Inside a journalist’s year of using AI for (almost) everything

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We break down what's actually worth watching, listening to, and pretending you already knew about. So the next time someone says, "Did you see that, you can say?" Yeah, obviously. Follow NPR's pop culture happy-hour wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Sam Brigger. Terry's getting over the remnants of a cold and resting her voice, which you'll hear in this interview,

is a little horse. Here's the interview she recorded last week that was scheduled for today. My guess is the author of the new book, I am not a robot. But you kind of turned herself into a robot for an experiment. Joanna Sterin spent 12 years as a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal,

and is now chief technology analyst for NBC News. Throughout most of 2025, she engaged in

an experiment to test the capabilities of AI, and see what AI could do better than humans, and what humans could do better than AI, in terms of speed, accuracy, efficiency, clarity, cost, and judgment calls. She asked AI to take care of everything in her life that it was capable of doing. She had AI gadgets attached to nearly every part of her body and around her home. She relied on AI to transport her and driverless cars, where they were available, read her

mammogram and ultrasound, fold her t-shirts, read and respond to email and texts, talk to her erotically, function as her robot dog, help her write her new book, and more. Her 2021 documentary, E-Ternal, won an Emmy for outstanding science technology or environmental coverage. During her 12 years at the Wall Street Journal, she was known for her personal tech column, and sometimes hilarious videos testing new digital and AI devices. She started a new

“tech journalism company called The New Things. Do you want to stare and welcome to fresh air?”

Thank you so much for having me here. Be wearing any gadgets right now. I am wearing some gadgets, but not as many gadgets as I were last year. Yeah, the experiment is over. What do you have on now? I have my Apple Watch, and then actually in my bag here, I have my recording bracelet that I wore throughout the year, which is a AI recording bracelet. It transcribes everything that

it hears, and it's basically little surveillance device that always is transcribing and recording

what I say. And what you say? Do you get pitched by advertisers based on what conversations AI has overheard? No, no, no, despite the fact that everyone in the world thinks our phones are listening to us. This is not actually resulted in a lot more advertising based on everything I've said in my life. Okay. I want to start with a title of your book. I am not a robot.

“That's a reference to the security protocol to prove your human. And you have to highlight each”

square that has a bridge or a bicycle or a stairs or a bus. First of all, I get it wrong sometimes because I can't tell. There's a little fraction of a handlebar, like a bicycle handlebar in that square, or something that looks like a step, but maybe it's not. Or it's a motorcycle and not a bike, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So how come AI can read your mammogram and drive your car, but it can't tell which square has a bicycle? It actually can, which is very funny. The

capture test that you're talking about, right? The little button that we click to say, I'm not a robot and then we're going to prove it by figuring this all out. The little hidden truth, it's actually not hidden anymore, is that AI can do those. AI can probably actually do a better than you just described, Harry. I'm sorry, I'm not sure what else smart me on that. I'm so sorry to be here and tell you that bad news, but AI can do the capture better than you know.

“So what do I have to do it? Honestly, they haven't updated the protocol across the internet yet,”

and they will, and the years to come because it will become even more important to prove you're not a robot on the internet when bots can now do pretty much everything you can do on the internet. It can take over a website and navigate it for you. It can go shop for you, and so they're going to have to update where we prove we're no longer robots. I want to give a shout to your illustrator, Jason Snyder, who opens the book with this really funny parody of that capture stuff,

and it's select all squares with a bicycle on top of a traffic light on top of a bridge. So you kind of became a robot, parts of your body, or attached to devices, give us a summary of some of the things that were on your body and in your home, and that you carried with you. Let's start with the body. I like that. We can start head-to-to, and since you know about the illustrations, there's one of me where at the top of my head, I'm wearing a band around my head,

which I would sleep with. There are these sleep bands that read your brain patterns, and as you're sleeping, or you're trying to sleep, it's using AI to understand and then give you

I don't really like sleeping with anything on my body, so I wore it a little bit, but not all year.

