I'll never know. OK, but some of these people at work are now having that experience. But what you're saying is that that is not an energizing thing for them. It's draining them in some way. So what do you think is the mechanism by which people are coming to feel so exhausted by working with these systems? Yeah, well, I do think it's particular to these two things that we found, which is the oversight of the tools and the intensification of work due to AI. And what people reported specifically is they put in more mental effort, they felt more fatigue, and they felt information overload.

31:22And, you know, we need more research, right? Like this is new and we're learning. But my hypothesis, right, from working with a lot of different companies on this kind of thing is it is fun and exciting combined with we feel more pressure. Everybody's talking about AI, AI, productivity, right? And I think it's just nature. Okay, one more thing. Let me just sort of try this out, see what I can do. And we're not re-centering on, like, what was I actually trying to achieve today, right? We're not getting focused on some of the most important aspects of our work. Yeah, I'm curious how much you think this really boils down to fear.

31:58Because when I talk to people who are anxious about using AI at work, they circle around this issue that, like, maybe it's materializing as burnout or feelings of overwhelm, but, like at its core, what they're nervous about is that we now have these systems that can do parts of their job and they're worried about losing their jobs. Did anything in your study sort of get to any of the economic or sort of survival anxiety that these workers might have been feeling that might have been registering to them as burnout, but deeper were something else? Yeah. So this is probably a good time to separate the two because the brain fry is the cognitive piece.

32:36Burnout is, you know, physical and mental exhaustion. It's more emotional. It's more about how I feel about work and, you know, do I feel like I'm doing a good job at work? Burnout, we did not find a correlation with brain fry. So I just want to be really clear. It was very interesting. I thought we would. We did not. Brain fry is distinct. And then what we found is actually you could use AI to reduce burnout. So there's a lot of nuance. Maybe the last thing I would say is we did look at, you know, how positive or negative you feel. But typically the people who are afraid are not the people who are doing heavy oversight work, in my experience.

33:14Right? So there's sort of the people who are, you know, leveraging it more like a search tool. Right? They're not necessarily getting up that learning curve to more of the intensive interactions. In your study, you found that people in certain industries tended to experience AI brain fry more frequently. I was struck by marketing seems to be the place where people are feeling it the most. And people in areas like management and law and compliance reported significantly less brain fry. Do you have a theory on why that is? Yeah. So the short answer is, unfortunately, our survey, at least scientifically, was not designed to answer that question.

33:54But I have my theories based on other work that I've done. And, you know, three years ago, I worked with some of the models to try to predict skill disruption. I was trying to figure out, like, which jobs will change the most. And one of the jobs that changed the most from a skill perspective was marketing manager. A marketing manager was 90 % disrupted from a skill perspective. So that's sort of the first fundamental piece about marketing is, like, they've tended to adopt. and is a really different way of working because of the power of the tools. The next thing, if I really just think about like what is Brain Fry, like it's about the iteration, it's about the oversight.

34:35A lot of marketing lends itself to that. Like in the field, we see stories of folks who are doing image creation. They're doing synthetic consumer panels, right? They're spinning up a bunch of campaigns at the same time. And it really lends itself to that definition of like, when do they know they're done? When do they know the image is ready? Like, have they defined those success thresholds for themselves? I'm guessing they haven't yet, right? Like, they haven't figured out how do you do all the things to the right level of quality based on the outcome that you're trying to drive for. It makes sense to me that, like, the more your job is changing, the more kind of vertigo you're going to be experiencing as these new tools are introduced into your workplace.

35:16You know, Kevin, you just observed that managers seem to be experiencing this less. One of my theories was that, well, the reason is because they're already used to overseeing a bunch of digital abstractions since they're human employees, right? They're mostly just sending them Slack messages and sending them emails, hopefully meeting in person fairly regularly. But I think if you're a manager, you've already been used to sort of overseeing a bunch of stuff, and those people just sort of may have skills that people who have not yet been in management roles don't have. I think there's something to that.

