The Vergecast - Into It: The Conversation We’re NOT Having About AI

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Today we're sharing an episode of Into It: A Vulture Podcast with Sam Sanders AI is making fake Drake/The Weeknd songs, weird images, and there’s a worry that TV and movie scripts could be written by ChatGPT. But it’s also about to dramatically change the way we consume, share, and obsess over pop culture. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, explains to Sam how pretty much everything we search on the internet is mediated by Google… and how AI is about to disrupt it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's your friend, Nilai. We've got a little surprise in the Vurchast feed today. My friend Sam Sanders hosts the Intuit podcast over at Fulcher.

It's all about culture and entertainment. It is great listening. And he and I got to talking about the internet and how much entertainment writing on the internet is built around people Googling for TV show recaps and Marvel explainers and how that entire ecosystem might change as AI changes search.

If you've been listening to the Verchcast, you know, I'm obsessed with how AI might change search and how that might change the future of the web. And it was really fun to talk to Sam about all that from his very different perspective. This conversation is almost like a mirror image of the Vergecast. I think you're really going to like it. Okay. Here I am on Intuit with Sam Sanders. Hey, you are listening to Intuit from Vulture in New York Magazine. I'm Sam Sanders.

And today, we're going to talk AI. Usually when it comes to entertainment and pop culture. the AI conversation is all about the content AI can make. The fake Drake songs, the crappy AI images, all the worry over TV and movie scripts written by chat GPT or whatever. And all of that is important. But when it comes to entertainment, there's another AI conversation we should be having

that we are not having yet. And it's all about how the rise of AI is going to change the way all of us consuming. pop culture and share it and obsess over it together. My friend Nilai Patel over at The Verge, he has been talking with me about this for a while. In this episode, he will talk to you about this as well. It's a really simple idea. Basically, at some point in the near future, AI will end Google's current dominance of the web.

Right now, most of us Google search to navigate the internet. And most websites build themselves knowing that you will probably get to them through Google. But what happens once we all stop Googling and start using AI to just like give us the answers without us having to go to a website to find those answers? How does that change our relationship to TV and music and movies and books and video games and how we find out about that stuff and how we obsess over that stuff and how we share our ideas about all of that stuff? Nilai says it changes all of that. A lot. So this episode, he will explain.

All right, let's get into it. So you and I talked at a little conference called South by Southwest all about how the internet, as we know it, is about to change in a big, big way for the last decade or two or even more. The internet was built in the shape that Google formed. You know, we have an internet that is search-based. And so the conversation now is like, if AI is. ascendant, what happens to Google, what happens to search, and what happens to internet as we know it. There's another chat that the entertainment field isn't having that is just as important. And this is a conversation about the shape of the internet when Google is no longer dominant

and what that means for the creation and consumption of pop culture. Yeah, not even dominant. What happens when Google changes? Yeah. Right. And like maybe that change will be less dominant. Maybe it'll be more dominant. But the thing that we're used to is a world where most of the web is designed to Google's

specifications. So Google search can find it. And if Google search changes, what Google wants changes and the web will change. And with parallel to that, you have all of these places in the culture that Google can't see. Like Google can't search TikTok. That's pretty wild, right? Google can't search Instagram. Google really doesn't show you a lot of, like, substacks.

So there's all these pockets of culture that are sort of developing outside of the gaze of Google. And then there's the pockets of culture, like the architecture of information on the web, that is kind of more readable by the Google search robot than it is by human beings. And that thing, when it changes, it'll go from being invisible to most people to being the most visible thing ever. Right? This thing you take for granted. I can type a question into Google and I'll get a list of links to websites that will answer the questions. When that changes, just think about all the people you know who do that 100 times a day without thinking about it.

