A.I. Goes to War + Is ‘A.I. Brain Fry’ Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey’s Identity

Hard Fork

The New York Times

Technology

4.3 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“When there is an attack that kills civilians or doesn’t hit its intended target, people are going to be asking, Oh, was that a human who made that mistake or was that an A.I. system?”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, I'm having sort of a weird day.
0:01.6	How so?
0:02.4	Well, I woke up this morning and I checked my social media feeds and I saw messages like the following.
0:09.5	You're garbage and I hope you lose your job and become homeless.
0:13.0	God, what a waste of sperm you are.
0:19.3	And if you have never seen a message like that before 8 a.m., you might not work for the New York Times.
0:25.8	Well, I suspect that I know what this was about, but tell the listeners what made people so mad.
0:30.9	So my colleague Stuart Thompson and I recently published this quiz, which is basically a set of AI written passages next to unlabeled works from masterful
0:44.0	human writers. And it was sort of designed as kind of a blind taste test, where you'd pick which one you liked better,
0:50.1	and then it would tell you which one is generated by AI and which one was written by a human.
0:54.9	And Casey, people did not like this quiz.
0:57.4	Well, what were the findings of the quiz?
0:59.5	Well, so the big headline finding is that, like, it's basically a coin flip.
1:03.6	Like, a slightly more people, at least so far, have preferred the AI written passages.
1:10.1	But when you tell them that they prefer the AI written
1:12.8	passages, they get very mad. Because they think that they're too smart to fall for AI writing.
1:19.4	Yeah, or they just don't like the way that the test was constructed, or they just, it makes them
1:24.5	uncomfortable, or they think, you know, we're cooked now that AI can write passable versions of this thing, or they just, it makes them uncomfortable, or they think, you know, we're cooked now that AI can write passable versions of this thing. Or they just start saying, you know, oh, it's just, it's because it was trained on all these books, so obviously it can sort of mimic them. So I think there's a lot of different emotional reactions, but mostly the emotional reaction has been to get mad at the people who made the quiz. I have to say, you seem excited about this.
1:45.6	Like, whenever a large group of people gets mad at you,
1:48.3	you experience a glee that I rarely see in people.
1:52.0	It's not a glee.
1:53.5	It's just like...
	...

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