35:48And I also wonder, Julia, if you think there's anything that is sort of inherently isolating about these tools. One thing that I've found with using AI for my own work is like, it's a single player video game, right? You're going back and forth with a machine. Very rarely am I in a room with other people using AI with them. And I wonder if part of the brain fry is sort of this siloing effect that these tools tend to have in the workplace where it's like everyone is chatting with their chatbots and their agents and no one is talking to each other. I'm glad you brought that up, Kevin, because back to this point around there's ways to use AI that actually reduce burnout.

36:26The people who were using it for repetitive tasks, they actually were doing those types of things. Like we found that they felt more socially connected at work. And so it's interesting, like in all the companies that I go to, I do various types of, you know, AI enablement and workshops. And one of the questions that I always get a lot of engagement on is what could you use AI for, which is like the three worst things on your to-do list, like the procrastination things, like the things you really wait and do. I mean, people love to talk about using AI for those. And my hypothesis is sometimes that's probably the repetitive work.

36:57And when you use it for that type of repetitive work, you actually reinvest the time in things that give you energy. So more work needs to be done, but I think I've seen that a bit in the field. And that's what our data would suggest as well. I want to ask about the three-tool cliff, which was a funny part of your study, basically, you found that the sort of number of AI tools that people are using at work has some sort of bearing on their productivity or their feelings of productivity. And then actually, when you switch from using three to four AI tools at work, there's something that happens where you all of us starting to start experiencing these things as not like a productivity enhancer, but actually just more of a stressful thing.

37:41Do you have a theory on why that is or why there seems to be this threshold? Well, I mean, classically, multitasking is not very productive, right? Like we all are, you know, seduced by the idea that we can do more and more and more. Yeah, Casey's playing Bellatra right now. Exactly. I am not. So, yeah, no, I think multitasking is part of that. But it's back to this point of like I'm overseeing more things. Like I'm actually doing more things. I'm starting more things. I'm stopping more things. I have more output to govern. You know, advice for leaders and managers are to help people understand this.

38:17Like one of the things I'd love to see is AI fluency right now mostly was defined by technical skills. Maybe in the last six to nine months, we've started to talk about the human skills that persist. I actually think cognitive sort of health should be part of defining AI fluency as we go forward. So both again, like individuals, like I can start to work differently with the tools, but also, again, managers and leaders can help protect against that. Let me ask one objection that some people might have to the research. You work for a consultancy. Consultants have an interest in making AI seem difficult so that companies will hire them to help manage it.

38:57Is there any chance that we're over-pathologizing what is going on here or sort of giving a scary-sounding name to what might just sort of be a temporary adjustment process as people start to use AI tools in the workplace? Yeah, I'm glad you've asked that. Maybe what I would say just first about kind of how I look at this and why I'm doing this research. So I am a consultant. Yes, I do advise companies. It's sort of the bread and butter of what I do. However, I'm also a researcher and I care really deeply about the data. And what's been very hard is our clients have wanted answers. Answers that we don't necessarily have all of the playbook for because it's so new and it's changing so rapidly.

39:39So I'd say just, you know, we really designed this to be a data-driven intervention. But beyond that, I think I've been for, like I said, for the last three years at the rock face. Like I've talked to more than a hundred companies. I've actually trained teams myself. I've been in the room with software developers, marketers, et cetera, trying to use these tools. And I see that like there's something there. Like there's a real strain where I'm trying to do the right thing, but something's getting in the way of me being productive with the tools. And we need to redesign work, hopefully, and particularly, you know, within teams to do that better.

40:13And like, if you're a worker out there, if people are listening to this and saying, yes, I am a worker, I am using AI tools at work, I am feeling the brain fry that you are describing, what can they do to help themselves? What has shown itself to be effective in your experience? Yeah, so if you're an individual worker, I think first, just acknowledging that this is a risk is the first thing. The second thing is really focusing on what you're trying to achieve. It's like back to that outcome piece. I mean, I know this is really basic, but if we were very clear about we're measuring outcomes, not output, and we're trying to get to the right answer, and what are those steps to help me get there?

40:56And so, you know, from our data, we would say the things you could do is one, engage your manager. So managers who engaged in questions, we saw brain fry go down. And I think it's about creating that sort of open dialogue about how should I use AI? When is it valuable? The other thing is to engage your team on this. So interestingly, when teams were using AI together and they had better integrated it into their workflow, so like how I hand off work to Kevin and Kevin does to Casey, we also saw brain fry go down. And, you know, I don't have the data to say exactly why, but my hypothesis would be is we're not bottlenecking work in one person.

