A.I. Goes to War + Is ‘A.I. Brain Fry’ Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey’s Identity
3/13/20261 hr 7 min
A.I. is changing the ways war is waged. This week, we explore how the U.S. and Israel are using A.I. to identify targets in the conflict with Iran — and why data centers and fiber optic cables are targets on the front lines. Then, researcher Julie Bedard breaks down “A.I. brain fry,” a new condition she and her colleagues studied among A.I. users at work. And finally, Casey shares his battle with Grammarly after the company used his identity in a new A.I. feature, without his consent.
Guest:
- Julie Bedard, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group who is also the lead author of a survey of “A.I. brain fry” in the workplace.
Additional Reading:
- U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says
- How A.I. Is Turbocharging the War in Iran
- Anthropic’s A.I. tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud
- A.I. Fatigue Is Real and Nobody Talks About It
- Token Anxiety
- A.I. Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It
- Grammarly Is Using Our Identities Without Permission
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Kevin Roose· Host0:30
Well, I'm having sort of a weird day.
Casey Newton· Host0:31
How so?
Kevin Roose· Host0:32
Well, I woke up this morning and I, you know, checked my social media feeds- Mm-hmm ... and, uh, I saw messages like the following: "You're garbage, and I hope you lose your job and become homeless. God, what a waste of sperm you are." [laughs] [laughs] And if you have never seen a message like that before 8:00 AM, uh, you might not work for The New York Times.
Casey Newton· Host0:55
Well, I, I suspect that I know what this was about, but tell the listeners what made people so mad.
Kevin Roose· Host1:01
So my colleague Stuart Thompson and I recently published this quiz- Mm-hmm ... uh, which is basically a set of AI written passages next to unlabeled sort of works from, from masterful human writers.
Casey Newton· Host1:15
Yeah.
Kevin Roose· Host1:15
And it was sort of designed as kind of a blind taste test- Mm-hmm ... where you pick which one you liked better, and then it would tell you, you know, which one is generated by AI and which one was written by a human. And, uh, Casey, people did not like this quiz.
Casey Newton· Host1:27
Well, what were the findings of the quiz?
Kevin Roose· Host1:29
Well,