Character.AI’s Teen Chatbot Crackdown + Elon Musk Groks Wikipedia + 48 Hours Without A.I.

26:43And I think overall presents like a pretty good picture of like who I am and what I have done. Oh my God. It's so long. It's incredible. I'll say it. It's too long. Like nobody actually wants that much information about me. Wait, can I read the family and relationship section to you? Because this is breaking some news here on this podcast. It says Newton is married to a lawyer. Congratulations. I thought your boyfriend worked in Anthropoc. Well, he does. And so we have found the first of many mistakes that you will find in Rockopedia. He maintains a low public profile regarding his personal relationships.

27:16Not true can't stop talking about it with no further details on partnerships or children disclosed in available interviews or profiles yeah so um i guess i'll try to say more about my boyfriend to try to help rock a pd out goodreads profile here newton exhibits a keen interest in reading false he hasn't read a book in years evidenced by his goodreads profile cataloging 112 books with ongoing reads including cahokia jazz by francis spufford the saint of bright doors by vajra Chandra Sekera and others spanning fiction and nonfiction. Let me give a shout out to the Saint of Bright Doors, by the way, that's, that is the best book I've read this year.

27:54Super, super good. So yeah. So there, I mean, there's like kind of something a little creepy about it, right? It's like, we're going to like go in and look at all of your public profiles and kind of see what we can scrape in. But I do think it like winds up putting together a kind of, you know, decent picture of my life. Now, for the most part, I've been able to stay out of a lot of culture wars and political controversies. And so, you know, I didn't see anything in there that made me, you know, really roll my eyes and feel bad. If, though, you are an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump, you may find that you're getting a much friendlier treatment on Grokipedia than you would on Wikipedia.

28:28Okay, so let's talk about the politics of Grokipedia. Where does it differ meaningfully from standard issue Wikipedia? So because it is designed as a kind of right-wing alternative, when you pull up articles that have been the subject of a lot of culture warring, you will just find material that is much closer to the conservative or Republican view. So for example, if you pull up the article on Donald Trump, and there is what I would say is a very friendly view of the events of January 6th, 2021, that sort of goes out of its way to talk about how, you know, Democrats sort of overstated the risk to democracy.

29:10So I will say that in some ways I expected Grokipedia to go further to the right. And like, you know, do not get it wrong. There is a lot of really racist stuff in Grokipedia. There's a lot of anti-trans stuff in Grokipedia. But like, as somebody who has spent more than a share of time like reading 4chan and like R the Donald back in the day, the stuff that I'm seeing in Grokipedia is not as bad as that. What is the strategy here? Like, what is Elon Musk hoping to accomplish? Is he hoping that people will, instead of going to Wikipedia to learn about stuff, go to Grokipedia and that we will sort of educate people differently in this country?

29:47Yeah, I think, you know, I read a quote in the New York Times article about the Grokipedia launch where they had some scholar who said, like, ever since people began to study things, people have wanted to control knowledge and how it is distributed, right? And I think Grokipedia is just a step in that direction. If you believe that Wikipedia has a chokehold on the public imagination, if you're concerned that Wikipedia data is being used as a pillar of most of the big large language models that we're now using every day, if you wanted to inject other views into the populace, you might want to create something like Grokipedia.

30:23Yeah, I'm also wondering how much of it has to do with the actual training of Grok, because one thing that we know is that Elon Musk has been frustrated in the past that despite his best efforts, it keeps sort of hoovering up all this data from the Internet and that makes it, he thinks, too liberal. And so I'm wondering if this is kind of like an effort to give Grok a new kind of substrate of knowledge that it can learn from so that it's not reliant on Wikipedia. I mean, it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much original work Grok is really doing. Like, I think that it is almost certainly showing you a wider range of sources than you might find on Wikipedia, or at least a wider range of right-leaning sources.

31:07But it's not as if there are a bunch of, like, you know, right-leaning Grokipedia editors who are going out there, doing original research or something. This is very much akin to a deep research report that you might get a ChatGPT or a Gemini to do for you, except that this time it's Grok. Right. So how much of a big deal is this? Are you seeing reactions from people who are scared that this actually will replace Wikipedia? Is this just kind of like one of Elon's many passion projects? You know, so far, I don't know that Grokipedia has made much of a splash in the mainstream, aside from just being a curiosity.