41:34And we're creating actually like a much more effective system where we're getting the work done with the right outcomes together. It seems tricky to me, though, because I think there is just so much thrashing around in organizations right now. I think that the amount of knowledge that any given manager or worker has about AI right now is highly variable, whether their knowledge is like keeping pace with the capabilities of the latest models, that seems like an open question to me. So I have to say, like in the near term, I actually feel quite pessimistic about this. I'm sure there are going to be individual managers and teams that are like doing a great job, but at a like economy wide level, I think people are just absolutely all over the map on this.

42:19Yeah, I think so too. And I think it's also not clear to me that people are going to feel comfortable talking to their managers about how they're feeling about AI. Because I think a lot of people have these reasonably well-founded fears that like, if you tell your manager, like, I'm using AI to do this part of my job, the manager's first thought is, well, going to be, well, maybe I can lay you off. Maybe I don't need all these humans anymore. And I think we're seeing enough of that happening at big companies now where they're laying off big percentages of their workforce and attributing that to productivity gains from AI, that I think people are sort of feeling like, well, if I discover how to use AI for my work, I'm going to keep it to my damn self.

42:57Absolutely. Or, Kevin, I think we also see the reverse of that, which is you go on social media and you see people bragging about the insane lengths that they are going to, to be using AI at all times, to have their, you know, clod swarms up and running and coding, you know, while they sleep. And I feel this sort of deep insecurity embedded in that, which is if I'm not out there constantly telling you how much AI I'm using, you know, I might sort of be next on the chopping block. My reaction to that is this is why leaders play a really important role. Because I think, Kevin, your point is well taken.

43:28I think there are things individuals can do. There are absolutely things managers can do. But this is about systemic redesign of work. So, Casey, to your point, like, I don't think AI brain fry is going away unless we tackle it head on. Like, I don't think this is something that we can sort of just democratize and let everybody figure it out. Although I think there are things they can do to mitigate. But I'm really interested in actually like, okay, let's rethink how we get the job done. Like, you know, we are really bad at stopping work. Is all work valuable? Like if we had leaders engage more meaningfully in these questions, that's the work we need to do if we really want to address some of this.

44:07Julie, I'm wondering how much you went back and looked through sort of historical precedent here. When I was researching my last book, I was doing a lot of reading about the 1970s when a bunch of manufacturing workplaces like auto plants were getting all these new automated robots to help them do things like assemble cars. And there was this whole sort of nationwide panic about this. They called it Lordstown syndrome because the first sort of GM plant to have this level of automation was in Lordstown, Ohio. And, you know, Congress held hearings about this like sort of new wave of worker alienation that was happening in these blue collar manufacturing workplaces for a lot of the same reasons that to me seem like they rhyme with at least this AI brain fry idea.

44:55Workers were just saying basically like, I don't feel like a human anymore. I feel like I just push buttons and the robots do all the work. I don't talk to people at the office anymore. My managers have all these crazy productivity expectations of me. And I think what was interesting in that beyond just the parallels to what people are feeling in white-collar workplaces today was that the way that they sort of got out of that was through striking and through organizing and unionizing and getting a bigger share of the profits that these companies were making from all this productivity. So I guess I'm just wondering if you could riff on maybe some of the historical parallels before and where this may all be heading.

45:32Well, I always get the question around Excel and accountants, right? Did the rise of Excel lead to more or fewer accountants? Or even if you think back, actually, to the Industrial Revolution, one thing I actually think is a really interesting parallel there is the rise of technology at that time. In many cases, it wasn't until there was actually a re-architecture of the shop floor did we actually see the productivity gains. And to me, that's an interesting parallel to what we need to do with redesigning work. Hmm. Julie, one of the questions I wanted to ask you was like, you know, it is the role of the consultant to come in and say, I have talked to people all across this land and I understand the best practices and I will bring them to you and you can redesign your shop floor so that you can get back to being maximally productive.