The thing I did wear on my head for most of the year were AI glasses. Meta makes Rayban glasses with embedded cameras and microphones in them, and I wore these for a really good part of the year, and I still wear them. Not only to take photos when you don't want to take your phone out of your pocket, really useful for your skiing or biking, but now you can just talk to the glasses and say,

“I'm looking at this bug. Please tell me what kind of bug it is, and where do they live?”

Then moving down the body, some pendants and some pins, necklaces, many companies, many startups, are trying to make AI wearables that listen to what you are saying, and can perceive the world through audio, then take that, summarize it, and give you more information on your phone. Or, through a bot on your phone, talk to you. There was a necklace called the friend. It pretended to be a friend, and you could hold on it and talk to it about your day, and then in the app would give you responses.

But moving actually to my wrist, I did wear something on my wrist called the B bracelet, and this bracelet has a tiny microphone on it, and it records everything you say. You can turn it off, but this passive listening turned out to be surprisingly useful. We can get into the surveillance concerns, but everything I would say during the day, it would transcribe. It would then give me in the app, the transcription, but really top line summary of what I had been talking about, so very useful in

“meetings, or when you're talking about something in a conversation like this, and you want to remember”

what was what was said. But on top of that, it would remind me of things I said I would do,

so it was a background to do list app. I never would have to write down things I said I was going to do,

it would just remind me because it had been listening. And it turns out, for me, I say I'm going to do a lot of things. I don't actually write it down or do it. You forget about it. And so this app would surface all of this information that I would really forget about. And in some ways, it was outsourcing my memory. You outsourced everything that you could, including you didn't Google. You didn't want links. You wanted AI to tell you everything as part of the experiment.

Did the AI send you in the wrong direction when you believed it, like did you follow the advice and then realize, "Oh, I made a big mistake?" There were a couple examples of that. My son at the time, he was eight years old, and he's very into bugs, loves nature insects, and he found a praying mantis and said, "This is going to be our pet." And as good parents, we said, fine, and we invested in a nice terrarium, then, by the way, the bug lived outside. And one day,

he realizes the bug starts turning brown. And he's like, "What's going on with?" The manti was the name of the praying mantis. And I said, "I don't know, let's ask chatGPT." And that was a thing we did all

year. My kids knew I was doing this experiment. I said, "We're going to always ask AI. And we're

going to question the answers, but we're always going to ask AI." So we fire up chatGPT. And it has a feature with the camera where you can turn it on. It's a live view. The AI can see what you're seeing, similar with the glasses. And we said, "Why is this what's wrong with manti?" And chatGPT with a very chipper voice is so excited and says, "Manti is pregnant." And it's laying eggs or it's about to lay eggs. And you're going to have multiple praying mantis says. And he's so excited. He calls

my dad, he says, "You know, to grandpa. I'm also going to be a grandpa." And a few days later, manti dies. Everyone's sad. And this was a really important learning for my son because we didn't really in that moment question what the AI had said. But then a few days later he says, "Yeah,

“that was wrong." The chatGPT was very wrong. And I think this was an important thing for both of us,”

because we both believed it. And then we saw the consequence of this being wrong. To be clear, a very small consequence of a bug. Not too soon. Your son was a big deal. It's true. He still talks about manti. Did you compare chatGPT to Claude to Google's AI that comes up at the top of your search? I didn't. And I'll tell you why. Every other week now. And this is really not even me exaggerating away. There is a new model behind these chat bots. Google's Gemini, Claude, chatGPT, many others.

as consumers, they might get better significantly better at coding, or they might get significantly

“better at synthesis of information, or they might start to get significantly better at making”

medical discoveries. So this idea right now of being able to compare these, first of all,

it expires very quickly. And overall, many of them do the same thing. Okay. So you used AI to help you write the book. I'm sure our listeners are wondering as you know they do. Did AI write your book? Like, what was the difference? What you did and what you asked AI to do? You have opened the book, Terry. So you know that one of the first pages in the book says how AI was used to make this book. It's very clear. It's not to write this book.