31:46If you follow Elon Musk on X and you visit X a lot, it is something that you've heard a lot about. And I've seen conservatives and the tech right talking up certain Grokipedia pages is like, aha, this is so much better than Wikipedia. So it is kind of having that moment right now. How long does that last? I don't know. You know, Wikipedia is one of the very most popular sites on the internet, and it's going to take a lot to displace that, right? I think for a lot of people going to Wikipedia is just muscle memory. So barring some sort of massive leverage that Elon Musk is able to get in distributing Grokipedia to more people, I think it's probably going to remain more of a curiosity.

32:26Yeah. And do you think this contributes to sort of the fears that people have about the decline of Wikipedia? Because we've been talking for years now about how generative AI chatbots are now people's increasingly their first step toward learning about a new subject, where maybe before, you know, if you wanted to learn about the, I don't know, the Franco-Prussian war, you would have like gone to the Wikipedia page for it. But now you might pop open chat GPT and just ask for information and he would sort of go out and look at Wikipedia and other sources for you and synthesize it. So is this like coming at a time where Wikipedia is already pretty vulnerable as a result of AI?

33:02I think to the extent that Wikipedia is vulnerable, well, Grokipedia doesn't really pose much additional threat. I think by far the larger threat to Wikipedia is what you just said. It is that more and more people are accessing the information via chatbots, via Google search results. And the main consequence of that for Wikipedia is that if Wikipedia can't get you to go to the site, it also can't get you to contribute. It can't get you to update articles. It can't get you to become an editor. And so the fear is that as traffic to Wikipedia declines, the quality of the site will decline as well.

33:37And in fact, just this month, Wikipedia published a blog post in which they said they are starting to see traffic declines due to generative AI. So that's a very real threat to the encyclopedia. Grokipedia, I think, isn't quite that. Yeah, I mean, whether or not Grokipedia takes off as a product, I think that this larger effort to delegitimize Wikipedia is quite possibly going to be successful because I think that people on the right especially have identified that, you know, even though Wikipedia looks like this sort of canonical thing that is just sort of appearing on the internet, like it is made by people, a relatively small percentage of people on Wikipedia are actually contributing to it.

34:20And so I think they have recognized that this is another set of refs that they can essentially work are the Wikipedia editors and the moderators who control the rules. And maybe that is sort of the larger victory that they see as being possible here is maybe they can just kind of undermine the sort of longstanding traditions and norms of the Wikipedia community and get it to behave more like Grokipedia. We'll see. I think Wikipedia has been really resilient so far. You know, there actually have been hearings in Congress about this alleged bias in Wikipedia, which I find outrageous because Wikipedia should be able to say whatever it wants about vaccines or January 6th or whatever else, right?

35:02It doesn't have any legal obligation to the federal government to provide one set of views over another. But that does get, Kevin, at why, on balance, I'm actually glad that Grokipedia exists. Why? Because I think if you see something online and you get really mad and you think that there is a better and smarter view out there, I think the best thing to do is to just put it up on the web, right? Not in every single case. There's some like horrible things that I wish you wouldn't post on the web. But look, if you want to have a debate about January 6th, go ahead and create a web page, right? That is my preferred, you know, resolution to political conversations, as opposed to we are going to start having hearings to try to pressure Wikipedia into having one particular political view.

35:47So I view Grokipedia as silly and bad and offensive as it can sometimes be as still a case of countering speech with more speech. And I think that that is overall a better way to have a democracy. Yeah, so I understand that take. But I'm also wondering if the fact that Grokipedia is AI-generated makes it any different. Like, is the answer to, like, speech that you don't like really having a chatbot go out there and write a bunch of slop text for you? I think that is a good question. And maybe we should sort of value Grokipedia less than we do Wikipedia for that reason. At the same time, humans are involved in the creating and the shaping of Grokipedia, right?

