Hater Season: Cal Newport on AI Reporting
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2026
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about the ways in which the media fails to report the truth about AI.
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Cal Newport’s “Don’t Trust AI Reporting”: https://youtu.be/xUh3Gc-BAlo?si=XpVzYHh7_k_VXpU1
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.6 | Quarzone Media. |
| 0:10.3 | Your witness to a great becoming, it's Better Offline, and I'm Ed Zittron. |
| 0:31.2 | Better Offline. Today we're joined by computer science professor and tech writer Cal Newport for hate to season. |
| 0:32.6 | Cal, thank you for joining me. |
| 0:35.4 | Always happy to do some Haiti, I suppose. |
| 0:42.3 | Well, you had an excellent YouTube that I'll be linking in the show notes about the mistakes in AI reporting. |
| 0:45.9 | Though I would, my hater in me says I don't think these are mistakes. |
| 0:52.2 | But you really, you touched one of the best videos I've seen on AI report, or AI in general, was what you did, |
| 0:55.0 | but it was basically this thing of, like the digital ick that these stories are meant to make you feel uncomfortable. And of course, this faux astonishment |
| 0:59.7 | thing, you know what, just run the tape. Tell me a little bit about what the bits that you found, |
| 1:04.1 | because I watched it going, yeah, yeah, yeah, like an angry person. Yeah, I had, I could imagine you when I was recording that video. |
| 1:12.7 | I was like, I bet Ed is cheering me a long. |
| 1:15.8 | Wilding out. |
| 1:16.9 | I was having a great time. |
| 1:18.4 | Exactly. |
| 1:19.2 | Well, I mean, let me just give the context, right? |
| 1:20.9 | So I'm in an interesting situation for observing this because, you know, I am a computer scientist. |
| 1:24.8 | So I'm not afraid of the technologies. |
| 1:27.3 | I'm happy to talk about transformers and feed forward networks and diffusion models. |
| 1:32.6 | And, like, that's not that scary to me. |
... |
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