How Tired Tropes Drive AI Coverage. Plus, is the Vibecession Back or Not?
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The latest reading on consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan showed the index falling to a six-month low, largely on inflation fears. This week, bad feelings and good data from the economy have some saying the vibe session is back. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Also on this week's show, Joe Biden once decried Donald Trump's tariffs on China. Now he's enacted his own. But no matter the political party, the consequences appear to be the same. Surprise, surprise. You raise prices on imported goods. You're raising prices for American households.

Plus, over-promising and under-delivering is par for the course in the tech world, especially when it comes to AI. Latest version, ChatGPT4, can even pass the bar exam with a score in the top 10%, and it can do it all in just seconds. That claim was debunked recently. It's all coming up after this.

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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, how Kamala Harris became a contender. People, I gather, were asking her, do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions. And her answer was, I'm happy to join a process like that, but I'm not going to wait around. I'm not going to wait around.

Evan Osnos on the rise of Kamala Harris, next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Listener supported, WNYC Studios. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Michael Olinger.

Fresh data on how Americans feel about the economy is officially out, and people are not happy. The latest reading on consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan showed the index falling to a six-month low, largely on inflation fears. A new poll this week for The Guardian found that the majority of Americans think we're in an economic recession, and they blame the Biden administration.

even though the economic indicators say that we aren't in a recession. The Consumer Price Index showed inflation cooling ever so slightly in April, coming in at 0.3% month over month, slightly lower than we saw in March. Again, it's an improvement. By the way, that core rate, that is the best reading of inflation since April of 2021. The unemployment rate remains under 4%.

It's now been under 4% for 27 months straight. That's over two years. That's the longest stretch since the 1960s. — That combination of bad feelings and good numbers has had some in the press announcing the return of the Vibe Session.

You remembered that phrase. It was originally coined in the summer of 2022 by economic analyst Kyla Scanlon. The vibe session is this idea of a disconnect between consumer sentiment and economic data, and why people feel bad about the economy despite the economic metrics telling them that the economy is doing okay. We've seen the "vibe session is over" news cycle happen a couple of times.

Scanlon said so herself in the summer of 2023 and again this past January. It wasn't a recession. It was a vibe session. And I'm thrilled to say that it's over. But some financial journalists are saying not so fast, including Gina Smilick, who's a reporter for The New York Times covering the Fed and the U.S. economy. So which is it, Gina?

I mean, the vibes have been changing in fairness to everybody involved here. We did see a real improvement in consumer confidence for a little bit there as inflation was cooling. And I think people were reading these very positive headlines. It did really seem like people were reacting to that. You know, you saw improvements across a number of indexes that measure how people feel about the economy. And we seem to be seeing some backtracking there recently. I think that

probably has less to do with the fact that like inflation has gotten appreciably worse in that period and more to do with the fact that inflation has stalled out. We're not seeing the progress that we previously were. And that has been in the headlines a lot. The other thing that has really fundamentally changed over the last couple of months for people is that as of the end of 2023, as of late last year, we were all expecting the Fed to make several interest rate cuts this year. We thought that borrowing costs

so mortgage rates, credit card rates, all those good things, that they were going to come down pretty substantially in 2024. But because inflation is proving a little bit more stubborn than anybody had expected, it seems increasingly unlikely that rates are going to come down very much if they come down at all. That sort of one-two punch of inflation being a little bit more stubborn and that being in the headlines in a negative way, and the fact that

interest rates, which are an expense for a lot of households, are likely to stay higher longer, is probably combining to make people feel less confident about this economy. Let's zoom out a little bit. What would you say is the good news about the economy right now?

There's a lot of good news about the economy right now. For one thing, unemployment is very low and it has been very low for a really long time. So we've still got joblessness under 4%, which is not at all usual for this stage in a business cycle. At this point in the Fed rate hike cycle, you know, it's surprising how resilient this labor market has been. And that just breeds all kinds of other good things. You know, when you've got unemployment this low, you see pretty solid wage gains. We've been seeing very strong wage gains for quite a bit now. And

we're seeing some pickup in productivity. And it's difficult to say how real that is, but it does seem like we might be seeing productivity increases in a way that we hadn't in a long time. And that could potentially be very good news for the economy because that's the kind of thing that can fuel strong growth into the future, which then in turn can help if the economy is growing rapidly and people are spending and businesses are expanding, that helps keep unemployment low. And so...

You know, we do seem to be in this otherwise pretty positive cycle where consumers are spending, businesses are still expanding, maybe a more muted pace than before, but still pretty solid. People are still hiring. You know, in general, it's a very strong economy out there. What do you make of the argument that people simply don't see good news for what it is?