36:28Like, it seems very unlikely to me that what we're reading on some of these really high-profile entries has not been edited or tweaked by someone, right? So I think I still see a pretty strong human hand in here, and that's why, on balance, it still does feel like counter-speech to me. Wow, that's a very pro-First Amendment take from you. Yeah. Your lawyer husband must be so proud.

36:54I just think like this inevitably ends with like Elon Musk, like forcing a state government to like teach Grokopedia in schools. I mean, you, you joke, but like, that's probably only a half joke. And I wouldn't be surprised if it does become like the curriculum in Texas in 2028. So we should absolutely keep an eye on that. And there are places it can go bad, but like at the end of the day, one thing about me as an elder millennial is I love the web. And so I'm generally in favor of people making websites. Because look, at the end of the day, the truth is most websites just get ignored, but they wind up being useful for like some people, right?

37:34So look, I'm not going to be visiting Rockopedia every day. But if the uncle who you're going to have your worst conversation with at Thanksgiving this year wants to use it, that's fine. I mean, I just my bigger question is like whether this whole category of kind of the online encyclopedia is just obsolete, right? Like I love Wikipedia as an idea, as an expression of collective knowledge, as what I consider like a true gem of the internet. It's a miracle. It's a miracle. And I cannot tell you the last time I went to Wikipedia. Really? Yes. Oh, I'm there every day. Really? Yes. So I feel like, you know, I go there now when I need to check something that a chatbot has told me, but I do not really go there as my first stop on any sort of given fact-finding mission because my consumption has shifted almost entirely to these chatbots and to search engines, we should say.

38:38I still do use Google on occasion. So I just wonder if there is any future in which Grokipedia, Wikipedia, any of these sites have a realistic hope of making it, or if they just sort of end up being kind of crammed into the chatbots and that becomes people's primary way of finding things out. Well, I think you're onto something real here because of all of the products that Elon Musk has launched in the past 10 years, Grokipedia does seem like by far the least forward-looking. Yes. Right. Now, it is possible that you could take the contents of Grokipedia and find other ways to distribute them. And maybe that's what he will do.

39:15You know, notably, he is not relying on human contributors to bring in the knowledge or because he just stole most of what was on Wikipedia. Those humans already did the work for him. But he can just take the material that he already has and sort of find new things to do with it, update it via conservative media of whichever flavor he likes. And so maybe that's the way that this thing winds up being a little bit more forward-looking than it seems today. Yeah. What's your Grokopedia take? Well, let me spend a little more time on it. Let me see what it has to say about the Hard Fork podcast. Oh, do we have a page?

39:51We don't have a page. Oh, my God. Okay, I hate this thing. Oh, my God. We could do tuning fork, Clark Fork River, or pastry fork. Let's see what it has to say about pastry fork.

40:05When we come back, why author A.J. Jacobs collected rainwater and foraged food while spending two days with no AI.

40:35Well, Casey, you and I are AI maximalists. We use this stuff all the time. But today we're going to talk with someone on the show who went 48 hours without using AI at all. An unthinkable idea to me. Suffice to say, an experiment that would not have occurred to the two of us to try. Yes. So today on the show, our guest is AJ Jacobs. A.J. is a great writer and a former mentor of mine. He was actually my first boss in journalism. I helped him with a book many years ago, about 20 years ago now, God, about the Bible. He is known for these kind of immersive experiments where he throws himself deeply into a topic.

41:11He wrote a book about following the Constitution literally. He wrote a book about following the Bible literally. He's also the host of the Puzzler podcast. And this week, he published an article in the New York Times titled 48 Hours Without AI. in which he sets out to live his life with as little AI contact as possible. Yeah, and you know, my expectation as I started to read this piece was that it would be pretty easy to go 48 hours without using AI, but for reasons that AJ gets into, it actually winds up being quite difficult. Yeah, you essentially have to time travel back to the 1800s to avoid contacting anything that has any form of AI in it.

41:49And I think it's a useful point in addition to being a very fun article because it does drive home just how intertwined all this stuff is with the way we live our lives today. And it's not inevitable that it's going to continue getting more intertwined, but I think it's a pretty good bet. Yeah, so this is a story that begins with AJ forswearing modern electricity and ends with him foraging for food in Central Park. And I think it's time to bring him in and talk about it. Yes, his life sort of resembled that show Naked and Afraid, where you have to just kind of find your way out of the forest. That's what living without AI in the year 2025 is like, according to A.J.

