Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

My guest today is longtime friend of the show Joanna Stern. You all know Joanna: she is the former senior personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a former Decoder guest host, one of my cofounders here at The Verge, and also just one of my very closest friends.

Joanna Stern is not a robot, but she lived with them

The journalist and author of I Am Not a Robot on her year living with AI and starting a new media company.

I mention that because Joanna just left that lofty perch at The Journal to start her own media company called New Things. She’s starting with her new book about AI, called I Am Not a Robot, which is out this week on May 12th.

You’ll hear us reference the fact that she and I have been talking about her big move to go independent for ages now — it’s something she’s wanted to do and wrestled with for years, and she has a long list of interesting reasons about why now is the time. She’s also structured her new venture in partnership with NBC to keep her in front of a big mainstream audience.

It was important that I prove to Joanna that I actually read her book, which is really quite good. She spent a full year allowing AI into every part of her life and has more of a sense of where this technology actually is than pretty much anyone because of it. As you’ll hear Joanna explain, many of the most hyped AI-powered gadgets — especially the humanoid robots — are definitely not ready, and they might not be for a very long time.

But you’ll also hear Joanna say she’s a lot more bullish on certain types of AI after her experience writing her book. She thinks wearable AI might really get us to a killer app — one that might justify all the extreme tradeoffs we’re making to continue developing the technology at the pace the tech industry wants to.

She’s also using AI to help get her new media company off the ground. So I asked her about that, too, and what she’s learning now that she’s left the world of traditional media and put a heavier emphasis on the YouTube algorithm.

This is a really fun one — it is about as close to the actual conversation Joanna and I have at our regular dinners as it gets.

Okay: Joanna Stern, author of the new book I Am Not a Robot and founder of New Things. Here we go.

*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. *

Joanna Stern, you’re the founder and chief everything officer of the new tech news venture New Things. You’re also a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, but most importantly, you’re a cofounder of The Verge and also just one of my closest friends. Welcome back to Decoder.

It is so nice to be here on Decoder and not subbing in for you.

**[Laughs] It’s true that you were also a guest host of this show for a while. This is the most conflicted episode of Decoder I think we’ve ever done, but I’m excited for it. I’m going to try to make it as tough on you as possible, as adversarial. We’re going to break down, we’re going to find the dark heart of New Things. **

I’m going to make it adversarial on you because I was a host here.

[Laughs] That’s true.

We’re figuring out whose show this is. I see that it says behind you “Nilay Patel”, but we’ll see.

We’re going to get AI to change it in real time to say “Joanna Stern”. Has anyone ever heard a podcast with two hosts? It’s going to be amazing.

You’ve got a new book out. It’s called I’m Not a Robot. You spent 12 months in your life using AI for everything. It’s organized by seasons. Your kids are in it. It’s very good. It’s very funny. It’s out on May 12th. There’ll be a preorder link in the show notes. You also started New Things, which is your new media company. You left The Wall Street Journal, you’ve got a YouTube venture. I want to talk about all of these things.

I want to start with a very simple question. You are one of the more influential tech reviewers in the world. You have spent a year using AI products to do everything in your life. There’s the book. You can see it.

I’m just going to keep doing this the whole show.

Here’s my theory. I don’t think consumer AI products are very good. I don’t think there’s a great consumer AI product, and I think a ton of the angst we hear about AI is a reflection of that. You have used all the products, you’ve used the expensive ones, the bleeding-edge ones. You just had a robot step on your foot. Where do you think we are? Are these products good? Are they great?

I think they can be great. I know that you feel this way, but I think they can be great. I’m going to turn the question back on you. People in your life that are not in the tech world, do they use AI?

It’s foisted upon them. That’s how I feel about it. I feel like if you open Google, you get some cheap-to-run AI model in your face doing AI Overviews, and that is fine. And Google had to do that because they felt very threatened by ChatGPT.

But then, if you open the free version of ChatGPT, you get some cheap-to-run AI model that is a bunch of engagement prompts at the end of every query. And everybody is having these experiences. So yes, they’re using them, but I don’t know—

AI is being forced upon them.

And the experiences that are being forced upon people look like slop. They open their Instagram feeds and there’s slop. No one’s going out to buy an iPhone. Do you know what I mean? That was a thing that people chose to do because they were excited about that product. You and I both lived through that entire moment together as colleagues. I’m just looking at these products, the free products that are in front of people, and I’m saying, “These aren’t actually great.”

I think that they have not become great in the three to four years since ChatGPT released. And so for the people that are using ChatGPT or some form of a chatbot, have they gotten considerably better, at least in terms of a product, in the last four years? If you look at the consumer, it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and we can say Claude has been shooting up there, but it’s hard to tell if that’s really a consumer adoption. I think the models have gotten better. You can maybe trust these more, but the interface has not gotten any better.

Most people are just still launching ChatGPT. Maybe they’re doing voice mode. I see a lot of people doing voice mode now, but mostly they’re typing to a chatbot and that has not gotten better. I agree with you there.

But I do think that people have figured out other use cases where AI is now helping them in their everyday lives, not just at work. That was my question to you: Are your friends, or the people you hang out with on the weekend... We both don’t have friends, let’s be honest.

[Laughs] We are friends.

We are friends, but we are in this. We are not normal people. That’s why we are friends, right?

Yeah, it’s very difficult to be our friend.

But your parent friends or your old friends or family, I see those people using AI in really interesting ways, or going to AI now instead of Google. Our nanny is a great example. She’s constantly asking ChatGPT questions. I’m going to give the classic example, which is recipes and cooking and all of those things, but she’s often asking ChatGPT to do things.

I do that too. I watch my daughter basically fight with Google about who knows more about space. It’s a very good pattern in our house. She starts asking Gemini for space facts, because she just talks to the Google Assistant on our Google Home, which is now powered by Gemini. So they just talk about space for a while. I think that is wonderful. I legitimately see her curiosity get rewarded in that dynamic. I think that’s great.

**What I’m talking about is that the AI industry is asking for a lot. A subtext of your book, and it’s made explicit about halfway through, is like, “Yeah, I’m talking about all the jobs going away.” There are grades of how fast the jobs might go away. You **