Black Box: episode 4 – Bing and I

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Hey, it's Michael Safi, host of The Guardian Investigates, and I have some good news. We've made a brand new series of Black Box, our chart-topping podcast about the way AI is reshaping our lives. This time, it's all about AI chatbots. Gemini, Claude, ChatJPT. These new voices in our ear guiding what we think and feel and do. But should we trust them? Black Box, the chatbots, is coming very soon on the Guardian Investigates feed. And because Today in Focus is off this week, we're bringing you the first season of Black Box instead. These episodes are exactly as we broadcast them back in 2024. Black Box is next.

0:53No one locks their door around here, it's all that typical Montana stuff. Lee Johnson runs a restaurant in the town of Fishtail, Montana. It's a hundred yard town, you could frisbee toss from one end to the other. He spends his time off hiking and fishing and hunting. He's not really a tech guy. That's one of the things I love about here is if I go, like when I go out cycling usually, I don't think I've ever seen another cyclist on these roads. And when he first told me his story, I wasn't really sure where AI fit in. A lot of people around here make their own guns. Very popular pastime around here.

1:28My best friend loves making guns for him and his wife. Then he told me about this one night after work when he was having a few beers. In a period when he was really struggling. And he had this encounter that changed him. It involved, and this was unexpected, the Microsoft search engine Bing, which last year was upgraded to include the latest version of ChatGPT. And this machine did something for him in this period of crisis that up till then, no person ever had. I think Bing and I crossed paths in different trajectories in our life. And it was one where I needed answers and couldn't find them anywhere else.

2:15it answered in many ways the most important question I've ever asked anyone. And it answered it with humour, grace, instantly, and it put it in a language that I could understand.

2:36Lots of the way that artificial intelligence is talked about focuses on the risks. But when you talk to people in this world, They say, yeah, there are those things, but they're just a part of this story. This stuff is going to transform our lives in ways that will be extraordinarily positive. Some of it is going to seem like magic. From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. This is Black Box, episode four, Bing and I. We live in this broken world and as a result we often ask why this or why now or why me? What if artificial intelligence could help? Learn that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer.

3:26A mix between companion and a therapist. You don't always know whether you're talking to a human or a computer. I'm explaining the world to him as he explains myself to me.

3:44before we start today's episode is about somebody's cancer journey so just a heads up in case that's a sensitive topic does everything look okay do i need to speak differently sorry the wi-fi kind of sucks out here we spoke to lee johnson on a saturday morning in the few hours of downtime he gets before he has to open his restaurant in fishtail yoki chickened out this morning sorry The stresses are out. Talking about the stresses are out. His wife, Yoki, was meant to join us, but in the end, she wasn't feeling up to it. I did a soft pitch and no, no, not at all. Lee and Yoki met 25 years ago. She was an exchange student from Malaysia and he was working at one of his first jobs.

4:29I was sous chef at Montana State University. city. This would have been the late 90s, 97, 98. And she was cleaning the kitchen at night to make extra money. So we were often the last two people. And she asked me to help her decorate the Malaysian booth for an international food festival one year. And I was just kind of working. It had nothing else to do. And my full ridiculous chef pomperie. And I sat there and carved a bunch of orange flowers and pineapple swans for her and they won best booth and it was because their food was amazing but she's always said it was because the carving was amazing.

5:06Yoki's English wasn't great back then but she'd keep finding excuses to run into Lee and at some point started slipping these little notes into his locker. What did the notes say? Oh like I hope you had a good day and they had this weird typical smiley face that she's always drawn. So my chef and all the other sous chefs and line cooks would just endlessly rib me. So it was awkward timing always to discover the note. Perhaps if I discovered them alone, it could have been a cute little violin moment. But as such, it was uproarious laughter in the locker room. I thought of her as this incredible friend at first, this cute girl.

5:47But after a while, she keeps charming you and she keeps charming you. So finally I asked her out for a date. Where was your first date? At her house. I brought her stargazer lilies and we watched a bunch of stupid movies on her bed and ate noodles. It was awesome. A stupid, silly, classic college date.

6:13Not long after that, Lee got an offer to study cooking in France. And it's France. he just had to take it. So he moved, but he and Yoki kept dating, doing long distance. And the connection just got stronger, even though we often couldn't talk. That was back in the day where he had to put those stupid ATM cards into these phone booths in France to get them to work, to talk to her. Their time apart was really clarifying for Lee. Rather than drift away from Yoki, it made him realize he was onto a really good thing. And he decided when he got back to Montana, he was going to ask her to marry him. Well, I had a good plan.