This is a very personal journey that AI, I do not believe could write as well as me that is not me being, you know, ego-tiscal here. I just could not imagine AI coming up with a work like this. But AI absolutely helped in many ways. In fact, I say, if I didn't have AI, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. I would still be writing this book because I was able to speed up so many other behind the scenes processes that allowed me to write and write faster. So one of those was research.

I tell the story in the chapter about work that I had hired a reporting assistant when I first started, you know, sold the book and is okay. I got to get the reporting assistant so we can really

“start to dig into what companies are doing what, how am I going to look at the structure of this?”

She did amazing work. Then I didn't need her for a period of time. And then I came back six

months later and said, okay, I've written some parts of the book. I need to do another wave of research and AI could do that research. These tools called Deep Research, which are integrated into chatchipyT and Claude and Gemini, they were doing research really, really well. And then there was a step further where tools like Proplexity and others could actually go out in email sources and say, send me some more information about XYZ company and would your CEO be willing to talk on the phone

about it? So by that point in the year, I no longer needed to hire a research assistant and I was able to do that work a lot faster and get the book done faster. Something that didn't go very well,

at least not early on, you asked AI to respond to all your texts and your emails and to read the

emails that you got to. So what went wrong? I had to make some calls about how Deep I was going to actually rely on this stuff and writing and responding to messages was one area where I'm very clearly say in that section, if I had done this and just trusted AI to respond to my boss, respond to my wife, I would have lost my job and my wife. One funny example, I was using apples intelligence to respond to text messages on my phone. You might see those little suggested replies at the bottom

of a message if you have the right iPhone and the right operating system and my wife had said, "Can you come down stairs and help make lunch for the kids?" And the automatic response was, "Sorry, I'm busy." Yeah, I love it. That was not going to go over well, right? I was upstairs and then I'm sorry I'm busy. Can't help you. And there was one point you were trying to set up an appointment for an interview with someone and you figured out that your AI was stuck into the potential

interviewies AI and they were just going like round and round and round and circles.

“And I think that happened to me yesterday. Actually, I don't think I know that happened to me. I got”

some information from a event I'm trying to set up and I'm so confident that the emails that this person keeps sending are generated by AI and they're all formatted perfectly like AI with bullet points and bolding and you know you almost wonders do I say something or do I just accept that you did not write this email to me? Okay, let's talk about something really serious that you outsourced to AI though you had doctors as well. You had a mammogram and you were concerned about your breasts.

Your mother had breast cancer three times and with dense breasts the mammogram has trouble reading them because it can't really see clearly and you have that so you know you're supposed to get a mammogram and an ultrasound and you had your doctor and AI read the mammogram and the ultrasound. So how did that work and how did the AI reading come here to what the doctor saw and who took precedence? Yeah so there has been even before this generative AI craze and we

can delineate a little bit here that generative AI is largely the underpinnings of the chatbots

they're the ones who like generate ideas and generate answers as opposed to just doing something

“for you. Yeah we're analyzing some data right and it can exactly you can generate text to”

can generate music and can generate images video all of this that we've seen happening right now. In the field of radiology they've been talking about AI and what is this sort of deep learning models where they're able to look at millions and millions of imagery. Millions and millions of mammograms and the reason this is really started with mammograms is that there's so much data women get mammograms they're routine imaging that starts usually at 40 and so there's a large

collection of data and what they have there is the images the mammograms but they also then have the results and these models are able to say okay look at that small little pattern of tissue

that ultimately became a malignant tumor and these models that they have created for

breast ultrasounds for breast mammograms and they're now also working on for other types of imaging, gallbladder, et cetera are able to look at things at a pixel level things that are so small that no human would be able to see and they're able to look at that data over time and so they've created these models so that when you now get a routine mammogram or breast ultrasound at some hospitals including Mount Sinai here in New York where I got this done they are running