42:26Jacobs. Let's bring him in.

42:34A.J. Jacobs, welcome to Hard Fork. Delighted to be here. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Casey. So you just did this experiment where you went 48 hours without using AI or machine learning. And I want to talk to you all about that. But can we just start with the photos at the top of this story? You are wearing what I would describe as a sort of very loud outfit that has some red checkered pants and a paisley flower print shirt and these glasses that look kind of like Elton John or the ones you get after you get your pupils dilated. Right. I brought them along. So why the fit? Explain this. Well, the premise of the article was, as you said, try not to interact with AI or machine learning for 48 hours.

43:25And one thing I realized quite early on was it's everywhere. It is everywhere, especially machine learning. So clothing designers are experimenting with it in terms of designing. But also anything on the supply chain is totally machine learning optimized. They figure out how to route it, how to pack it using machine learning. So I'm like, well, anything in my closet that's 10 years old or less is probably off limits if I'm really being strict. But I did have deep in my closet my grandfather's 1970s Paisley shirt and red and white checkered pants. And he went through an Austin Powers phase. He was very much a dandy.

44:10And I was like, all right, I got to do it, even though it made me very uncomfortable. Although my wife said that it was the coolest I had looked since we've been married, which was insulting and also flattering. I think you got the timing right. I think it's been so long since those clothes were in fashion that they now actually do look fashionable again. Yeah. Yeah. AJ, let me ask you this. As you headed into this experiment, what is or was your relationship with AI? Are you the sort of person who was using generative AI tools like ChatGPT every day? Was it a more occasional thing? Or where were you on that spectrum?

44:49Yeah, I would say I'm in the middle. I'm not a Luddite, but I don't like have it controlling my life. I did use it for research, and it was actually not bad. I was impressed. Got it. So you were not trying to prove that, like, AI is bad. I just remember, like, some of your other experiments that you've done over the years have included following the rules of the Bible. That was sort of at a time when people were talking about taking the Bible very literally. And I knew that part of why you were doing this was like a kind of attempt to like say, well, here's what would happen if you just went all the way toward your stated belief.

45:23So there was sort of a point in there about the dangers of literalism. Were you trying to make a similar point about the dangers of AI here? I did not go in with an axe to grind on this one. It was more the thesis says, where is AI hiding? Because I don't believe AI is all good or all bad. I didn't believe that before, and I don't believe it now. I think in some cases, it's awesome. Thank God that machine learning checks whether there's credit card fraud. But on the other hand, it has huge risks and has divided our country. So I was not coming in saying it's all good or all bad, just where is it?

46:03And also, any lessons can I learn from spending two days without it? So let's get into the experiment. I feel like the biggest choice you had to make at the outset was, how am I going to define what counts as AI? and you decided to include machine learning. Talk to us a bit about kind of how you set the boundaries for how you were going to run this thing. Right. All the experts I talked to said AI is a big umbrella and you've got generative AI like ChatGPT and that's getting all the heat now. But AI has been around for decades because the umbrella also covers machine learning. It basically covers these machines that can evolve, that can look at new data and change.

46:49The way I explained it in a paragraph that was cut was that I see... This is why I love freelance writers. They harbor so many grudges, and it's great to be able to have a podcast to air them out. I bet you had a better idea for the headline too, didn't you, AJ? I know, what is this crap? No, he was delightful. It was just a matter of space. But I said traditional programs are input A yields output B, whereas machine learning is more like a recipe that changes. So you have a recipe, but then there's data that comes in and the recipe says, oh, people really like sugar. I'm going to add sugar. So it evolves.

47:34And the reason I thought it was important to put the both in is because I feel they both have this great potential and great risk. They both have these unintended consequences. When you have machines that can change and you can't predict what they're going to do, that is, as I said, sometimes wonderful. Sometimes you end up with YouTube algorithms that turn us all into flat earthers. Right. So let's talk about some of the things you did on this experiment. My sort of characterization of this up top would be that you had to basically become Amish for 48 hours. You were. That was a line again. Did that also get cut out of the story?