Think about how many times you do that without thinking about. It me. I can't live my life without Google Search. And if Google Search starts answering the questions itself, if AI starts answering the questions and doesn't send you to a website, all the sort of like SEO consequences that we see out in the... the world will change. Also, just really quick, we should point out SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you aren't in a

newsroom or dealing with websites for living, you don't know what it means. But basically, it means gaming your website and your URLs for prominent play in Google search. Yeah. So if you are the lucky person who convinces Google that when people search for chocolate chip cookie

recipe, that you should be the first result, you have a business. Right? You can put ads on that business, you can sell chocolate chips, you can do whatever. You're going to get a lot of traffic from people searching for chocolate chip cookie recipes. If you're at the bottom of that list, or heaven forbid, on the second page, you don't have a business. So there's a huge fight to be at the top of those results. And it means when you actually go click on what's at the top of the result for chocolate chip cookie recipe, that page looks bonkers because it's designed to

game Google and not necessarily be useful to people. And that is 100% why recipe blogs have like 2,000 words of text before the actual recipe. Explain to our listeners who may not realize it how much the internet that we know right now is kind of run by Google. When you told this to me, I was like, I had never thought of that, but huh, makes sense. In a nutshell, can you tell us how much of the internet, as we know it, is shaped by Google and has bent its will towards Google's whims? Yeah.

Yeah, so just think about the experience of using the web. You are opening a browser, which is probably Chrome, which is owned and developed by Google. You are often starting your journey on the web on Google.com. Do you know how many people search for the word Facebook to get to Facebook? All the aunties. Google knows this. They're like a primary use case for Google is navigational. And so we don't mess without those pages.

We don't put featured snippets or have the AI do it. We're like, here's the link to Facebook. So a huge number of people are just getting around the internet, like in the most basic way by asking Google to help them. Then you land on a web page, and most web pages that are free are monetized with advertising. That Google runs. At every point in sort of the chain of technologies

that put advertising in front of you in the internet, Google owns a company or a technology, that is the one or two player in that marketplace. So ad tech is a complicated thing, but basically Google is in prime position to control it end to end. So if you have a website and you've got ads on that website, Google is in your business. They know what's happening. They're the ones providing the targeting. They're the ones serving the ads. The whole thing, that's Google. And then if you want to get traffic to your website, you can buy ads on Google and people searching for car insurance, the car insurance companies literally buy the keywords. So they show up

in search results at the top of the list. Or you can play these SEO games. And that means there's an entire industry of people who help optimize websites to show up in search engine rankings. And they're SEO experts. And I would tell you that they are more like a priesthood or than a consultancy. Wow. Right. They interpret what Google says about what it wants the web to be into rules, into design. So if you look at websites, their design of much websites has become the same over time. For Google. Because it's easier for Google to understand that design. So, yeah. So this is the thing that I realized once you told me this. I think we always imagine that Google is just code that is nonpartisan, unbiased, probably not changing and kind of just works.

But in actuality, Google is internet-wise a god who asks its subjects to consistently tweak the way they do things to make it happy. Yeah. So Google is a company, just like any other. It has employees. The employees have arguments. It makes a lot of money. But it projects. this exterior image of just being your friend, the search provider that has slides in the office and a big colorful logo. And you peel one layer off of that. You're like, oh, this is a company that makes a lot of money and has a lot of investors who want the company to make more money. And the thing that makes Google the most money by far is search. It's the entire business.

And that business is an advertising business. And I am talking on a vulture podcast. and if I just ask you to imagine what an advertising business looks like, you already know, right? It's an ad business. They're trying to get you to buy stuff. And they help companies... I'd be reading these hello fresh ads.

I should do. And you know, like that piece of it, Google hides that aspect of what they do. They're in the business of helping companies find an audience for their products and then getting you to buy those products. We've explained how dominant Google actually is when it comes to Internet and how much they bend everything to their will. That's about to change.

Allegedly, I keep reading these articles that say pretty soon at some point, we won't experience the internet through Google Search, we'll experience it through AI and AI search. I want you to tell me at a 101 level what that actually looks like, Neelai. So Google Search now, you're looking for a chocolate chip recipe. It finds a bunch of websites with recipes on them. You go to one of those websites. And that's Google Search, and that is the default way of operating the Internet.