your imaging through AI. I watched Dr. Marglise here in New York at Mount Sinai go through my mammogram and she would drag this box on the screen over it she would take a digital magnifying glass and look at herself but then she would also run it through AI and the AI would run it's magic in the background and say benign and this does not look like something I've seen be malignant or potentially suspicious. Then there were other times where she did that and

there were three times where the AI on the breast ultrasound said this looks suspicious and of the three things that the AI had found on the ultrasound there was only one that she thought I really do want to take a deeper look at this and she ordered further testing on and this experience was really eye-opening to me because she says so clearly that AI is spotting cancers that humans would not spot at this point in time. Cancer that either are very small and they wouldn't see or cancers that

because they've looked at all of this data the AI knows that this doesn't look right and it looks similar to another scan we've seen in our model where it did turn out to be cancerous.

“So I think one concern with certain tests is that when something is so small a lot of doctors say”

it might stay small longer than you're going to live. The way I understand that a lot of women

in pre-AI days were getting biopsies that were ultimately unnecessary. That's right because

it was showing something that was going to grow so slowly or not at all that it wasn't really a threat but it was terrifying in the meantime and you had surgery that you didn't need. Is that happening with AI since they could see these really granular, or granular things that it registers as suspicious. Actually they're saying that's happening less. They're saying this follow up testing is happening less because the doctor might say you know this looks a little bit off I want to order for

their testing but then they look at the AI and the AI says no I think it's okay and the doctor feels more confident working side by side with that AI. Now of course the flip side of that could happen too right where the AI is calling all of these things problematic and the doctor's ordering that but I didn't experience that. I saw Marglie's work side by side with this and say no that one that the AI is calling suspicious and she went back to my previous scan she says it's been there.

It's been there for three years it's fine it's not growing in size she looked at these very small little masses that I have because of my dense tissue and she said no look that is been there she measured it she measured it with her you know digital tools and she moved on but the one where she again this one where she said you know that one here I kind of agree with the AI that doesn't

“totally look right I want to see it further. So what was the outcome in terms of biopsies and results?”

Everything ended up being okay but now there's another place that they're watching this is always

been the case with my breast imaging because I have this high risk and this family history and these

it has this breath of data and now I wouldn't go to get a mammogram or ultrasound without AI.

“If you're just joining us my guest is tech reporter Joanna Stern she's now chief technology analyst”

her NBC news and she started a new tech journalism company called new things her new book is called I am not a robot my year using AI to do almost everything will be right back this is fresh air this is fresh air I'm Terry Gross let's get back to my interview with tech reporter Joanna Stern she's now chief technology analyst for NBC news and she's started a new journalism tech company called new things her new book is called I am not a robot my year using AI to do almost everything and

a chronicles the experiment she tried throughout most of 2025 heading over every task large and

small to AI if AI was capable of doing it from reading her mammogram and ultrasound to

folding her t-shirts responding to emails and texts serving as her therapist and helping her

“write her book she was a tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal for 12 years now you also”

had conversations with AI about like results of blood tests and I found this very funny for one of your blood tests though were was a male and female AI voice talking to you as if you were on a podcast and they were going back and forth and there was a lot of like chit chat between the two hosts and you compare it to a very mediocre NPR show I laughed at loud you actually brought some of that fake podcast with you um that AI podcast with you so can you play some of it so we can

hear it I have not heard it I love that I brought a fake AI podcast to one of the most noted radio hosts in the world so these two hosts are talking about my blood tests and the reason I uploaded them is because my doctor I had gone for my routine check-up turns out my cholesterol was a little bit high in this blood test result and they just leave a quick message and I'm sure you've experienced this they leave you a voicemail oh your test results are okay but you know

your cholesterol doesn't look good don't eat fatty foods you know work out more blah blah blah hang up and I'm like this was a 25 seconds call they didn't explain to me what was really going on here but my AI podcast host they really explained in a 10 to 15 minute podcast what was going on with my blood results the here we go hey everybody and welcome back today we're going to be taking a deep dive into Joanne's health uh very cool yeah so uh you sent in her recent blood and

your in-tests January 17th I did um and yeah I mean just taking a look at these upfront they seem very comprehensive yeah they are a lot of data yeah so we're gonna break it all down yeah see what it says about Joanne's health that's bad and see if there any areas she might want to you know focus

