The AI Resistance is Forming. (Should You Join?)

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

In this episode of Deep Questions with Cal Newport, Cal explores the personal and societal impact of AI on human flourishing, shifting focus from

Key takeaways

• AI is not necessarily making people better at their craft; it often reinforces mediocrity by offering safe, predictable suggestions.
• The widespread use of AI tools is contributing to a decline in original thinking and unique voice in online content.

Main topics

• The personal cost of over-reliance on AI
• AI's role in degrading original thought and creativity

Notable quotes

"We are at a point in history, not nearing it, but here, where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop, or if they're going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love."

Conclusion

Cal and Brad argue that the real question isn't whether AI will destroy humanity, but how

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) So there's a new paper making the rounds. It's called Large Language Models as a Cognitive Virus. It's written by a distinguished group of professors from all around the world. Now, the core argument in this paper is that LLMs, as they spread, are like a virus that is going to change collectively the way that cognition happens. These changes could be very negative. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. When I read this paper, it woke me up. Because here's what's been going on. The AI discourse in recent months has really been focused on existential questions. Questions like, are swarms of AI monsters going to kill us all? Or questions like, are we just one model update away from LLM-based tools being able to solve all of our problems and ushering in some sort of digital utopia? Now, these questions are fun and exciting and frustrating, and I got involved in some of these debates because, you know, I didn't want people to be more anxious than they needed to be, and I thought there were some absurdities being floated around in here. But this paper reminded me that my main focus in my work is you. You being the individual, my main focus is helping individuals figure out what is the best way to navigate the current technological landscape that allows you as a human being to flourish. Speaker 1 (1:29) I should be focusing less on the impact of AI on humanity and more on the impact of AI on humans. All right, so I was having these thoughts, and then I got a call from my good friend Brad Stolberg. Now, you know Brad because he's been on the show many times. He's an author, most recently of the New York Times bestseller, The Way of Excellence. And Brad called me, and he started giving me this impassioned speech about how he was done with AI. He tried it. People told him, you need to be using this. Don't be cynical. This is the future. And he tried. And he said, you know what? This is not making me better at the things I care about. It's not making me a better human. It's not making my life better. It's actually running contrary to many of the things that I live in my life and write about, about what makes human life meaningful. So you know what? I'm done. And I said, Brad. I got to have you on the show because what you're talking about sounds like the beginnings of a pro-human resistance movement to this sort of totalitizing influence of artificial intelligence. Exactly the type of issue that we should be discussing. Speaker 1 (2:38) not about whether the super intelligent AI is going to kill us with lasers or bees with bombs strapped onto them. We should be talking about how should you as a person be thinking about AI right now if your goal is to flourish as a human. We need that to be a part of the conversation. Arguably, that should be the biggest part of the conversations because that's what most people actually care about is how is this going to impact my life? How do I keep my life meaningful? So I had Brad on and we walked through it. I walked through why did he make that decision? What were the planks of this platform on which he's building this sort of incipient resistance movement? We got some of the objections. Look, we didn't come away with some sort of crystal clear philosophy that I'm saying all of you have to follow. This is the right way to do. But I came away thinking this is the type of conversation we need to be having right now. This is what matters as much as trying to understand the minutia of exactly what harness was used in the solving of this math equation and what does that mean for the general math ability. I'm kind of tired of those discussions. Let's get back to the question of how do humans flourish in our current technological world. So if you've been a little bit anxious about AI or if you've been frustrated thinking everyone's talking about this and it's not making me happier, I'm not sure what I want to do with it. I think this. This conversation is going to be useful to you, and I think you're going to enjoy it. All right, so let's get into it. All right, Brad, well, welcome back to the show. Where I wanted to start, I wanted to level set by just asking you right now, what role does AI play in your day-to-day life, and how has that changed over time? Speaker 2 (4:20) Right now, it plays a very minimal role in my day-to-day life. AI has essentially, for me, become a supplement to Google. And what I mean by that is I'm still in the habit of going to Google to search something. So I'll literally just go to Google, www.google.com and search something. And then occasionally, I think it's Gemini. Is that the right? Is that Google's AI product? Whatever Google's AI product is, it'll tell me a top line result and then ask if I want more. And sometimes if I'm asking it like, what's the weather in Greenville, South Carolina going to be today? I trust the top line AI answer. Speaker 1 (4:55) And the key thing is it wasn't always that way. So you gave a real effort to experimenting and exploring the roles of AI in your work before you arrived at this. So what was going on before? What were you trying before you came to your current position of minimal