AI search is an AI chatbot just tells you a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Right? Chat, GPT just tells it to you. Or you say, hey, I'm looking for a TV for my living room. It needs to be about this size. I want these features. And right now, Google Search will take you to the verge or it'll take you to one of a hundred of our competitors. In the future, an AI is just going to be like, here's a list.

I went and read the Internet for you and here's a list of TVs that meet your specs. And that is a big threat. to Google, right? The whole business depends on selling the advertising to be the, you know, the first sponsored result and then selling the advertising across the whole web when you click on those links. If chat chad chbdd is just answering questions like that, or Bing, which is powered by chat chaptains, is just answering questions like that and taking market share from Google, this is a big threat to them. It also changes what kinds of questions you might ask the internet, right? If you can now ask these vastly more general purpose questions,

hey, can you write me a resume? Like, you would never type that into Google today. Oh my God. Right, but now you might ask a chatbot. So now you're changing your relationship to the computer. Well, yeah, yeah. And so Google at AIO released a bunch of these features, right? There's a preview of a Google search that is much more AI-driven, that does talk to you just like that. You can ask it follow-up questions, which is really interesting.

They're building a generative AI function directly into Gmail and Google Docs. So you can say, hey, write a note to my boss that says he did a good job. This was a demo on stage. Wow. The whole thing. They're doing the whole thing. And they need to prove that they can do the whole thing because the threat to the business,

the conventional wisdom is that they're behind in these new AI companies like OpenAI, like stable diffusion, like these new tools that we're seeing will somehow disrupt Google because they were late. Yeah. Yeah. This is the question I have for you now.

How in the hell was Google late? They're supposed to be smart. They're supposed to be powerful. How do they get caught off guard? It seems like they were caught off guard whenever I read about the rise of AI. Google invented a lot of this technology. They were the first to tell you that the T-in-chat GPT stands for Transformer, which is technology that was invented at Google that allows for those large language models to just talk to you like a person.

They just didn't deploy it because they were scared of being wrong. And this is like a very classic business problem where the big incumbent has too much to risk, makes too much money. and then the smaller startup can come along and say, hey, this is a little bit crappier, but it's a little more fun, and use this instead, and over time it gets better, and it unseatsy incumbent.

And this happens all the time in the technology industry. And right now it looks very much, like they're in the cycle of, here's the big, extremely lucrative, kind of getting a little worse search engine because of all the content farms and SEO scams. But we invented the technology, and we're afraid of ever getting anything wrong

or the AI hallucinating, so we're just going to demo it, And then suddenly chat sheet T shows up and it's like, yeah, this thing will just lie to you. Bing is like, yeah, this thing is definitely going to try to bang you. Like, no hesitation. Bing is like trying to get in your pants, right? And Google's like caught flat-footed because they weren't willing to take those risks. Yeah.

Well, also, was part of the reason Google was slow on embracing or trying AI was because the company had become so reliant on an ad-heavy business. And it seems like ads work a lot less and make a lot less money. AI is dominant. Yeah, there's something to that. Again, they did invent all the technology. Sunnabuchai has been calling Google an AI first company for seven years. I have watched him give demos of AI chatbots since at least 2015. So it's not that they missed it or they didn't invent it.

Again, they invented the underlying technology that is making all this happen. It's they wouldn't turn it into products because of the thing you're talking about. Their existing products were too. lucrative. And I'll give you just one extremely narrow example. Right now, a Google search, right, they've got to have computers that actually run the search and display the results here. A Google search costs nothing, right? If you just think about the cost to Google and just like electricity, right, they've optimized this so much over the past 20 years they've been running Google search that you type something into Google and a computer spins its wheels and

gives you an answer and this costs like fractions of a penny. I know people who have released AI-based chatbots where every question costs 10 cents. What? Yep. It's just 10 cents of computing power. That's how much every query to some specialized AI chatbots will cost. But if you're staring at the market, you're like, we're working on this technology that we think one day will change search forever. And right now there's no competition to search.