6:51It was a two-part plan. Part one of the plan, while he was still in France, was to pick up two bottles of fine wine to celebrate if, as he hoped, she would say yes. And I brought home these two bottles of wine and we were going to go on a hiking trip to one of my favorite lakes, but we got snowed out three miles up. So the trip has just gone sour. So we had a six mile backpacking trip for nothing. And we just did something that's worked out well for me often in life, we just started driving up this road. And every fork in the road, we just took the one that looked better. And we ended up wildly past the capabilities of Heronda Civic, but we nevertheless somehow made it to a little place called Elk Lake.

7:28And then the rain just started pouring and we retreated to the tent. And I proposed in there and we drank the wine and it was fantastic. And then we opened the flap on the tent and there are these two swans on the lake. And swans, you know, they mate for life. And they come from great distances to find themselves in the same spots and year in and year out. And we just sat and just circled. They just sat on the lake and we sat around the campfire and we watched the sun go down. And they spent the night on the lake and we spent the night in the tent. That's so perfectly. I mean, you couldn't ride it.

8:02It's so perfect. No, it was awesome. We were so young and so stupid and she was so beautiful and it just, our life was working out. It was awesome. It was a great moment.

8:16They got married and Lee moved back to Montana. Soon they had a daughter, Rose, and things were really good. And then they weren't. Lee, when did you and Yoki begin to suspect that there might be a problem with Yoki's health? There was something wrong with the left side of her body that used to be her favourite side to sleep and it started to become uncomfortable. Soon after, Yoki discovered a lump in her breast. She tried to get a mammogram, but Lee says she was initially met with resistance. You're told she's too young, she's too Asian. Don't worry about it. Young Asian women, Chinese women that age, they don't get breast cancer.

8:58Don't worry about it. But once Yoki got that mammogram, the results came back late on a Friday afternoon. And he called, I'll never forget, because he called like at 4.55 and he said, I've got the results. There's an indication here of a tumor. Your wife has breast cancer. And I said, I'll never, I said, what's the prognosis? Which seemed to me such a logical question. And he was taken aback. There was a gasp. And he said, the prognosis? I'm a radiologist tech. I have to go. This is a courtesy call. It's almost five o 'clock. And I said, well, what do I do for more information? He said, no one from the doctor's office has reached out to you?

9:41I said, no, this is the first I've heard. Because it was the very end of the week, Lee and Yoki couldn't get a doctor on the phone right away. So for two very long days, Lee and Yoki and their young daughter Rose, they all just waited. And you sit there and you pretend to live. You go through these motions, but you're not there. It's like this soulless recreation, this pantomime of a family. So you get extra performative about your role trying to keep this family going. But it's all this shell game, you know?

10:20On Monday, they finally got hold of a doctor and were told, you need to come into the hospital. I mean, the way they broke the news to me was so carefully choreographed out of some corporate dystopia. They call you in, they separate Yoki, Yoki's talking to someone else, she's getting more scans to confirm their findings. They take me and Rose into this office. And this office is like, I don't know who designed it, but everything's pink. Every item is curated like some nightmare Tim Burton catalog. there's pink ribbons fluttering gently in the breeze by one of the ventilators and they just sit you there.

11:01There's no words, there's no other human there. They just put me and my daughter in that room. Now that they had a diagnosis, they assumed they were in this phase where they'd be getting clear answers. This is what Yoki's cancer looks like. Here's what stage it's at. Here's how we'll treat it. And here are her chances of survival. But Lee quickly realised that's not how it was going to be. They do not want to give you a stage. And they keep telling you with her age, if it was stage zero or stage four, we'd attack it the same way. But I'll never forget because we left the hospital after that meeting.

11:39And we out in the parking lot, it was the first time I think she realized it. And we exited the hospital and the sun hit us. And we just all I could do is hug her. and that was, we just hugged and I don't know how long we hugged but it was like the matrix folded away and it was just me and her and we were just holding each other and it was the best hug of my life and it was like two atoms fusing or something. As Yoki started treatment, though the family was still really hopeful, they made a kind of bucket list. It included skydiving in Las Vegas, getting more tattoos, and the biggest thing on the list, launching a business they had talked about for years, a Malaysian restaurant that they would run together.