use? Speaker 2 (5:13) So I think I started. at this current position of minimal use. And then I had a conversation with someone whose work I respect a ton, who will not be named. This was about six, seven months ago, who really encouraged me to use AI. Dario Speaker 1 (5:28) Lamade. We know you're talking about Dario Lamade. You're a good friend. Speaker 2 (5:32) Essentially said, like, Brad, I think you are being... I think your skepticism is starting to border on cynicism. And I think you're missing the boat. And a lot of the things that you're saying might make sense in theory, but in practice, like you should try using this tool. I think it's going to help you. I think it's going to make your writing better. It's going to make your life easier. And because this is someone I really respect, I said, all right, I'm going to actually give it a try. So I got a $20 a month chat GPT membership and I got a $20 a month Claude membership. And initially, I started by running pieces of writing through the machine and asking it for five suggestions to make the piece better or asking it what I missed that I should reconsider or asking it if I was going to cut 30 % of this, what would I cut? Never just rotely accepting the answer and doing it, but really trying to use it as a thought partner, right? That's how it was portrayed to me. It was portrayed as like you have a New York City caliber editor that you're going to get to work with. Speaker 2 (6:30) I was pretty stoked by it. I remember calling you, Cal, and being like, Cal, maybe you're being too much of a cynic here. It's giving me pretty good ideas. And then about a month and a half in, what I realized is it gives me the same pretty good idea that's not really even idea. It's just a way of reassuring me that what I have is good enough. And then one line that sounds really interesting, but when you actually toss and turn it in your head, there's nothing underneath it. I realized that it wasn't making my work better. It wasn't making my workflow better. So I said, all right, I'm just going to use this as a copy editor. So if I have a newsletter that I'm putting out or an essay that I'm working on, I'm just going to run it through the machine and tell me, please check for any grammatical and spelling errors. And it's great. It catches all the grammatical and spelling errors. However, it can't resist. It can't resist adding in a little beat and saying, hey, if you want three ideas to punch it up, here's what I'd suggest. And the suggestions were pretty flat. And the suggestions were also the same style and tone and synthetic feel to what I was reading in other people's work who I noticed had gotten pretty sloppy. And I'm just like, just stop. Just give me the freaking grammar errors. And it got to a point where it was. just annoying, like uninteresting and annoying. And, you know, for as much as I have challenges when I ask my wife to edit my work for grammar and spelling, because she's an attorney and she catches everything. And sometimes I don't make the changes she suggests. I'd much rather be annoyed with my loving human wife than with a robot. So I've essentially stopped using AI for everything. Speaker 1 (8:12) Right. And you're seeing the opposite in the world of online content, which you see. You're seeing the opposite. You're seeing quality degrading. You're seeing sharpness of ideas flattening. You're seeing telltale signs of slop. I mean, every time I talk to you, you're a little bit depressed about the state of online discourse. But for people out there who aren't reading a lot online, what is it that you're seeing happening around you by sort of our peer group of writers? Speaker 2 (8:42) Well, I think our peer group of writers are pretty Speaker 1 (8:45) good. Not people we know, but writers. Speaker 2 (8:49) Yeah, writers in general. And I think not even writers. I think people that want to be writers that were never really serious about the craft of writing, and that's worth separating. The writing is just completely homogenized and soulless. Like, everything sounds the same. Everything has the same structure. Everything has the same rhythm. Everything has the simple declarative. It's not this. It's that. Short sentence interspersed at the same intervals. Um, everything has these really fluffy metaphors that again, at first seem fascinating. And then you continue reading and thinking about it. And you're like, this is, this is just a house of cards. Like there's nothing underneath this metaphor. This is like something trying to sound smart. I heard our mutual friend, Derek Thompson put it this way, which is the AI robots feel like every sentence they write has to be more evocative than the last sentence. And that's just not good writing. It's, it's like weird, synthetic. So I think that's happening. And then another thing that I think is happening is that it is degrading the experience of writing itself. Like part of what makes good writing good is that the person struggled to produce it. Because in that struggle, the best ideas come out, the best way to deliver those ideas come out, the best work comes out through struggle. The click of a button in picking and choosing what you want is not the same kind of struggle as actually writing. And I think as a result of that, you can produce a lot more work, but the quality of the work goes down and the quality of your life, the quality of your experience with the craft goes down. Speaker 1 (10:30) Right. Speaker 2 (10:30) I don't think that we should be automating the things that we claim are our crafts. Speaker 1 (10:35) I think a quick break from my conversation with Brad to talk about some of the sponsors that makes this show. possible. So fall is here. All the travel of summer is over. But what this means is my obligations are piling up faster and faster. And I find when things get this frantic, nutrition is often the first thing to slip. This is where Factor enters the scene. Factor makes chef-created, dietician-designed, ready-to-eat meals so that you don't have to choose between real food and convenience. And here's the thing. 