So we're just going to keep working on it and trying to make it cheaper before we roll it out. Like you, as a rational business person, you would never say, say, okay, when this user pushes a button, it costs us fractions of a penny. We're going to replace it with a thing that costs us 10 cents without any competitive threat whatsoever. You would just never, you would be a horrible business person if you made that choice without a competitive threat. But now there's the competitive threat.

And the competitive threat is from chat, GPT, it's from Microsoft, it's from all these other companies. And Microsoft in particular is very happy to show up and say, yeah, it'll cost 10 cents, but you'll use us instead of Google. And this is the first time we've taken market share from Google and search. And Google's version of the internet might become Microsoft's version of the internet. Like, what if we all start changing our websites, changing our content, changing our search strategies to tailor to be better for Microsoft instead of Google? All right. Time for a break, but you know the drill.

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And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. This is what I really want to get into, and this is what makes it a vulture conversation, because I'm really obsessed in how this shift to AI-Ville in all of the internet, how it affects the creation of popular culture and the consumption of it. Let me give an example. Beyonce's tour just started this week. I am going to see her at the end of the month in London, because I'm stupid and gave her all my money.

but a thing I do every day now is just Google up on Beyonce in that tour. I Google every few hours and see if there's new images. I Google every few hours and see if there's reviews of the concerts already. I Google every few hours and see if there's more talk about whether she'll release the visuals or not. I look online for people who are writing fun stuff about it and online communities talking about it. My entire consumption of Beyonce and her tour in the run-up to going. to the tour is Google-based, and it's this weird way that I'm kind of building my internet

community and anticipation around this event. Seriously. It's Google-based. Seriously. I'm searching. And then if I'm not searching on Google, I'm like searching like on Instagram, but it's search-based. Sure. How does that creation of internet community and anticipation around a piece of pop culture

change when it's AI? Yeah. I don't know how to give myself constant. Beyonce updates every few hours every day till I see her on tour when it's AI. So I'm surprised that it's search-based because I think we all saw this arc

with Taylor Swift and her tour and it's all TikTok-based. Right? I'm 38 years old. Well, it's just funny because this is another threat to Google's dominance and searches. People are just searching TikTok for stuff all the time.

You want to know how to cut an onion? TikTok is actually better at showing you the answer than Google right now because it's just going to show you 100 videos of people in their weird ways to cut onions. You want to see Taylor Swift played in the rain last night in Nashville. TikTok is going to show you 100 videos right away. But you know what I mean, right?

I don't. I want to look at that flying glitter horse that Beyonce rode. Hell yeah. You want to see that? Where are you going to find that right away? You're going to find 100 videos of that thing on TikTok. You're not going to Google it and then go to a web page that probably has an embed of a TikTok. So this is already moving.

I'm already old. It's already moving in this other way. And you're using Instagram, so it's kind of the same vibe, right? It's a more visual, more immediate search experience. But then there's the lore, right? The Beehive has, is looking for Easter eggs in the show. They're looking for set lists. They're looking for all this.

That is structured data. Oh, right? I just TikTok searched Beyonce Horse. Yeah. This is a better experience. It's a way better experience, right? Thank you. But you look at sort of the lore, the world building that everyone wants to do

with every kind of property right now. And all of that is targeted at search. Guardians of Galaxy 3 is happening. This is the thing. And it's search. It's search. You think about how many entertainment publications or entertainment writers spend hours of productive time,

knowing that people are going to search for the post-credit scene of a Marvel movie, knowing that people are desperate to find out who Taylor is dating today, right? And all of that stuff is search demand-driven. And so now people launch property. Like Marvel knows it has to seed the lore before a movie comes out. So it's available to you. And so like we've built an architecture of information

around culture, around entertainment, that you know that people are watching this stuff with a phone in their hand or the first thing they're going to do when they're done watching the movie is Google lost ending explained. Yes, yes, exactly. I'm sitting here still stuck on all these Beyonce

on the horse videos. Let me tell you, she's one of the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. She's got that leg up and she's a little scary. And I'm like, she's high in the air. Man, if I was still a church kid, I'd be putting the blessed oil on my phone.