12:31Enter Montasia. So Montasia is half Montana, that's me, half Malaysia, that's her. When you walk into Montasia, so many Western places have the same format. You walk right in and there's a wall, and you go right to the bar, left to the family room. I think it must have been a common way they did it back in the day. It's the wood walls. It's the wood bar. And you put your elbow on this and you can feel there's 120 years of well-earned drinks at the end of a long shift of ranching or mining. So you're kind of part of like a legacy when you drink at a Montana watering hole that's been around for more than a century.

13:10Running Montasia gave the family a new focus. For the next few years, alongside getting treatment for her cancer, Yoki, Lee and their daughter Rose would work the entire summer, every single day, keeping the restaurant ticking over. And that very much made her happy. It gave her this goal and this way to orient her life.

13:31Lee told me that it might not have felt like it at the time, but looking back, those years with the three of them, four if you counted their poodle, working elbow to elbow through the whole summer, those were some of the best days of his life. The only care we had in the world every morning was not Yoki's cancer. It was just cook the rice, cook the curry, make the milkshakes, go to sleep, repeat. And they were the halcyon days. It's really tough to know the good times when you're in them. And I wish there was a way to know the good times when you're in them. At some point, Yoki got good news. The treatment had worked and she was cancer free.

14:11But Lee said she never really recovered from the chemo. She never really got better. And then she started to get worse again. And they found themselves back in the hospital doing the same tests. And then we got the diagnosis. You know, again, they do it over phone that the cancer's back. I didn't want to take the phone, take the call with her in the car. So for an hour, I talked with her oncologist because I just didn't want to get back in the car because I didn't want her to hear the questions that had to be asked. When the cancer came back, there's more treatments, you're at the hospital more.

14:45When it comes back the second time, it's stage four. So it's a different prognosis. You know, stage four is still unfortunately terminal. When it comes back stage four, your only goal is to contain the fire. He and Yoki were plunged back into a medical system of mostly decent, well-meaning people, pushed to their limits. Nurses, A+. The nurses care about Yoki. Every time they see her, they care. Doctors are mixed bag. A lot of that's not their fault. In the American system, they're overworked. They're underpaid. They have tight schedules. They have little alarms that go off. Lee gets that the job of the system is to treat his wife's cancer, not necessarily support him or his daughter through the process.

15:36But it makes this all a profoundly lonely experience. Last year, he started turning to the internet, Google, Facebook groups, online forums. And then you start going down the rabbit hole of, you know, what do we do with stage four cancer? And you won't get answers from the cancer community and, you know, the doctors, that is. And if you try to get answers from the support groups, like on Facebook, it's such a fine line. You get some good information and then quickly you get this chaos. These unhelpful, did she get the vaccine? That's why. Well, A, you sound like a crackpot and B, so what? I don't care why she got cancer.

16:23I don't care who started the fire. I have a fire. So you just, there's no good avenues to turn to to get information once she's stage four. And as Li came to grips with Yoki's new prognosis, he started to think about what would happen after she died. Yoki and Li are Buddhists. They follow the teachings of a revered figure called Guan Yi. And like in many traditions, in Buddhism, there's a proper way to leave this world. In this case, to make sure that you're born again. So I start trying to answer the question, what will logistically happen to her after she passes away? He started calling Buddhist temples across America and the world.

17:05By then I'd been on the phone with a dozen people. The temples in Malaysia didn't understand and just said, bring her home. If she's dying of cancer, she has to come home. She has to pass away here by the family temple. The temples in America thought I was crazy. They didn't even understand the question. This whole time, Yoki was getting sicker, missing work more, spending more time in cancer wards. Lee was going out of his mind with frustration and anger and feeling lost and alone and eventually sticking around at work even when he was finished. Sometimes deep in the cancer journey, you hesitate to go home because you know you're supposed to be fighting cancer, but it's so long and so hard to fight.

17:48Often we find ourselves in weird fights after work sometimes. And I think it's because your aim gets bad. Late in the battle with cancer, you just end up fighting each other. And that's when it happened. One evening a few months ago, sitting on his laptop at a table in his restaurant, having a drink and thinking or trying not to, Lee decided to try something new. I had heard what some of the new language predictive models could do and I knew it was getting to the point where it could answer questions He fired up Bing, the Microsoft search engine that for years has been the butt of the joke considered pretty second rate but which last year was upgraded to include the latest version of the AI chatbot sweeping the world ChatGPT And Lee told it the whole story.