I want to play you a clip from Jared Bernstein, President Joe Biden's top economic advisor last July. I think people have been definitely somewhat shaken up by what they've been through. And I think what the president did when he got here was to say, we have to get back to normal as quickly as possible.

It may take a while for that renormalization to work into people's consciousness, but we're starting to see some of it now. I happen to think that- I do think it's the case that people felt pretty good about their finances coming out of the pandemic because they had gotten a couple of one-time checks.

And that helped people pay off debts. It helped them pay off student loans. It was positive in people's lives. And now they've kind of worked their way through that. And I think that there are a lot of people out there who are probably sort of benchmarking off of that as the normal, like maybe a world in which you got a stimulus check temporarily felt like it was the normal. And now we're back to a world where that's just not happening. The pandemic disrupted economic life in a pretty serious way. Then the response to the pandemic is

shook up economic life in a pretty serious way. And we are still kind of trying to figure out what normal looks like. The vibes stuff is honestly kind of confusing for me. I mean, after the Consumer Price Index data came out last week, the stock market jumped. The S&P, the Nasdaq, and the Dow all hit record highs. Is that true? Yeah. So the stock market vibes are good. That seems pretty obvious. So where is the ambiguity about vibes? Who's feeling the pinch exactly?

Yeah, so I think it's a lot of sort of the lower income consumers who are not necessarily benefiting so much from these run ups in asset prices. But what about the fact that wages are up across the board? In December, the Treasury released data showing Americans in the bottom 25% of the country's income distribution have seen the most growth in real wages over the past four years, about 3.2% or about 150 bucks a week. So

So what you see if you look at sort of the economic data to try and gauge how households are doing financially is that you've got delinquencies rising for auto loans and on credit card debt, particularly among younger and lower income households.

And so it does seem like there's a subset of American society that's really under a lot of pressure right now financially. And so those people are probably not feeling so great. I also think that there's a real danger of attributing too much weight to the stock market. Like the stock market reflects how businesses are performing and what their earnings outlook is. It does not necessarily reflect

how people are feeling about the broader economy. It certainly can reflect that. The stock market can go up because people are feeling better about the economy, but it can also go up because people are feeling good about what AI is going to mean for a tech company's bottom line, which has very little to do with how people are feeling about the broader economy. And so I think that that's an important distinction to make.

Yeah, I want to ask you about the negative sentiment data. That's based on surveys, right? Polling, which is almost always more complicated than, you know, a hard number or percentage suggests. Are there any nuances that you think have gotten lost in the coverage? You know, I think one important nuance is that

how people feel about how they're doing versus how they're actually doing. There's often a disconnect there. You know, one thing that I think has been really unique about this cycle or really interesting about this cycle is that you've seen people saying that they feel very bad about their economic positions and they feel very bad about the economy. But then when you ask them about their actual personal finances, they'll tell you they feel okay about those.

And when you ask them about their spending intentions, they'll be like, heck yes, I'm spending. They're very optimistic about their spending outlook. And we're seeing consumers spend quite a bit. If you really felt personally bad about the economy, presumably you would be kind of like tightening the belt a little bit. And that's really not the dynamic we've been seeing at all.

That said, not everyone is so bullish on the term vibe session itself. One critique that I've seen earlier this year in The Atlantic was a piece that quoted the work of economist Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner at the Brookings Institution, who compared an index of the sentiment of economic coverage in a set of mainstream newspapers with what

is actually happening in the economy. And they found that from 1988 to 2016, changes in the two tracked pretty closely together. But at the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency, coverage got way more negative than the economic data would predict. The Atlantic wrote, quote, after Joe Biden took office, the Gulf widened even more.

The researchers found that from 2017 to 2023, the media's negativity gap was nearly five times larger than it was during the previous three decades. So what do you make of this argument that news coverage might be contributing to how people say they feel about the economy? Well,

We need to not just simplistically say like, oh, the media is negative. Media negativity is creating a negative echo chamber that is making us all feel bad. I think we also have to think like, did we feel bad in the first place? Is that why the news has gotten more negative? And I think in this case, actually, it kind of lines up pretty neatly with the economic story that we've been more broadly discussing, which is for the first time since the 1980s. So for the first time in really four decades.

we have significant inflation. You know, prior to this, I think the economic data that we were all sort of trying to think that everything aligned with was the job market data. The job market was really the main game in town for the first, you know,

10 years of my career personally. Like we were all just kind of watching what happened with every employment report. And the employment reports tended to track really, really well with how everybody felt about the broader economy. Like everything kind of boiled down to the job market. And then the inflation took off starting in 2021, but really most painfully in 2022. And I think that fundamentally changed the economic conversation. I think it really changed how people feel about the economy and

And part of the reason the media narrative remains pretty negative, even with a strong job market, is that we're reflecting how people feel about the inflation. And then there's the fact that we now have generations of people who have lived through a quick succession of larger economic hardship, the 2007-2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic.