46:21But for Kevin and I, we feel like the ground never stops shifting under our feet anymore. And that every few weeks, some new model comes along where the level of capability goes up. And maybe even something that I would not have been able to do in November, I actually can now. And before too long, maybe that's going to be a core expectation for me that is part of my job. So part of me wonders, like, is this actually a good time to be redesigning your workflows if, you know, three months from now, six months from now, the landscape might have completely changed all over again? Yes. And I have tackled this question many, many times.

47:01Here's my take. For companies who didn't do anything two years ago, they would have said the exact same thing to me, Casey. They would have said the tech is going to change. I'm going to wait. I want to be a fast follower. And honestly, there is some smart truth to that, right? Like pick your bets. Like I definitely wouldn't be doing this everywhere. But I think this is about learning a new capability and muscle as an organization. Like this is about teaching us how to change. So I would say like if you're not, if you're on the sidelines, yes, it's just going to keep moving. So you could have that excuse, you know, a year ago, two years ago, two more years.

47:38But you're also going to be missing out on that opportunity to build capability as leaders, to build that in your teams, to start upskilling people. I think there's actual things that you can do to support your talent to go on this journey with you. Yeah. And I would say, like, also, if I could add something to that from 1972, which is apparently where I love going on this subject, there was this sort of team at GM when the Lordstown Syndrome was taking over that had to figure out how to bring back the striking workers. And one thing they did was that they set up these new humanization councils where basically workers, people from the assembly line, were invited to give their thoughts on how the robots were being used and how the machines were set up and how the assembly lines were laid out.

48:24And feeling like they had some input and some control over their situation and were not just like passive bystanders actually seemed to help. So I don't know whether that's directly applicable to white-collar workplaces that are going through this today, but I do think that having some of the energy and ideas come from the quote-unquote bottom from the actual workers doing the individual contributions seems to matter. Yeah, I mean, Kevin, that's absolutely right. Like, how do we have more agency in this? And if you do that, you're going to be really user-centric. You're going to think about, like, what work do people enjoy doing?

48:59What work do they not enjoy doing? What are some of the barriers, cognitive or otherwise, to getting actually that work done? I think that's exactly right. Well, Juliet, thank you so much for giving us a lesson. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go deal with our AI brain fry. I actually have AI brain freeze. It happens if you use ChatGPT while you're drinking a Slurpee. Well, as long as it's not AI brain rot, we're fine. Yeah, yeah. We got there a long time ago. Thanks, Julie. Thanks, Julie. Thanks. When we cut back, the worst AI feature we've ever seen. Makes you more like Casey.

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51:22Well, Casey, I heard you got an exciting new job last week. I did, and it was the sort of job, Kevin, that I didn't even know that I had or was doing. So you had this crazy experience by being selected against your will and without your permission. As one of Grammarly, the AI kind of writing assistant, They have an expert network of people whose voices they have borrowed for the purposes of, I guess, making people's writing better. So, A, congratulations. Thank you. I assume the royalty checks are just overflowing your mailbox. But what actually happened here? You had a fascinating newsletter about this this week.

52:03Well, thank you. So this story I first learned about from The Verge. Their reporter, Stevie Bonifield, wrote about this. And it turned out that last summer, Grammarly had added this feature called Expert Review. I had not actually used Grammarly until this. Have you ever used it? So I decided, you know what? Why don't I sign up for the free trial and see what Grammarly can do for me? And if you go to the support page for this feature, it says that Expert Review, quote, is designed to take your writing to the next level with insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject matter experts.

52:41That sounds pretty cool, right? Well, scroll a little further down, Kevin, and you see the following disclaimer. References to experts in expert review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities. And so I read that and I thought, when you say that these insights come from leading professionals, what does the word from mean to you? because it sounds like what you're telling me is they don't come from those experts at all. Yeah, it's like when you see like a tub of margarine and it's like, you know, it's like butter style product in very small type.

53:22Yeah, they had sort of an expert network with an asterisk. None of the experts were actually consulted and we didn't actually hear from them in any way. Absolutely. So Stevie over at The Verge put a bunch of writing through expert review to see what sort of expert names would pop up. I was one of them. Congratulations. Thank you. You know, as you might imagine, Grammarly also picked a bunch of, like, actual famous people. So Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan. And I decided to put this thing through my own paces and loaded up some recent columns that we published in Platformer and pasted them in to see what sort of experts it would suggest.