But I'm not and I love it. I'm like, I'm not going that high. So even though I'm still searching on Google, the young kids that were searching for Beyonce content on TikTok, they're still using search. Right? And I'm even thinking like, I'm finally at some point going to finally watch

yellow jackets. And when I finally do that, I'm going to search to see what Vulture wrote about it. I'm going to search to see which app, I think at Showtime, I don't know, how much does that cost? Where do I get to do to find it? I'm going to search Christina Ricci and see what she's been up to because she's in the show. I'm going to Google some recaps. I'm going to search for funny tweets about this show. My consumption of this thing will be search-based, whether it's Google search, TikTok search, Twitter search. What happens when the certification we all do around the pop culture we love, becomes AI-based. And I kind of want you to give me

an example from your world of culture consumption. Yeah. So whenever I'm done watching anything, I just start Googling it. So an episode of succession is over, and I'm already looking for somebody to write a recap of a thing I just watched,

to tell me what Easter eggs I missed. Mm-hmm. And I just find that incredibly delightful. Like, it's like I was really enjoyed watching whatever I was watching. Now it's over, and I'm going to relive it again, text. I don't know why I do this. I didn't do this before, but now it's just a habit.

Yeah. I think it picked up with Game of Thrones in particular, right? And if you're at the place where you're like, Beyonce on this horse could be in Game of Thrones. I'm sorry, I'm still watching Beyonce Horse. I like knowing that I have to compete with literally a glitter horse on TikTok. Like the, I'm putting my phone down. Like an entire Chinese sciop designed to capture the attention of millions of Americans. And I'm here talking about SEO with you. Like, I'm staying no chance. It's so horrible. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, so just think about that. Like, what if you're like, I want to read a recap of succession, and it's already being ingested into Google, the script is already into Google, and Google's AI is just going to write you the answer. Is that going to be good? Is it going to meet what you want?

What if you want to Google? Well, this is the question, though. Is it going to give you a mashup of 12 shitty Recaps. Yeah, where's it going to come from? And not the best one. Whose labor is going to be compensated for that work? I don't know the answer to that question. Right now, that's the biggest open question is

all these AIs are being trained by sort of scraping the open internet and no one got paid for that. They just took it and they ingested it and you could fall down an entire rabbit hole of like copyright law. But at the end of the day, the experience of using the internet is you're just going to ask the robot

for something and it's going to give it back to you. And it might just make it itself. And that's wild. part of the culture where a lot of what people want, you know, you work in entertainment. Every time I end up writing about a piece of entertainment, if I say I like it or I express an opinion, right, the flood of reactions can be very harsh.

And if you can just sand off the harsh edges and you're like, here's what happened in the Marvel movie, no opinion. The robot wrote it for you. That feedback loop to me feels very dangerous, right? It's no longer, well, it feels very isolated. I'm not really in conversation with any. anybody else on the internet.

Like when I think about my Beyonce searching, I'm seeing the names of the folks who made this. I might interact with them, comment on the article, reply to the tweet. When AI gives me an answer about Beyonce, that's it. Yeah. And I, the reason I love writing about computers,

and I love thinking about computers, is ultimately computers are a tool of expression. And the thing that they have done for years and years and years is make it easier to create it easier to create. create culture, make it easier to distribute culture, make it easier to talk about culture. This is the story of computers in our lives. They make it easier to make art. Right? You look at anything in computing. You look at cameras on our phones. You look at Twitter. However much of a mess Twitter is, entire social movements were born on Twitter from people using