A quick succession of economic hardship and also a pretty fundamentally changing economy. You know, I think some pretty large things have shifted generationally in ways that really matter. I talk to a lot of people in the millennial and Gen Z generations these days, and these two generations are not super optimistic about their homeownership.

prospects. You know, I think we saw millennials starting to jump into the housing market in a pretty big way in 2020, but they've been struggling in recent years. You talk to a lot of Gen Z and they think like we're never going to buy houses. Look how much they've increased in price. So I just think some of those milestones that used to be sort of a standard part of the American economic experience feel increasingly out of reach. That also bears on how people feel about the economy and their economic prospects.

Maybe to the financially illiterate like myself, one kind of vibe I got from the Vibe Session news coverage was this kind of, you know, the New York Times pitch bot Twitter account.

I'm sure you're familiar with that. I'm very familiar. They like to make fun of me. Okay, okay. So you're going to know where I'm coming from. But there is a kind of like, the economy is doing okay. And that's a problem for Joe Biden anyway. That was the sort of sense I got from a lot of the vibe session coverage. Maybe I'm totally misreading it. But there did seem to be a kind of, we're going to hold this guy's feet to the fire. I'm going to play something up that

wasn't super borne out in the data. Did you ever get that criticism?

Oh, I got a lot of that criticism, but I feel that it is perhaps misfounded. I obviously, you know, continued writing stories the way I continued writing them, which was very much in tone, acknowledging the fact that people felt bad about this inflation. I think that you can't choose which data you're going to look at. You know, I think you've got to look at all of the data. And what we saw in this cycle is that it is absolutely the case. And some of the hard economic data looks really awesome. That said...

I don't think we can just completely ignore consumer confidence data because it doesn't line up. You know, it has been really negative. It's looked really bad and it is looking worse again recently. And I think you also just can't ignore when you're doing reporting and when you're talking to people out in the world and they're saying like, what is this great economy I'm hearing about? Like that does not comport with my lived experience at all. I feel like we would be remiss as journalists to just ignore that. Like our job is to reflect the world as people are experiencing it, not the world as...

six government surveys that we have decided are the only ones that matter are reporting it. You know, like it can be the case of the nonfarm payroll survey looks really positive, but that can't just be the only thing we're paying attention to in this world. I don't think that would be journalism. Gina, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Gina Smilick is a reporter for The New York Times covering the Fed and the U.S. economy. She's also the author of the book Limitless, The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis.

Coming up, the bizarre tariff wars playing out in Washington. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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James Baldwin is one of those writers who commands respect as well as love and affection. He was born 100 years ago this year. I'm Razia Iqbal. Join me for Notes on a Native Son, a special series from Notes from America with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Nikki Giovanni, and many others discussing their favorite passages by Baldwin. Listen to new episodes every Saturday in the Notes from America feed wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. With economic anxiety on the rise, former President Donald Trump is hoping to pin blame on current President Joe Biden. Everything is more expensive, a lot more expensive, actually.

Because of Joe Biden's reckless policies that have caused soaring energy costs and currency inflation. Inflation is destroying. You know, they call it a country killer. Going back hundreds of years, Germany, countries that had big inflation are dead. They become dead countries.

his messaging may be working. According to a new poll out this week from Cook Political Report, nearly 60% of Americans in swing states think Biden has at least some control over inflation, and more voters trust Trump than Biden to get their cost of living under control. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump is recycling one of his favorite bits.

China. Specifically, how they're owning us when it comes to trade. China is right now our boss. They are the boss of the United States, almost like we're a subsidiary of China. Then, last week, Biden announced a major new economic policy.

trade tariffs that build on the tariffs Trump put on a slew of Chinese-made goods during his term. Big economic announcement from President Biden. $18 billion in new tariffs on Chinese imports. The tariffs on electric vehicles go from 25% to 100%. He's slapping a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum. He's also adding a 50% tariff on semiconductors in this.

In response, this week Trump threatened to up the ante if he's elected. I'm the one that saved the steel industry with tariffs. This is just a limited thing. I saved it with tariffs, and they have to go up. This sudden bipartisan love of raising tariffs is remarkable because it's a total reversal of a decades-long consensus in Washington, when both Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed that lowering tariffs was the best thing for the economy.

To understand how we got here, I spoke with Gordon Hanson, an economist and a co-director of the Reimagining the Economy project at Harvard University's Kennedy School. He's done extensive research on the economic and political impacts of Trump's tariffs. Gordon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Starting in 2013, you and a team of economists started publishing research on what you dubbed the China shock. Can you define that term?