48:17That was in there. I said Amish cosplay was one, or Laura Engelwilder. I was another comparison. Yes, because pretty much anything that's electric or electronic includes machine learning, including electricity itself, because Con Edison uses tons of machine learning to figure out where is the demand going to be. So, yeah, I had to go Amish. I did have a solar powered generator, so I could plug in a lamp for a while. But yeah, it started the moment I woke up. My iPhone uses facial recognition. That's AI. But even that goes further than that. You know, the iPhone camera uses AI. The Gmail uses machine learning, even without the new AI features of Google.

49:05and water. That was a surprise because the New York Reservoir System uses machine learning to help. They want to make clear that humans make the final decisions because they don't want people to freak out. But the machine learning helps them figure out where's the demand and when should we make repairs. So how did you stay hydrated for two days? Well, I did plan ahead, which maybe was a little bit of cheating, but I put a bowl out or several bowls on my windowsill in the weeks before to collect rainwater. And I didn't get giardia or anything, so I feel lucky. How much rainwater were you able to collect before you started the experiment?

49:45Well, that's why I had several bowls and it was weeks. So yeah, it was not ideal. It was not ideal. So there's another piece of this experiment that I wanted to ask you about, which is that you had to forage for a meal in Central park? Now, I was not under the impression that food itself was generated by AI, but what am I missing here? Well, of course, it all depends how you define it. I mean, food is really intertwined with AI. Industrial farms use AI and machine learning for figuring out whether to water the crops, when to plant them. Food is, of course, shipped along the supply chain, which is AI optimized.

50:26So if I'm being really strict, which of course I was, I was like, well, maybe I can't eat anything from the grocery. So to be super safe, I found a video where a man named Wildman Steve Brill is his name, and he teaches you how to find edible food in Central Park. So I took him up on that and I went foraging and I got some what are called plantain weeds in Central Park, which I ate and not great, not great. They taste like dirt, but they didn't kill me. They didn't kill me. That's that park to table cuisine that is so popular in New York these days. They're so ahead of the curve over there. I ate some plantain weeds from a guy in Central Park once and I saw the fifth dimension.

51:16That's right. I've seen all those plantain weed dispensaries that are popping up all over the city lately. Now, Kevin, as AJ is describing his experience of depriving himself of so much AI and so much technology, I'm wondering how that lands on you. Because I think if I were to come to you and to say, hey, all generative AI services are going to be down for the next 10 minutes, I think your heart would seize up. You'd start having palpitations. I'd see a cold sweat running down your forehead. So was this a challenging story for you to read? You know, it was. And I was thinking, how would I do at this?

51:51And then I was thinking I would probably, this would probably be good for me. I should probably do this like every couple months. I should do 48 hours of no technology at all. I mean, we've talked on the show. You've gotten to the point where you'll put your phone in a prison, you know, overnight if you feel like you're developing too strong of an attachment to it. But, you know, at the same time, I have never seen you run an experiment quite like this. Yeah, this is true. I have taken breaks from technology. I was there was a period where I was doing this like digital Sabbath thing where like one day a week I would try not to use my phone or send any emails, but that was too hard.

52:24So I quit that. But AJ, did this experiment? We should we should continue talking about this experiment because I want to get to the takeaways here. So you have this 48 hour period where you're not using AI. And then like, what is your emotion upon reaching the end of this period and being able to use this stuff again? Well, I had a lot of mixed emotions. I mean, on the one hand, there was relief of being cut off. Like you've talked about it, the digital detox. There was also annoyance. I mean, it is super annoying to try to, you know, you can't Google. You can't Google. My Encyclopedia Britannica is not up to date.

53:05On the other hand, it was terrifying. That was another feeling I had because I realized how omnipresent AI is. And as I've said, it's not all bad, but it has these huge risks. So it was really a mixture of emotions, which maybe is the right way to react to AI. It's not a monolith. It's not black and white. It's super confusing. How much easier would this experiment have been if you had limited it to generative AI? If you said, okay, machine learning is fine, that's pretty well just kind of integrated into all services as you reported out here. But what if you just sort of said, well, I'm not going to use ChatGPT and other sort of generative AI services?