54:01And while I was never able to get my own name, Kevin, I did see a succession of people that sort of felt like if you made a list of people who would hate this idea the most, that is who Grammarly had picked. So Timnit Gebru, a very vocal critic of AI systems, the way they are built and deployed, she showed up as a quote-unquote expert. So did Julia Engwitt, who is an investigative reporter. She writes for New York Times Opinion, and it used her writing, even though she has written a lot about how tech systems are used for privacy and surveillance in ways that are contrary to how we probably want them to be used.

54:44Julia, by the way, filed a class action complaint against Grammarly's parent company on Wednesday, seeking to stop them from, quote, trading on her name and those of hundreds of other journalists, authors, and editors, and to stop them from, quote, attributing words to them that they never uttered and advice that they never gave. Wait, can I ask a question about the mechanics of this? Okay, so you're writing in Grammarly, which I gather is sort of like a bolt-on to like a word processor. Yes. and it sort of detects the topic you're writing about and then pops up a little, like, clippy thing that's like, would you like Julia Angwin to edit this for you?

55:19Would you like Casey Newton to give this one a pass? Exactly. I'll actually show you an example here if you want to look at my laptop. You can see that here is the text that I wrote, and then in this little left-hand column, in this case, it just says Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher, my good friend, past hard forecast, legendary Silicon Valley journalist and podcaster, and someone who has absolutely no involvement with Grammarly. But her name just sort of pops up there with no disclaimer at all, right? And then when you sort of click in, it will offer this sort of Kara-inspired advice. And this is the point, Kevin, where I would like to talk about the kind of advice that this thing actually gives.

55:59Please. So you might expect, given that they were allegedly trying to borrow the expertise of real humans, that that expertise would seem like incredibly specific to that person, right? Instead, what you're getting is just a bunch of very generic advice about something that you might do. So I noted, for example, that, you know, we public, my colleague Ella Marcianos wrote a story and platformer last week where she went to a protest at OpenAI. And there was a suggestion that Grammarly had said was inspired by John Carreyrou, the legendary investigative journalist who brought down Theranos. And the advice basically boiled down to try opening with a colorful scene and use a lot of rich details and characters, right?

56:46Like sort of the most absolute generic advice that you would ever imagine getting and nothing like I would imagine the actual experience of sitting down with John Carreyrou and saying like, hey, how did you write Bad Blood? Yeah. How did it say that Kara Swisher would edit a story? So I will just read you the piece of advice that it gave me. This was also a piece of advice about this protest story. The fake AI Kara said, Could you briefly compare how daily AI users versus AI skeptics articulate risk, creating a through line readers can follow? A synthesizing sentence here may tighten the narrative arc.

57:26I'm laughing because that is the exact opposite of how I imagined Kara Swisher would edit someone. Yeah. It would just be like a string of like four letter words and like, you know, this sucks. Do it over again. Yeah. It would say, stop wasting my time. You know, like that, that would be the advice. The thing that I just read, I just want to acknowledge, like it is word salad. Do you know what I mean? Totally. Like you can tell what, I don't know what underlying model they're using here. I'm guessing it is not a frontier one, right? It's reading very like GPT-2 to me, you know? So this advice is so bad, but let's bring this into what I actually find upsetting about this, Kevin.

58:03Yeah, let's make this about you. No, well, here's the thing. I'm actually not going to make it about me because I have sort of just long since accepted that all of these companies have stolen all my intellectual property and are having their way with it. Where I really feel bad is for the subscribers to Grammarly. These people are paying$144 a year to be able to use this glorified spell checker, okay? And they load this thing up and then Grammarly gives them this service. And so if you are a paid subscriber to Grammarly, you are paying a subscription to get Grammarly to hallucinate on your behalf, right?

58:40To make up a bunch of stuff that is not true, right? This is not the actual sort of advice that any of these experts would provide. And you are paying for that service. when you just as easily could have taken whatever text you had written and pasted into a free chatbot and gotten generic advice that is just as not great as what you were getting here. Right, and the truly crazy thing about this is that despite charging all this money for people to use this substandard AI product, they are not, to my knowledge, passing any of this along to you or Kara or John Carreyrou or any of these authors whose identities they have purloined for the purposes of selling this product?