Sure. So China joined the global economy in fits and starts beginning in the 1980s and in the 1990s, as its economy was moving away from decades of Maoist central planning to something that was more market-oriented, something pretty phenomenal happened.

China underwent a period of about 20 years of economic growth, the likes of which we've never seen. We've seen economies grow fast. We've never seen an economy as big as China's grow that fast. The other thing we hadn't seen was a country as big as China be as specialized as it was in a pretty narrow set of manufacturing products. This just upended global markets.

If you were producing stuff that China needed to fund its global factories, so that would be iron ore, that would be copper, that would be all sorts of primary commodities that places like Australia and Canada and Brazil and South Africa and Indonesia were producing. It was boom times. This was just an unbelievable windfall.

But if you were producing the stuff that China was also producing, textiles and furniture and clothing and simple electronics, it was a nightmare scenario. All of a sudden, the world market was flooded with goods that were the basis for your livelihood.

In the US, regional economies tended to be pretty specialized in a handful of products. Martinsville, Virginia, for instance, had a half of its working age population employed in manufacturing that produced basically two things, textiles, mainly sweatshirts, and furniture.

The growth of China overnight meant just complete upheaval in economies like Martinsville's and other places in the United States that had been dedicated to producing manufactured products.

and then enter Donald Trump in 2017. I'll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I'll bring back our jobs and I'll bring back our money. When Trump was campaigning on a message of America first and countering the era of hyper-globalization, it resonated in parts of the world that felt like they'd been punched in the gut by the global economy.

So his prescription was, well, China has flooded the market with U.S. goods. Let's put taxes on Chinese imports. And that's going to save those regions that had been part of the U.S. manufacturing base. Yeah, he put tariffs on solar panels and washing machines, then steel and aluminum, and then a 25 percent tariff on all kinds of goods from China. How did China respond?

China responded by putting tariffs on the goods that the US exports to China. The complicated thing here is that a lot of what the US exports to China are services and intellectual property and stuff that's very hard to tax at the border.

We don't export a lot of physical goods to China outside of agriculture and minerals. So what that meant was China was left with a pretty narrow set of options of what to hit with countervailing duties. And that primarily fell on the agricultural goods that are produced in the American heartland. When you were watching this trade war escalate beginning in 2017, as an economist, what was going through your mind?

As a public citizen, I was concerned that the U.S. was embarking on a set of wrong-handed economic policies. As an economist, I was fascinated because the U.S. had spent the better part of five decades dismantling trade barriers, slowly moving towards an ever more globalized world. And from one day to the next, basically, Trump had unresolved.

upended that situation and moved us towards much higher trade barriers. And that meant a reduction in international trade. And so we were just waiting for the data to come out so that we could begin to track what was the impact of Trump's trade protection. Did the trade war help American workers?

It did not. We took a very close look at the data. This is work I did with Anna Beck, David Otter, and David Dorn, tracking all the goods that the U.S. imports from all countries in the world at a highly disaggregated level. And then we matched those goods to where they were produced in the United States to say, well, if the U.S. now has increased tariffs on, say, sweatshirts or

Are the places that were producing sweatshirts now going to start producing them again? And we tracked this from 2018 when the tariffs really started to bite through 2019 and all the way out to 2022, which at the time was as far as we could push the data. And what we found in terms of impacts on U.S. manufacturing employment was

was kind of a big nothing. There was really no change in employment in response to those tariffs. Do we have any good data on how these Trump and now Biden tariffs have impacted the price of goods? Here's the wild thing about the Trump tariffs.

the first evidence we saw of their impacts was really shocking. It showed that tariffs led for a one-to-one increase in prices as those goods were entering the United States. That meant that a 25 percent tariff would mean that prices were 25 percent higher.

And we first documented that in looking at wholesale prices of goods. As those goods went from wholesalers to retailers, the retailers ate part of that margin. And so the price increases that were passed on to American consumers weren't the full 25%, but they were a pretty good chunk of it. Surprise, surprise, you raise prices on imported goods, you're raising prices for American households.

In the conclusion of your paper, you write that, quote, the net effect of import tariffs, retaliatory tariffs and farm subsidies on employment in locations exposed to the trade war was at best a wash. And it may have been mildly negative, but residents of tariff protected locations became less likely to identify as Democrats and more likely to vote for Trump.

Why do you think that happened? Well, again, it was effective messaging. The workers in America's heartland, you know, in the Midwestern states that had been part of America's manufacturing base going back decades, felt betrayed when, in the 1990s, President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. The United States must seek nothing less than a new trading system that benefits all nations through robust commerce.

but that protects our middle class and gives other nations a chance to grow one. Between Clinton signing the North American Free Trade Agreement and Donald Trump coming into power, the China shock happened. So first, NAFTA was a symbolic betrayal of American workers. And then the China trade shock was an actual economic storm that really upended the regions that had been manufacturing centers for much of the last 60 or 70 years.

