KEVIN ROOSE:

Have you noticed how insanely polarized the A.I. discourse has become recently?

CASEY NEWTON: From time to time I take a look at my Bluesky mentions and am reminded of the many, many skeptics out there and how differently they see the world.

ROOSE Honestly, I think all the arguing about whether A.I. is good or bad obscures a more interesting thing happening right now, which is that this stuff, in its present form, has become genuinely useful. ChatGPT is the sixth-biggest website on Earth. Something like 43 percent of Americans in the work force use generative A.I. I can’t think of another technology, besides maybe the smartphone, that has gone from “doesn’t exist” to “basically can’t function without it” in less time.

NEWTON The only historical analogue I could think of would be the “Hard Fork” podcast.

ROOSE I used to feel like a crazy early adopter for using A.I. all the time, but now I feel as if I am actually closer to the median of the people I know, in terms of my daily usage.

NEWTON I’m seeing a wide range of uses. Some people I know are essentially just having fun — like my mom, who used a chatbot to help find songs for her 50th-wedding-anniversary photo montage. I’m increasingly using it for work functions — asking to research unfamiliar topics to help me get a jump start, for example, or taking a first stab at fact-checking.

My boyfriend is probably the biggest power user I know. He’s a software engineer, and he will give his A.I. assistant various tasks, and then step away for long stretches while it writes and rewrites code. A significant portion of his job is essentially just supervising an A.I.

ROOSE A.I. has essentially replaced Google for me for basic questions: What setting do I put this toaster oven on to make a turkey melt? How do I stop weeds from growing on my patio? I use it for interior decorating — I’ll upload a photo of a room in my house and say, “Give this room a glow-up, tell me what furniture to buy and how to arrange it and generate the ‘after’ picture.” A friend of mine just told me that they now talk to ChatGPT voice mode on their commute in their car — instead of listening to a podcast, they’ll just open it up and say, “Teach me something about modern art,” or whatever.