59:19No, they're not. And, you know, look, I think that all of the AI companies just have a huge entitlement problem in general. You know, I think that they think, look, if it's on the internet, it is in the public domain and it belongs to us. And they don't spend enough time thinking about how they are destroying the incentives for anyone to create a public open internet, right? If you feel like you're just going to get screwed in this way. So I do think that that is really unfortunate. Yeah. So what did Grammarly say when you started writing about this? Well, when I reached out to them, they thought about it for a while and then finally came back to me on Monday and said, you know what?

59:59We've thought about it. And if you're one of our experts who we didn't consult and we're not paying, you can now opt out of this feature. How nice of them. So you can now send an email and say, I don't want to be a part of this system anymore. And so, you know, I wrote the story and got a lot of comments on social media like, you know, geez, it really seems like the least they can do. But, Kevin, as we record this, I actually have some breaking news. What's that? So I got an email from the spokeswoman over at Superhuman today. Superhuman is what Grammarly now calls itself. They did a rebrand last year, and they're now sort of a bundle of mediocre products.

1:00:38and they sent me a note and said that after careful consideration, we have decided to disable expert review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented or not represented at all. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Thanks for holding us accountable. We're committed to getting it right next time and we'll be transparent about how we improve. Wow. Results. Newton gets results. Newton getting some results. I mean, look, it's clear to me that they are embarrassed about this, but this is one where the whole time I was using this thing, I was like, who was the product manager?

1:01:19What were the meetings? Imagine the meeting. Was there a lawyer involved in that? Who was the lawyer that signed off and said, yes, feel free to misrepresent that you are getting inspiration from all of these different editors. So the thing is such a spectacular misfire. And it really made me wonder, what is the future of a product like Grammarly? And that's kind of where I want to end this. You just finished writing a book. You presumably could have used some sort of AI writing assistance. Did it ever occur to you to use Grammarly? No. Why not? Because I don't know anything about it and I don't need it.

1:01:57And I have other tools. Well, so talk to me about these other tools because this is what I think the real story is, which is like in 2009, when Grammarly launched, you didn't have a lot of options for writing assistance, right? You had whatever spell checker was in Google Docs, and that was probably going to be the best tool available. Fast forward to today, though, you got ChatGPT, you got Gemini, you got Claude. There are free versions of these services. If you want a quick grammar check, you can get it. My guess is that's the experience that you just had. Yeah, if I want a grammar check, I'm just copying and pasting into one of the AI models.

1:02:28I'm not using a purpose-built thing for that, or it's now built into Google Docs. Yeah. And to emphasize a point, when you're using Claude, as you did in your book, you're using the latest and greatest version of Claude. If you are using some sort of startup that is using the API of Anthropic, they're not actually incentivized to give you the frontier model most of the time, because that's going to be very expensive. So they're going to give you a model that's a couple generations old because they can get a lower price and their margin is going to be better on it. So we've talked a lot in recent weeks about the potential for a SaaS apocalypse where these companies that are selling these sort of, you know, business-y prosumer services are going to get crushed by the fact that there is now just a cheaper way to do it.

1:03:14I wonder if you think that Grammarly might be one of those. No, I think it's going to be part of the asspocalypse, which is for software that absolutely sucks, that there's no reason to be using in the first place. And I think that software has a hard road ahead. I just do not think there is a future for this product. And like, when I saw this, yes, I did have the moment of like, outrage is too strong a word. I felt supremely annoyed, okay? I did feel like very annoyed that this was happening. But again, it's like, I know all these companies have like all read my stuff, you know? You could go into Claw today and say, draw inspiration from Casey Newton and edit my piece.

1:03:49Claw is not going to refuse and say, I don't have the rights to his intellectual property. It's just going to do it. And it's not going to notify me and it's not going to pay me, right? So I do think that there is a distinction between what these companies are doing, but I just want to point out that in some way, like, the violation is the same. The bigger thing to me was this really feels like desperation, you know? And I think that more and more of these consumer sort of internet services that have been able to get away by offering a pretty subpar product and selling it to you for more than$100 a year, I think the rude awakening is showing up.