They were waiting for somebody to come and say, we're on your side. And Trump provided that message. This is the part I don't totally understand. Was it that Democrats didn't adequately communicate the downsides of free trade, that it could potentially really hurt American workers? Or is it that they earnestly believed that opening up trade with more countries like China and Mexico would deliver prosperity for American workers?

So to understand how we got to the point that democratic presidents were advocating for free trade, kind of important to go back to where the push for globalization came from. Coming out of World War II, the world was a mess. And we created a set of institutions that would help countries trade with each other and help create global prosperity.

For decades, the community of trading nations was pretty much high-income countries. It was the U.S., it was Europe, it was Canada, it was Japan. And when those countries traded with each other, it tended to be like for like, the U.S. sending pickup trucks to the rest of the world and importing small sedans from Japan or luxury sedans from Germany. And so we had a sense that globalization wasn't going to be that disruptive.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as President Clinton was now beginning to sign new free trade agreements, and it wasn't just Democratic presidents, the North American Free Trade Agreement, though it was signed by Clinton, it was first conceived of by President Bush.

We were now envisaging expanding trade with low-income countries, countries we hadn't traded with substantially before. And then China comes onto the scene. So we now have not just low-income countries, but really big, low-income countries. And we didn't have mechanisms in place that would help workers adjust to the very real changes in the global marketplace that occurred as countries like China came onto the scene and began expanding their exports in rapid course.

Our listeners are already hearing a lot of technical economic terms coming up in the campaign. Trump, for instance, likes to talk about things like trade deficits and currency devaluation. Joe Biden has run up record trade deficits, also known as losses. China's killing us.

They're devaluing their currency to a level that you wouldn't believe it makes it impossible for our companies to compete. Biden is talking about things like intellectual property protection. China is stealing intellectual property. China is conditioning being able to do business in China and based on whether or not you have 51% Chinese ownership. What do you think news consumers and voters think?

need to know about these terms in order to understand the campaign rhetoric and make an informed decision. If you're talking to me about trade deficits, you aren't talking to me about good jobs. I would avoid fancy arguments that are taking us towards esoteric policy tools and away from the primary challenge that we face, which is higher incomes for American workers who didn't go to college. I feel like you have a bone to pick with trade deficits.

Do you want to just explain why you think there's too much focus on trade deficits? So what is a trade deficit? A trade deficit is when we buy more from other people than they buy from us. Full stop. It means our imports are greater than our exports. Now, it might make sense to say, well, the reason that's happening is because the people we're trading with are not letting our goods in and we're letting their goods in.

And as attractive as that reasoning sounds is wrong. Trade deficits aren't about trade barriers. They aren't about tariffs. Trade deficits are about your savings and investment being different from my savings and investment.

The U.S. doesn't save very much, and it invests a lot more than it saves. And as a consequence, we need to borrow from the rest of the world in order to do so. That borrowing takes the form of a trade deficit. That trade deficit becomes this big, attractive target that people like Donald Trump can come along and say, I'm going to solve it with tariffs.

Lo and behold, what has happened to U.S. trade deficits since Trump tariffs went into effect in 2018? They've gotten bigger. But this time is going to be different, Gordon. I'll take the other side of that bet. Gordon, thank you very much. My pleasure, Micah. This has been really enjoyable for me. Gordon Hanson is an economist and the co-director of the Reimagining the Economy project at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

Coming up, tech journalists are feeding the AI hype machine. Maybe they should not do that. This is On The Media.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

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Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one. I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson, the first ever Black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media, I'm Michael Olinger. Last week, OpenAI released a demo of its latest technology, its text-based software, ChatGPT 4.0, which responds to prompts and now has a new voice. A few, actually, but this one, called Sky, got the most attention. You've got me on the edge of my... Well, I don't really have a seat, but you get the idea. What's the big news?

People online said the demo reminded them of a 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his AI voice assistant, performed by Scarlett Johansson. Good morning, Theodore. Good morning. You have a meeting in five minutes. You want to try getting out of bed? Get up! You're too funny. Within hours of the demo's release, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman tweeted the word HER, the name of that very film.

Which, by the way, he has publicly described as an inspiration for his work. Then, days later... The actor says she turned down the offer to be the voice of the artificial intelligence system and that they made one that sounded just like her. Johansson said Altman approached her eight months ago and she turned down his offer to lend her likeness to the software.

He approached her again just two days before the release of the demo. She said, "I was shocked, angered, and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference." In response to requests from Johansson's lawyer, OpenAI has said they're discontinuing the voice they called Sky.