cameras on their phones and just talking to each other. What was happening in their lives? This is the talking to each other. Also, Beyonce, update. date. I've now found the TikToks where people are saying Beyonce on the horse is actually some book of revelation imagery and it's like dark-sighted. You found the lore. You found the lore. And that lore is going to get

seated. One of the things that I love the most is whenever, with Beyonce in particular, she's a very referential artist. She picks and chooses what she wants and she really highlights it. And if you are ever in the position of needing to Google it, the example that I think this is most famous famous right the single ladies video the Fosse dance oh yeah why did so many

entertainment writers suddenly have an expert level understanding of Bob Fossi like was that always in the background right and that's like a combination of they have search and they know there's demand for it they're going to meet the demands so they're getting like all this happened in the background so that when people were searching for these things that they had seen in a Beyonce video yes there were supply and so here book of revelations glitter horse is going to become a search term. And a lot of very smart writers are going to produce Book of Revelation's Glitter Horse content. And that is an absolutely bonkers cycle to think about. And what worries me about AI, when I say computers are tools to make culture, that is what

they do. And all of the economics of how we think about entertainment and culture, right, go out the window when you drop computers into it. No one actually cares about making money. on the internet. They all, we all want to. Mm-hmm. But our most human desire is to make things

and show them to each other and everyone is constantly doing it for free all the time because of computers. Yeah. And what artists are supposed to do is challenge us and push us and all these things.

And if you take AI and it's literally a statistical average of everything that happened before. There will be no challenging. And it starts answering the questions. You've now sanded the edges off.

Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job.

job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

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If you know that you're launching season two of a show like Yellowjackets into an internet that's ruled by AI and not search and Google search, how do you craft your entire show and your, entire rollout of the show differently. Yeah. You must, right? You have to. Yeah, that, you know, the entertainment embargoes that come along with the end of every episode of every show might change. Like, you might want to give that information to Google first so that it can answer the

AI questions better about the ending of your show. Just the way that you might see the architecture of supply and demand for entertainment content might change. And what is really interesting to me is, again, we take it for granted right now. This did not used to be the case. People did not finish an episode of Friends and immediately Google Friends, right? Yeah. That happened now.

And that means the shows have all been able to do more intricate world building. They've been able to be more self-referential without as much explanation or exposition. Because the trust from the showrunners is that the audience will do the work. They will do the homework if they need to do the homework. And you start to take that away or change it. And eventually you might end up in place where shows have to go back to being a single shot, self-contained, beginning, middle, and an end story. Because you can't depend on a search architecture to deliver everything to you. Or you can't depend on people even using it in that way.

If the average member of the audience first turns to TikTok to search after a show is over, you've got to provide something very different. different to the world. Yeah. Yeah. How worried should I be about this shift as an elder millennial who was pretty used to ingesting pop culture a certain way? How much will I have to relearn how I converse with Beyonce and yellow jackets and Guardians of the Galaxy in the next few years?

My instinct is that we should be excited about it. Okay. But what if I'm not? And if you're not, you know, you can be a boomer like everybody else. You can still use Yahoo on a dial-up line. That's fine. That's good. Okay.

Okay. But the reason I say we should be excited about it is there was a time when Snapchat sent the verge a lot of traffic, right? The idea that there's some big platform tech company in between you and other people or you in the culture that is shaping how that culture is made. When I say it's Facebook, people know that's big. When I say it's Twitter, people recoil, right? You wrote this just to get hate clicks on Twitter. Like, everyone knows what I'm talking about. You wrote this to get Google.

It's felt very neutral. It's like the thing we all did in the background to pay for the thing we actually want to see. Something happened there. But I think this is what's going to break that relationship. And I say I think it's going to happen because the idea that we're going to ask different questions of our computers and expect our computers to make things for us

as opposed to us using computers to make things, I think all of that desire for human connection is going to go somewhere else. And maybe there'll be new tech platform companies and maybe there'll be different algorithms in the way. But I think that's healthy. Like we've done this for two decades now. And it screwed us up.