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Well, so let's get into this because when we were talking about this before on the phone, it really seemed like there was three major planks to your I'm sort of done with AI platform. And I think it's worth looking at each of these in turn because we don't normally hear this so systematically explored. I think it's important. So your first plank had to do with effort, right? I mean, your new book. Is that the way of excellence? You know, you're someone who knows a lot and has written recently a lot about the role of the pursuit of excellence in creating meaningful life. And you've talked to me about how you see real clashes with that human reality when you see AI being more increasingly used. So let's get into that plank a little bit. So what's going on here in your mind with the role of effort and meaning and how AI might undermine that? Speaker 2 (14:15) In order to find meaning in just about anything in life, whether it is a relationship, whether it is a work product, whether it is a leisure activity, you have to exert effort and you have to struggle. Everything worthwhile in life requires effort. By definition, the promise of AI is that it eliminates or it mitigates or it shrinks the effort, right? I call it the click of a button economy. You want an essay? Click a button. You want a recipe? click a button. You want a training plan? Click a button. You want a script for asking someone out on a date? Click a button. It eliminates the struggle that leads to the feelings of satisfaction whether you achieve or fail. And the common retort to this, which I totally sympathize with, is, well, if you're just using AI for a few things, you can exert effort on other things. And in theory, I think that's great. But what happens is the more that you use AI, the more it's like this slippery slope. And you're like, oh, well, if it corrected all the grammar in my piece, maybe I'll ask it to rewrite that paragraph that I was struggling with. And oh, if I asked it to rewrite that paragraph I was struggling with, maybe I'll ask it for 10 different conclusions. And I'll just choose the one I like best. So it's still me doing the work. But it's not you doing the work anymore. It's the machine doing the work. And I think that so much of the promise of AI is efficiency. But nobody wants their gravestone to read he was efficient. Like we want to struggle for meaning in our life. We want to exert effort in all excellence in any domain, whether it is in the culinary arts as a chef, whether it is in athletics, whether it is in writing, which is our craft, whether it is in medicine, like all excellence at root is ultra human. It doesn't mean that there aren't tools involved, but the more that the tools cannibalize and overtake the humanity. the less quality and craft you're going to see in the thing. And there's mass-produced everything, right? There's factory medicine. There's factory farming. There's factory mass-produced training and sport. There's factory mass-produced writing. And that's fine. It's cheaper. The masses sometimes like it, but it's not good. It's not quality. And I think that if we have a choice in our life to pursue quality, both the production of quality and the consumption of quality, that makes a good life. And I worry that AI is selling this false promise that actually that's not what matters. What matters is rote efficiency in quantity. Speaker 1 (16:49) Right. Well, I mean, an aspect of what you just said there that I hadn't thought about before until I read the study that I talked about in the intro to this program where I was thinking about LLM use like a cognitive virus. And part of that construction was we're underestimating the addictiveness. of this type of interaction as well. So just like you were saying, I'm just using an LLM to do X is going to turn pretty soon to I'm using it for almost everything else because there is something that is irresistible about having a linguistic conversational partner that is listening to you, that is reflecting things back, that is largely telling you like this is good, what you're doing is smart. You know, there's a construction that especially the GPT models have where if you're asking for advice about anything, it will always say, yeah, that's good. I like this a lot. There's just one thing I would change. And that turns out to be like the ideal way to give feedback to someone because it makes you feel smart, but it's not just fully affirmational. And it gives you that excitement of like, I have an idea that I just have to tweak it a little bit and this is really good. And it is pretty addictive. So anyways, that paper set it up as like, look, you let this in one place, it's going to spread other places. But I think what you're—push on this a little bit, because I think this is countercultural for a lot of people. You're saying struggle's good, quality is good. You know, for a human to have experiences that are quality, this seems to me like one of the big points in the way of excellence is the pursuit of excellence is life-affirming, right? That struggle is life-affirming. If you were to take the AI philosophy and apply it to the topic of excellence, it would say, having done something excellently is what matters, and the quicker you can get there with whatever help you can, the better, which completely belies what you found, which is that it's always the struggle and in the process in which we find meaning. So why, I mean, is that right? And why are we falling prey to that? Why don't we, why have we been trained to think struggle or friction somehow means that something bad is happening? Speaker 2 (19:01) I think that there's a couple of things worth addressing here. The first is sometimes struggle and friction is bad, and we should work to minimize struggle and friction. I mean, I drive a car. I don't walk everywhere. However, if I never use my body for anything physically, that... whole muscular and cardiovascular system would atrophy. So I protect certain parts of my life where I am very focused on exerting my body. And as a result, I feel good and I have a body that I can continue to use. I think the