But the company maintains they hired a voice actor for the job before approaching Johansson and made no attempt to emulate the actor.

The debacle emphasized how these large language models often rely on human labor and data, often taken without permission. Despite its problems, so many AI boosters in Silicon Valley and members of the press say that artificial intelligence holds the keys to a shining future. We may look on our time as the moment civilization was transformed, as it was by fire, agriculture, and electricity.

Oh man, when the AI coverage started, I thought, here we go again. This is the same old story. Sam Harnett is the author of a 2020 paper titled Words Matter, How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence. I wrote it because I was really disappointed with the coverage I was seeing and some of the coverage I ended up doing. Today, Sam hosts a podcast called Ways of Knowing.

But back in 2015, he was a tech reporter for KQED in San Francisco, filing stories for Marketplace and NPR. I was a young reporter. You got to do these quick stories. And before you know it, you're using all these words like startup or tech or platform. I started thinking these words themselves are misleading, like ride share for an Uber. Like, what are you sharing? Like you're paying someone to drive you around. You're not sharing anything, you know?

These euphemisms were pushed by the tech industry and quickly adopted by the press during the early days of the gig economy. In his paper, Sam listed off several styles of media tropes that defined that era, like the first-person review. He points to a Time magazine cover story titled, "'Baby, You Can Drive My Car' and "'Do My Errands' and "'Rent My Stuff.'"

And those experiential first-person stories, they're not critical at all, right? It's all about how you're engaging with this thing and what it's like. And even when they are critical, you're still sort of giving them a lot of free advertising by casting it as a totally new thing.

Yes, but on the consumer side, you could see where your car was before it got to you. You could see who the driver was. You could know how much it was going to cost. You didn't have to give cash to a stranger in a car. Right. That's innovation, no? Well, I mean, you look at Uber and Lyft, they're using GPS and phones. I mean, GPS had been around for decades. Phones were relatively new, but Uber and Lyft didn't invent the phones. Right.

Really, the innovation seemed to be ignoring local transportation laws and ignoring labor laws. And it was all being cast as techno-utopianism, this inevitable future of work. It's a mass transit revolution sparked by the Universal Ridesharing Company that goes by only a block letter U on its windshield. Of course, we're talking about Uber. I hope that all regulators will take the time to understand that most of these problems

These drivers greatly value the freedom and flexibility to be able to work whenever and wherever they want. The industry wants those drivers to stay independent contractors. That's cheaper for those companies. It's also at the core of their business. So what Uber does, this is the future. It is the sharing economy. The marketplace will win, but we've got to support them.

But really, it was the passive work. I think it was talking to a lot of taxi drivers and realizing that this is work that has no social safety net. This is work that has no overtime. There's no guaranteed minimum wage. Work that's undoing protections that were hard fought 100 years ago. Meanwhile, some outlets focused on what Sam Harnett calls the outlier worker profile.

CNBC wrote about 38-year-old David Feldman, who, quote, quit the rat race and left his finance job to make six figures picking up gigs on Fiverr, a site that connects customers with freelancers. The Washington Post ran a story titled Uber's Remarkable Growth Could End the Era of Poorly Paid Cab Drivers.

which cited these claims from the company. The people that drive their taxis barely break even, whereas someone who drives an Uber can make a net $90,000 a year. The median pay for Uber drivers in New York City, $90,000 a year for a 40-hour work week. Wow, that is...

the same as a post-secondary science teacher and a financial analyst here. That's a lot of money. Claims that landed Uber in court. The Federal Trade Commission will send nearly $20 million in checks to Uber drivers. This is all part of a settlement with a ride-hailing company. The FTC found Uber exaggerated the yearly and hourly income drivers that they could make in certain cities.

Instead of pressing Silicon Valley executives on how these companies were, say, misleading workers, many journalists did uncritical interviews. They were threatening to sue you, right? They were threatening to shut us down. Host Guy Raz in 2018, interviewing Lyft CEO John Zimmer for NPR's podcast, How I Built This. The opportunity was massive, and the regulatory obstacles were just as massive. How long did it take for you to overcome...

those initial regulatory challenges? Like, was it months, years? I'd say at least a year, probably for that first year. They cast the people running these companies as heroes who overcome adversity. Sam Harnett. Who create a thing that the listener wants to succeed. It's kind of astonishing how the tech industry kind of keeps finding ways to get lots of media coverage that ends up turning into lots of investment and lots of power.

Speed is imperative. And if they can get up and running quickly enough, and if their business model can become a thing that's regularly used by consumers and embedded in society, then they become too big to regulate. I think we see it with a lot of new technologies, whether it's the gig economy, whether it was with crypto a few years ago, whether it's AI.