And it screwed us up. And I think it's better for us to say, here's what we learned. We're going to build a new thing now with some of that experience and some of that, you know, some of that scar tissue, and some of that focus about what we actually want. I want to, what I really want to give to Intuit listeners is a plea to think about the rise of AI in some bigger ways than a lot of coverage would have us think about it now on the entertainment side.

Yeah. As I said earlier, right now, the entertainment industry only thinks of AI. in terms of the content it will make and how it might replace people, the fake Drake songs, the shitty images made by AI, scripts written by AI. But what I want this conversation

to our listeners is that that won't be the only shift that AI brings. There's going to be a shift in how community around culture is built and maintained and constructed when AI becomes dominant. The way that we collect ourselves

around the Beyonce horse, around Gardens the Galaxy 3, around whatever boy band we're into, it's going to fundamentally change, and that's going to change our relationship to the culture we love. And if that is the thing I want people to take from this conversation,

what advice or caution would you give our listeners as we enter this brave new world where AI reshapes how we build community around the pop culture we love? You know, there's that old story about the frog in the water and you turn up the heat and the frog never notices it.

I love that story. Yeah, yeah. We're in that moment. And I think the thing that's really challenging is you can't, the frog doesn't notice it because the change is so gradual, right? This is the moment to say,

I see the water. I'm aware of it. I see that I'm aware of the slight temperature rise and I'm going to make choices about information I'm going to make choices about how aware I am of how this is happening to me. There's a really great study actually from a division of Google that says young people on the internet encounter information. This is their relationship to the news.

They encounter it. I think this is our moment to say we shouldn't just encounter things. We shouldn't just let algorithms happen to me. So here's this company that, again, I actually quite like this year. I think Sunnabashai is a very thoughtful human being. And I know lots of Googlers. They're all very thoughtful. They are sincere in their mission of trying to organize the world's information.

But they have shareholders. This is a massive, extremely lucrative business. There's a capitalist enterprise. It prioritizes itself, just like any other company would rationally. And if you're in this ecosystem of information, and the temperature is going up, and you can't see that, oh, it's Google's kind of turning up the temperature on me. this is that moment to step back and say,

how am I getting, what choices am I making versus what choices are being made for me? And I think that little bit of recognition is what lets you step out of it. It's also, a lot of people who listen to the show, make culture. It's what lets you make better, more challenging, more interesting culture

because you see the framework that you're in and then you make art about that. And it's actually really hard to describe the internet. And this is the moment where I think because it's changing, we can just step outside of it and look at it and say it's there. Yeah, I like that. What I hear you saying is pay attention. This shift might be bigger than we think.

I think that the Internet's information architecture is about to change. Because of AI, because search changes, because the glitter horse is easier to find on TikTok. And that change in behavior, that first thing you do on the Internet, When that changes, the whole world changes. And I think that's good. Everything's supposed to change. And we've lived in this internet for long enough.

This is, and look around. But it's, yeah, this is true. Listen. Maybe it's time for a change. Maybe it's time for a change. Okay. To quote Sister Act 2, y'all better wake up and pay it down.

There we go. Yeah, actually, I'll end even more swing. Computers are there to make art. That's what they're for. They're not there to do math. They're there to make art. Use them for that. I think we'll all be better out.

I love it. All right, thanks again to Nilai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. If you want more of this stuff, go find his writing over there at The Verge. I would start with his very good essay called What Happens When Google Search Doesn't have the answers. All right, Intuit is hosted by me, Sam Sand,

This show is produced by Jenae West, Travis Larchuk, Gabi Grossman, Jelani Carter, and Takazen. Our fearless editor is Jordana Hochman. Our engineer is Daniel Turrick. Our music is composed by Breakmaster's cylinder, who could never be replaced by AI. And the executive producer of audio at Vox Media is Nishat Kourwa. All right, listeners, we are back Friday with the new episode.

Till then, go to TikTok and look up images and videos of Beyonce's revelation. horse. It's really great. All right, bye.