53:50I think it would have been easier for now. In five years, I think that line will be erased. I also think it would have been hard to research because, as I confess in the article, I used a ton of ChatGPT to research this article. And that was another takeaway was how to use ChatGPT because ChatGPT sensed the thesis of my article. It knew I wanted to find machine learning and AI everywhere. So it was like serving me up these half-truths. And I had to give it some tough love and say, ChatGPT, pretend I've got the opposite thesis. I don't want AI and ML to be anywhere. Tell me now, what are the reliable sources?

54:36Because, yeah, as you know, it's just, you know, an obsequious machine. Yeah. I mean, I think if there's one takeaway from your piece, for me, it's that like the line between sort of classical AI or machine learning and generative AI is like thin and getting thinner. Right now, people are very angry at generative AI. They say, oh, it takes all this electricity, it uses all this water. These companies are sort of foisting it onto us. So I think there will be people who read this article and say, well, he's making sort of this inevitabilist argument that there's nothing we can do and we have to live in this world and it's too late to sort of turn back the tide.

55:18And I think what I came away feeling from your article was that, yeah, in five years, the sort of difference between generative AI and classical AI may be so small as to be invisible. And we will just sort of think of this stuff as being on a continuum that starts with like Netflix recommendations and image recognition and self-driving cars and like goes through chatbots and all that other stuff. Well, I mean, there's like an old joke in the tech industry that AI is just whatever we call whatever the computer can't do yet. Right. Right. Like we've just sort of been on this like advancing frontier forever.

55:53And yeah, it keeps being able to do more stuff. Right. Can I just add one thing about the inevitabilist part? Because I don't want that to be the takeaway. I don't want people to give up. I feel we need more transparency. I love the law that you were talking about, the California law about watermarking AI images. We need more transparency on what's AI and what is AI generated. I'm in favor of more regulation. I mean, it is such a powerful technology. And I also want more control over my algorithms. I hate that Facebook has so much control. Maybe there's a way to go in and make it show me articles that I disagree with.

56:34Maybe, but it would take me days to figure it out. So there are things we could do. It's not inevitable. We got to take action because we are somewhat in control of where AI and ML are going to take us. I mean, I guess I'm curious what you think, AJ, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about religion as well as AI, how far that comparison holds. Because I often tell people that being in San Francisco in the AI world in 2025 feels a little like being in the Protestant Reformation. You know, you've got all these cults and these groups and these people, you know, handing out pamphlets, declaring that the end is near and trying to recruit you to their movement.

57:17And it just feels like kind of this great blossoming of these ideas about the future and the end of the world. I also know that like the last time we had a big industrial revolution, there were like a lot of weird cults and utopian communities and sort of people who opted out of the new technology. I'm curious, like I understand this was a sort of a joke or a stunt or a piece meant to illuminate some larger point. But I'm wondering if you think there will be people who actually choose to live like this because they will just see all of this AI. And instead of having the reaction that you had, which is like, I want to dive in and like investigate this, they will just be like, screw it.

57:59I'm out. I'm going to my haven in the woods and I'm going to turn off all my devices and I'm going to live like it's 1870. Yeah, I think you will have that. You will have some a big Luddite movement and I can understand it because it is scary. as to the religion metaphor, I think is a good one. I think there is a lot of overlap and this sense of this destiny that AI is destined to create heaven on earth or even replace us. I would say one difference between religion and science is the idea that science can be falsified. So my hope is that people in the AI industry keep an open mind and look for falsification, look for examples of where AI is actually not doing good and trying to adjust to that so that it doesn't become a religion.

58:59Well, AJ, thanks so much for coming. Thanks for doing this experiment. The piece is called 48 Hours Without AI, and you can read it at the New York Times. Very scary story to read on Halloween. Oh, good point.

59:39Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyot. This episode was fact-checked by Will Peischel and was engineered by Katie McMurrin. Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemiseau, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Kuiwink Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com with the error you found on your Brockopedia page.

1:00:38Thank you.