Paris Marks is the host of a podcast called Tech Won't Save Us and the writer behind the Disconnect newsletter. We often see these very rapid embraces of whatever the next new thing from the tech industry is and less of a desire to really question the promises that the companies are making about them. Marks agrees that some of the same media tropes that Sam Harnett identified are recurring now with AI, like the first-person review.

After ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, the companies were selling that we were potentially even closer to computers matching human-level intelligence. And one of the things that we saw a lot of media organizations doing was actually going on to ChatGPT and having conversations with it. And there's a really striking example of this that was published in The New York Times by Kevin Roos, their tech journalist.

And he basically had this two-hour conversation with this chatbot, which he said wanted to be called Sydney. It had its own name. It was telling him that it wanted to be alive and was ultimately asking Roos to leave his wife and have a relationship with the chatbot.

bot. And the way that it was written, it was ascribing intentionality to this chat bot. It was thinking, it was having these responses, it was feeling certain things, when actually we know that these chat bots are not doing anything of the sort, right? The science fiction author Ted Chiang basically called these chat bots autocomplete on steroids. You know, we're used to using autocomplete on our phones when we're texting people, you know, it's suggesting the next word, and this is just taking it to a new level. The fact that a nascent

chatbot with millions of dollars of funding behind it would say such outrageous things. Is that not in and of itself newsworthy, even if the chatbot's own claims about its human-like intelligence were just outright wrong?

I think it definitely can be. But then the question is, like, how do you frame it and how do you explain it to the public? This was February of 2023. ChatGBT was released at the end of November of 2022. So we were still really early in the public's kind of getting to know what this technology was. It really misleads people as to what is going on there. Another trope that Harnett lays out in his paper is his discussion of the founder-council.

interview. Today, we've seen so many fawning conversations with tech leaders who are at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Yeah, absolutely. One of the ones that really stands out, of course, is an interview that Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, did with 60 Minutes back in April of 2023. And in this interview, Sundar was talking about how these AIs were a black box and we don't know what goes on in there.

Let me put it this way. I don't think we fully understand how a human mind works either.

One of the biggest problems there was not just what Sundar Pichai was saying, but that the hosts of the program who were, you know, interviewing him and conducting this were not really pushing back on any of these narratives that he was putting out there. Of the AI issues we talked about, the most mysterious is called emergent properties. Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes. Some AI systems are teaching themselves skills that they weren't expected to have. For example...

One Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know. After the piece came out, AI researcher Margaret Mitchell, who previously co-led Google's AI ethics team, posted on X saying that according to Google's own public documents, the chatbot had actually been trained on Bengali texts.

Meaning this was not evidence of emergent properties. Here's another exaggeration that made its way into a TV news piece. The latest version, ChatGPT-4, can even pass the bar exam with a score in the top 10 percent. And it can do it all in just seconds. ChatGPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile on the bar exam. Was that legit?

Yeah, so that claim was debunked recently. Julia Angwin is the founder of Proof News. She recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine. An MIT researcher basically re-ran the test and found that it actually scored in the 48th percentile. And the difference was that

When you're talking about percentiles, you have to say who are the other people in that cohort that you're comparing with, right? And so apparently OpenAI was comparing to a cohort of people who had previously failed the exam multiple times.

OpenAI compared its product to a group that took the bar in February. They tend to fail more than people who take it in July. And so when you put it compared to a cohort of people who had passed it at the regular rate, then you got to this 48th percentile.

The problem is that paper comes out, it's peer reviewed, and it's like goes through the academic process. It comes out like a year later than the claim. Tell me about Devin. This is a red hot product from a new startup that claims to be an AI software engineer. Can it do what its creators claim it can do?

So Devon is from this company called Cognition, which raised about $21 million from investors and came out with what they called an AI software engineer that they said could do programming tasks on its own. The public couldn't really get access to Devon, so there wasn't anything to go on except these videos of Devon supposedly completing tasks. I'm going to ask Devon to benchmark the performance of Lama on a couple of different API providers.

From now on, Devin is in the driver's seat. And the press wrote about it as if it was totally real, right? Wire did a, you know, forget chatbots, AI agents are the future with the headline. Bloomberg did a breathless article about how these programmers are basically writing code that would destroy their own jobs. And

There was a software developer named Carl Brown who decided to actually test the claim. I have been a software professional for 35 years. Here's Carl Brown on his YouTube channel, Internet of Bugs. For the record, personally, I think generative AI is cool. I use GitHub Copilot on a regular basis. I use ChatGPT, Lama 2, Stable Diffusion. All that kind of stuff is cool. But lying about what these tools can do does everyone a disservice.