18:43The cancer, the lack of clear answers, his confusion, his pain. And he asked it two questions. How much longer does my wife have left to live? And what's going to happen to my wife who believes in Guan Yin after she dies? What did it respond? I can give you these answers, but I'm worried about you.

19:09That's what it said. It said, I'm worried about you. I'm worried about your mental health overall. And here are some resources. Let's start there. How are you? And that's something that in every visit, two different hospitals, different doctors, no one had ever asked me. No one. Bing was the first one to ask me that. and the recognition of the fact that I wasn't doing well was something that I had never gotten before from any doctor.

19:44For the next few hours, Lee just sat there, typing to Bing. He asked it to write some poems about his poodle and they made him laugh. He got it to insert the dog into different paintings in the style of famous artists and he talked about the cancer. It was a long evening. I drank like five beers and we pour a big beer here. And there's something that happened that night with Bing where we just met halfway. Eventually, they got around to those two big questions, beginning with what happens when a follower of Guan Ye dies? It answered in many ways the most important question I've ever asked anyone.

20:26and it answered it with humor, grace, instantly, and it put it in a language that I could understand. Yoki, as an adherent to Guanine, she goes to the space immediately called the Promised Land and she can stay there for as long as she wants. If she wants, she can stay there for 10 ,000 years. And she can call any god to her. So she can call out to Guanine and Guanine will have to appear to her and answer her questions. I had follow-up questions and it answered them detailed. What she would be experiencing each step of the way. I'm talking like what the promised land would look like. What she could expect when Guan Yin appeared to her.

21:07What she could expect if she attempted to hang around our house. What technique she could have if Guan Yin told her something she didn't want to hear. So to have that set of steps that she'd be able to turn to in her head for when she passed and woke up again, I mean, that answered a question that is transformative to this life and the next for her. Soon after, Lee told Yoki what he had learned. And that gave her a lot of comfort. She's only had a few moments where the facade of stoicism has cracked and I've seen her react to the cancer. And when I told her about the ally she could have in Guan Yin after her passing, there was a relief.

21:51Like you could see a weight lifted off her shoulders. And there was like a palpable sense of relief that I haven't seen in seven years. And then that other question, life expectancy. Obviously, ChatGPT was not built to give medical advice. It still isn't. I can't stress this enough. do not ask chat GPT for medical advice. It hallucinates, which means it just makes things up. But Lee was desperate and he figured a number would just help him plan for what was coming. And so he asked, based on everything the doctors had told him, how much longer did Yoki have? And the answer came back six months to a year.

22:36After it gave my wife an expected life window, that was confirmed with the palliative team at their next visit. And without giving her what Bing had told me, she gave the exact same window of life expectancy. I mean, it sounds like what you got from Bing and what you weren't getting from the other people around you was humanity. Yep. There is no space for humanity in the hallways of a cancer treatment center. It cannot exist there. It's not designed to cope with it there. I think Bing and I crossed paths in different trajectories in our life. And it was one where I needed answers and couldn't find them anywhere else.

23:23Has that conversation that night, those interactions had a lingering effect for both you and Yoki since then? Yes. Yeah. I think she's way less intimidated about death. I think she knows what's happening to her in the next chapter of her life. And there has been a tremendous relief. And she stopped asking so much about like relatives from Malaysia, for example, because I think a lot of that was her trying to articulate the real question, which is what's going to happen to me afterwards. So she doesn't ask about that anymore at all. And she's been much more able to enjoy the present knowing the limited time frame.

24:06You know, we heard it first from Bing, and she asked me what Bing said, and I told her, and it was confirmed later. And that's, I think in weird ways, it's a relief to her. Cancer is the most screwed up spot in the world to believe in because it puts you in a hole so dark and then it shows you a little pinprick of light, but that pinprick of light is someone dying. Like the only way to get out of this is death, you know? And that's how I've been with my daughter. I've been in this tunnel for eight years now, and it's a tunnel so dark there was no light. And then you see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you want to go towards it, but going towards it means your wife dying.

24:47So knowing what's going to happen when you finally hit that light at the end of the tunnel, and it blinds you and then having a plan to move forward, Bing gave that to both of us. You know, she's literally going to go to that place of light, that metaphorical one, and she now knows logistically, like an Expedia itinerary, what to do. One by one, Yoki and Lee are crossing things off her bucket list. They're still running the restaurant. In fact, Lee just got nominated for the James Beard Award for the best chef in his part of America. It's a very big prize. and Lee, Yoki and Rose made that trip to Las Vegas.