From The New York Times, I'm Tracy Mumford with a special edition of The Headlines. It's a you ask, we try to answer episode on all things AI.
This is a great technology and it has lots of positive uses. So, let's just start with that.
AI is an existential threat to humanity.
We've got to make sure that we don't lose our edge in the global competition on this with China.
With the debates raging and developments coming fast and furious, we put out a call for your questions on the technology. And now we brought in two of my colleagues who cover AI for answers.
We will get to the whole are the robots going to take over in a minute, but to start we got a lot of questions about how AI seems to have become a part of everyday life right now, whether we like it or not. Here to field those is Mike Isaac, who's reported on Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Hey Mike.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I want to kick things off here with a question from Emily S, who I think is very much not alone when she asked, "Am I inevitably using AI every time I use a search engine?"
I mean, for a lot of people in the world search is kind of synonymous with Google and I would say it's very hard if not impossible to turn off AI in Google search at this point. If you really don't want to use AI in any sort of searching, there are other companies like DuckDuckGo and Brave that offer a specifically non-AI search engine. And so, you have options. It's just if you're using Google, you are basically using AI to do searching.
So, we're getting to the point where you might have to do work to not use AI.
That's right. And that's just yeah, that's Google's whole thing is they really believe AI search is the future. So, you can decide to be a part of that or not.
Mike, we got a bunch of questions about how to think about the environmental impact of using AI. I think we have all seen some version of the warnings that, you know, typing a question into a chatbot is like pouring a gallon of water down the drain, like things in that vein.
How should people be thinking about that?
Well, look, I think it was probably more of an issue early on in AI development. These companies have developed pretty advanced systems to try to tamp down on waste. They've developed what are sort of closed-loop cooling systems to try to recycle the water after it becomes warm, they cool it down again, they keep it going. So, water is less of a problem now than it was before. And I actually think that the energy use is more of a real concern, in particular because of how it can drive up rates for people in different communities, as well as just, you know, this stuff is very power-hungry. And that, I would argue, is perhaps a more pressing concern than water consumption.
All right. So, we also inevitably got a lot of questions about privacy.
This one came from Matthias J, who asked whether personal info that he might type into the chatbot, is it possible that that info could then end up popping up in answers that the chatbot gives to other users? Like, could his personal information be spread that way?
So, as you might imagine, these companies have toggle switches to turn off data sharing, or at least like how that your information can be used, but they are very much buried inside of the apps and not easy to find. I mean, that's just like tech company par for the course at this point. I will say a lot of the data is anonymized. They do use this stuff internally to train their systems and detach your personal name from it, but at the same time, I still think it's just a good practice to not put anything crucially detailed about your life into these AI engines, because they don't particularly know how all of these work in a lot of ways, you know? These bots are still surprising even the companies. So, I would say if you're very concerned about that, go and try to find the settings buried in the menus of all of these apps, but never put in super sensitive things like your social security number or bank account details would be my main argument.
It feels like some people though upload their entire tax documents, their entire medical history. Like, we are past that point in some ways.
Yeah, I mean, and look, say you upload your entire tax history, which is something I would never personally do. That sort of thing makes these bots better over time because then they can use that to help people do their taxes in the future. But, like, it's still unclear to me where those particular numbers in your tax return may be going. And again, the companies say we anonymize it, it's safe, or whatever, but I just think it's easier to err on the side of caution on how much very detailed information you're sharing.
Mike, we got a ton of emails that were basically some version of can AI hack my blank, right? So, can AI hack my bank account, my phone, my smart oven.
[laughter] We actually had a middle school class in St. Genevieve, Missouri wrote in and they wanted to know if AI could hack the self-driving features in a Tesla. So, how should we think about this?
I think of this in two ways. There's the things that we can control and the things that we can't control. I would say the things that we can control are your what's called password hygiene, right? You don't reuse the same passwords across all your accounts. Definitely don't use like the word password or 1 2 3 4 5.