1:04:27You know, where all of a sudden, if you have a subscription to your Claude or your Gemini or your ChatGPT, you're probably going to be able to get more from that and do more things. And you're just not going to need the subscription anymore. It's exactly like when we were talking about Vibe Coding and being like, why are we paying Squarespace all this money, right? I think the why are we paying Grammarly all this money moment is coming. Yeah, and I should say, if you want to rip off Casey Newton's editing style without his permission or without compensating him, you should just do that in a free chatbot.

1:05:02His advice is not worth that much. Trust me, I have seen his edits, and I would not pay$140 a year for them. I'm a great editor, okay? Ask around. You should really ask around. I offer very detailed, thoughtful feedback. No, this is horrible. I'm very glad you exposed it. I'm very glad they went back and said, we're not going to do this anymore. But I think this kind of thing is going to keep happening, unfortunately, because there is money to be made. And if you can get away with it, you're going to do it. You know, an interesting question might be like, is there a good version of this feature?

1:05:40And what would that be? Do you think so? If they had come to you and said, hey, Casey, we're starting this new expert review feature. and every time someone edits their emails to sound more like Casey Newton, we're gonna give you 10 cents. Would you have done that? I mean, I don't know. In general, I am in favor of AI companies trying to strike deals with creative people that say like, we are going to give you some sort of, we're gonna essentially share the revenue that is based on the creative work that you have done. So certainly I would like to see some kind of explorations like that. But, you know, I think about some of the editing I've done.

1:06:20You know, I can remember like working with one writer once and she was working like on a kind of narrative feature story. And it just made me think of Catherine Boo, the great features writer for The New Yorker for a long time, wrote this incredible book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. And I was like, go read Catherine Boo. Like, go read Catherine Boo pieces in The New Yorker. She's the goat. And see how she like evokes characters and see how she kind of structures her narratives. and like so can i imagine an ai tool that like you were having a conversation with that also said like you need to read some katherine boo and click here and hey if you already have a new yorker subscription maybe you can log in right here and we'll sort of bring up some of the relevant passages so yes i do think that there is value in in sort of guiding writers to actual experts the key is you have to guide them to the actual expertise right not just what your llm is hallucinating Right.

1:07:12That would be my worry if they had come to me, which they did not, which I'm a little bit offended by, frankly. They put you in the feature. Was I not worth ripping off? I'm right here, Grammarly. I'm pretty good. but no, had they come to me and said hey, we want to make you part of this, I would have said well, how good is your model? Because my worry about something like that would be that someone would open up their word processor and start writing their business memo and say make it sound more like Kevin Roos and then it would make it sound terrible and generic and people would blame me and I would kind of get the bad rap for allowing my reputation to be laundered in this way.

1:07:50I was texting with my friend Matt Honan, who's the editor of the MIT Technology Review, and he found that he was also being used as an expert. And when he clicked on the expertise that he was allegedly providing the user of Expert Review, he looked to see what source they were citing, and it was a speaker bio that he had submitted from an event. So it's like, based on Matt's speaker bio, you should have used to work at Wired? Like, I don't even know what it said. But again, it's just like, they just did not think this through. Yeah. Well, now, as a result of Grammarly pulling back this feature request, if you want your emails to sound like Casey Newton, you're going to just have to put a bunch of typos and random punctuation in yourself manually.

1:08:37And if you really want to know what I think of your writing, it's that you should start a podcast. That's where the future's going. Okay. Casey, I'm glad you escaped Grammarly servitude.

1:09:06Innovation loves speed. Risk doesn't. For most organizations, that tension never goes away. Every time a new AI capability appears, the pressure to move fast collides with the responsibility to move safely. One Trust is built for this moment. Their AI-ready governance platform provides context to understand your data, controls to stay ahead of risk, and confidence to act boldly. Governing well and moving fast aren't trade-offs. They're complementary done right. That is governance that helps you go. Visit onetrust.com backslash AI. Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Viren Pavich.

1:09:48We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Original music by Mary Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemistow, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com with whatever fake advice I just gave you in Grammarly, and I'm sorry for it.

1:10:42Holy shit! They just disabled expert review in Grammarly! Whoa! Yay! You're free.