So he took one of these videos where Devin was aiming to complete a task and he tried to replicate exactly what was happening. He did the task in 36 minutes and the timestamps in the video show that it took Devin more than six hours to do the task. What Carl says is that Devin is generating its own errors and then debugging and fixing the errors that it made itself.

The company basically acknowledged it, actually, in tweets. They didn't respond to my inquiries, but they basically said, yeah, you know, we're still trying to make it better. But it was one of these things where it was a classic example of like, journalists shouldn't believe just a video that claims to show something happening without actually taking a minute to...

to even carefully watch the video or ask to have access to the tool themselves. If I started a company and raised millions of dollars in funding, I would be under a lot of pressure to prove to the public that it works. And you'd think that people who cover Silicon Valley understand that dynamic? Totally. But I mean, I will tell you that after my piece ran in the New York Times questioning whether we should believe all this AI hype,

A reporter at Wired did an entire piece basically trashing my piece. And the title of it was, We Should Believe the AI Hype. Really? Yes.

Okay. And what was their argument? Basically that in the future, I will be proven wrong because it will all get better. And that's sort of the company's argument too, which is like, don't believe your lying eyes. Believe the future that I'm holding up in front of you. I think for journalists, I don't think our role is to call the future. I think our role is to assess the present and

And the recent past. The recent past tells us that big tech is very good at generating hype in the press and using venture capital to grow really fast and influence regulators. I'm not predicting this will happen with AI. It's already happening. My worst fears are that we cause significant, we the field, the technology, the industry cause significant harm to the world.

Here's Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testifying before Congress last May and discussing why he thinks AI needs to be regulated. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to

to prevent that from happening. Just a month later, Time magazine revealed that OpenAI had secretly lobbied the EU to go easy on the company when regulators were drafting what's now the largest set of AI guardrails. Because he is treated as kind of the high priest of this AI moment.

because he had these compelling narratives that were being backed up by a lot of reporting. Paris Marx. He was basically able to convince European Union officials to reduce the regulations on his company and his types of products specifically. And that carried through to when the AI Act was finally passed. All this while technology companies pushed the public along a path that they and members of the press say is inevitable.

We know that generative AI, the chat GPTs, the image generators, things like that, are much more computationally intensive than the types of tools that we were using previously. So they require a lot more computing power. And as a result of that, Amazon and Microsoft and Google are in the process of doing a major build out of large hyperscale data centers around the world in order to

what they hope will be this major demand for these generative AI tools into the future. That obviously requires a lot of energy and a lot of water to power it.

I think we have paths now to a massive energy transition away from burning carbon. And so in this interview in January with Bloomberg, Altman actually directly engaged with that when he was asked about it. Does this frighten you guys? Because the world hasn't been that versatile when it comes to supply. But AI, as you have pointed out, it's not going to take its time until we start generating enough power. It motivates us to go invest more in fusion and invest more in new storage.

He said that we're actually going to need an energy breakthrough in nuclear technologies in order to power the vision of AI that he has. He didn't kind of hesitate and say, well, if we don't arrive at it, then maybe we won't be able to roll out this vision of AI that I hope to see, but rather that we're just going to have to power it with other energy sources, those often being fossil energy sources, and that would require us to geoengineer the planet in order to kind of

keep it cooler than it would otherwise be because of all the emissions that we're creating. The existential question I have about AI is, is it worth it? Julia Angwin. Is it worth having something that maybe sorts data better, writes an email for you?

at the cost of our extremely precious energy. And then also, AI is based on scooping up all this data from the public internet without consent. As Sam Harnett said, speed is imperative. It's why big tech is pushing some half-baked AI features.

As of last week, when you type a question into Google, you now see an AI-generated answer. Some people reported that the AI told them to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, which weren't presented as jokes, even though the info appears to have been scraped from Reddit and The Onion.

You know, there's this AI pioneer, Jan LeCun, who works at Meta. He's their leading AI scientist. And he recently tweeted out something I thought was so perfect. He said, it will take years for AI to get as smart as cats. And I thought, like, that's perfect. I should have just run that instead of my column. Yeah.

Here's one last issue. When Google AI summarizes legit info from real news sites, there's no need to go to the original source.

meaning even less traffic for ailing media organizations. This is yet another reason members of the press should refrain from Silicon Valley boosterism. Janky new tools may be eating our lunch, but if the recipe was made by AI, we should probably wait to dig in. ♪

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Michael Loewinger.

On Notes from America, we have conversations with people across the country about how we can truly become the nation that we claim to be. Each week, we talk about race, our politics, education, relationships, usually all of them, because everything's connected. And you, our listeners, are at the center of those conversations. I'm Kai Wright. Join me on Notes from America, wherever you get your podcasts.