Will A.I kill imagination?
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If A.I. can write a song with just you in mind, will you still be able to share that musical experience with others? Joshua Rothman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what happens to culture when we rely on A.I. to generate visual art or music, what it means for engaging in difficult subjects, and what machine-generated art means for our very human desires. His article is “A.I. Is Coming for Culture.”
This episode originally aired October 1st, 2025.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Have you heard about OMG? Yes. This is a website the New York Times wirecutter featured as one of their most popular gifts. And for good reason, it presents new findings from the largest ever research study into women's pleasure and intimacy. In partnership with researchers at Yale and at Indiana University, they asked tens of thousands of women what they |
| 0:21.6 | wished they and their partners had discovered sooner. They found the patterns in those |
| 0:26.2 | discoveries and all that wisdom and intimacy is organized as hundreds of short videos, |
| 0:31.6 | animations, and how-toes. When you see OMG, yes, you might understand why wirecutter recommended it. |
| 0:38.2 | It is warm, honest, and has regular women talking about real experiences. |
| 0:42.7 | It's truly eye-opening. |
| 0:44.8 | See for yourself at omgyes.com. |
| 0:47.3 | That's OMGS.com. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we engage with the world. |
| 1:03.4 | What we call searching is increasingly about technology serving up custom-designed paths to information we have demonstrated an interest in consuming. |
| 1:11.7 | Or maybe the algorithms seem to magically predict what we want because they are shaping what we like |
| 1:17.6 | in the first place. |
| 1:19.1 | From KERA in Dallas, this is think. |
| 1:22.0 | I'm Chris Boyd. |
| 1:23.5 | Just as it is increasingly difficult to draw a hard line between desires that come from within |
| 1:28.9 | and those imposed upon us by our technology, it is also starting to be tough to tell the difference |
| 1:34.1 | between what is generated by human minds versus machines. With the right prompt, we can order up a |
| 1:40.1 | picture, a pop song, even a podcast that has never existed before that may never be |
| 1:45.4 | witnessed by another living soul. Those digital items may offer the kind of gratification |
| 1:50.2 | that comes from culture, but culture by definition is made to be shared. What do we have when |
| 1:56.2 | the sharing part stops happening? Joshua Rothman has thought a lot about this. He's a staff writer at the New Yorker |
| 2:02.4 | where you can read his article, AI is coming for culture. Joshua, welcome to think. Hi, thanks for having me. |
| 2:09.9 | How would you say algorithms shape what you do and think about every day before you have even |
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