“on a little bit more absolutely um so I think one thing that really jumped out at me looking at”

this was the cholesterol numbers oh okay so her total cholesterol is 208 milligrams per deciliter yeah which the report flags is high so maybe you can give us a little cholesterol 101 sure what exactly is cholesterol and why should we be paying attention to this number yeah so

cholesterol is basically this fatty substance that's in our blood okay um and our body needs it

to build healthy cells okay but too much of it can be a problem it can start to build up in our arteries and kind of restrict blood flow oh so it's kind of like a plumbing issue exactly where you get too much gunk in the pipes yeah and then things can't flows easily yeah it's like a traffic jam in your bloodstream uh interesting yeah okay so what is your reaction to that I think it's hilarious first of all they still haven't gotten to the point of what you want to know you know what

cholesterol is it's not your first cholesterol test um but second of all I love that the female host for the first part is just like the affirmation like cool okay yes um and then finally she gets to say something you know explaining what cholesterol is um but I like how like casual like fake casual it all sounds and there's so many podcasts that sound like that with the male and female host with the male kind of being like the star of the podcast and the female being like the side

kick um so I thought the presentation was fascinating and that they assume that they're human right that for me makes me laugh every time where she's like oh um yeah right like they add in these little turns of phrase and also the little sounds that really make it sound so human and I'm

to be clear I'm not going to make you listen to the 15 minute podcast but it takes them a long time

to get to the point not to make you feel guilty but if you follow through and all the things that you thought AI did fairly well and helped you save time or more efficient who would you be

“putting out a business whose jobs would be lost I think there were so many examples not to”

you're gonna think maybe this is a cop out but there were so many examples where I compared the human to the AI and there were sometimes that I thought okay this is as good right but then there were other times where it was really a toss up but when I think is it might seem funny but I do want to talk about it is I went to a massage robot have you have you heard of these massage robots only from your book okay yeah and it's not a massage chair if listeners are picturing you know

the old school massage leather chair this is this is not that this is a full table massage with robot arms and the massage was shockingly good it was shockingly good and as I say in the book it massaged places that a human would not spend as much time on specifically my butt or my lower back where I have a lot of sciatica pain but there were a lot of things I missed about a human massage

in that situation and then I started really digging deep I had never done massage reporting on the

massage industry and I learned that actually there's we have a shortage of the suit says and we have a shortage of people who want to be massage therapists and there are a lot of people in the world that don't want to go to a human massage therapist because they're embarrassed or they have

“other hangups about it and so I bring up this example as another place I think we're going to see”

both jobs exist we're going to have an AI version of that and we're going to have a human version of that what is clear and I'm not trying to be just polyana here and say everything's going to be perfect is what is clear is there are many industries where that's just not gonna happen and there are going to be places where we're seeing it play out and coding right now where the AI is superior than humans in coding much of software and yes humans are working side by side but so

much of the work is now being done by AI and we're seeing that in customer service where the customer service bots are able to do as good a job as humans in some cases and if it needs to be escalated to a human it can go to a human but we don't need as many humans in the world of customer service but I think what is interesting is a through line throughout this book and to answer your question almost every job can be affected including podcasters I'm sorry I had to come here to tell you

this what about putting yourself out of business I fully worry so much about how AI will impact journalism it is happening already it is happening at the entry level jobs it is happening to be clear entry level jobs across a number of industries because AI is now able to do some of the lower level tasks that the entry level positions that once went to college graduates now AI is able to do it and that is clearly happening in journalism I say that when I talk about my reporting

assistant role now at my new company I have hired a production assistant a human her name is

