Joanna Stern, longtime tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, spent the last year working on I Am Not a Robot, a book about AI — and in the process, used agents and bots in “as many parts of my life as possible.”
So when she started considering quitting her newspaper job and striking out on her own, she bounced the idea off of people but then, naturally, turned to ChatGPT.
“I sat with you as a human, and you definitely did not give me that advice,” Stern told Semafor’s Ben Smith on the Mixed Signals podcast. “People give you ideas, but they do not tell you what to do. Humans do not tell you what to do, because if you did tell me what to do and it really went wrong, you’d feel really bad, right? But ChatGPT just fully told me … to quit.”
“It felt like the one big decision where I actually did trust AI,” she added. “Every human kept being like, trust your gut, trust your gut, you know what to do. And it’s like, no, … my gut just wants a burrito. My gut doesn’t know what to do right now. I’m too overridden with anxiety. But [AI] doesn’t have anxiety.”
Stern gave Semafor a preview of what her new tech media venture, called New Things, will bring: “Stunts,” along the lines of her experiments with a Claude-powered vending machine, but also a newsletter, video, events, and potentially more. The idea is to “cover the latest and greatest of consumer tech, but do it through the lens [of] humans — humans that like to have fun.”