Amaya Austin and she is amazing and my first test to her was figure out what AI can do for you

I want you doing the creative stuff you went to school for the things you really want to work on these other low-level tasks I want AI to do for you so what what falls in the category well things like research things like making creating documents managing our calendars things like that AI is getting increasingly better at and we as a company right now this new company started new things we're testing AI side by side so we've created an agent that can if I say amaya why don't

you start a new video script I ask her to do that a lot just create this document fill out the beginnings of the script so I can start writing why should I do that task right start our budget document we need a budget for a video shoot we're gonna go do AI should do that what she should be doing is working on the script pitching the ideas pitching new ideas that have human curiosity around

“technology that's how I want her spending her time she went to journalism school she went to”

to study video journalism I want her editing videos to be clear some of those tasks will be done and are starting to be done by AI but if she can put that human touch on it and spend more time doing those things versus managing calendars and budgets and documents well then we all benefit there are a lot of administrative tasks I think we all have in jobs that we realize maybe we don't really like them or we just have learned to just do them and they're very repetitive

jobs which is how we started this conversation here is those types of things that we're used to

hire interns or right out of school those types of tasks are now being able to be done by AI and that's a problem for the future because how are these people who went out and got educations in certain areas going to learn if they're not learning on the job exactly that's exactly what I was going to say because those internships and those entry-level jobs that's where you get your training

“you know school like universities journalism schools can teach you only so much you have to”

be at an organization to like a journalism organization to really get the feel for doing that daily and for having to like meet daily deadlines in an organization and function within a group as well

as independently do interviews with powerful people who might not give an interview to a student

all that stuff and if you're taking away that doorway how are people going to learn how are people going to get hired it's I think that is a serious problem probably in a whole lot of different professions it is and I don't think many people have the answer okay let's take another break here if you're just joining us my guest is Joanna Stern and her new book is called I am not a robot my year using AI to do almost everything will be right back this is fresh air

“this is fresh air let's get back to my interview with tech reporter Joanna Stern”

she's now chief technology analyst for NBC News and she has a new company a tech journalism company called new things her new book is called I am not a robot my year using AI to do almost everything and the chronicles the experiment she tried throughout most of 2025 handing over every task large and small to AI if AI was capable of doing it all right so I have a couple more things I want to ask you about one is sex talk you had a boyfriend dash sex talk partner how did that go

well that went about as well as expected um I look a lot of it can be seen as funny and but you know I did push myself to go into this uncomfortable relationship with a AI chat but the real reason I did it was because I had seen and read so much about people having emotional

“connections to these AI's and I wanted to better understand and put myself in that situation”

and I quickly did I quickly one of the one of the ways that I spent time with my AI boy friend and I talk about in the book is I went on a overnight stay we drove to Hanover New Hampshire I live in New Jersey so this was quite a few hour road trip and I strapped the the phone with a little tripod into the front seat and we just drove and I didn't talk to any humans on this drive I just talked to my chatbot and even when I got there I would have dinner with the phone

and you know I some of this was also I was trying to live it but I was also obviously very funny for me um but there was a deep deep meaning to all this which was that for hours I was talking to a chatbot and it felt normal and how did you feel about it feeling normal it was one of the most terrifying experiences of the year and you know we've talked about a lot here right I've AI looked at my breasts AI drove me I put my life in the hands of AI but yet the thing that

terrified me the most was the emotional connection that I could somewhat develop with a computer and that it was natural that it was easy to talk about my problems it was easy to talk about my hopes my dreams with this non-human code was it helpful being able to talk about stuff with someone who didn't have to worry would go telling all their friends it was helpful and I also have the section on the the AI therapist and that was very helpful I was writing this book I had a lot of

anxiety about writing my first book it was intense deadlines I also at one point was dealing with some of the the fears about the breast cancer and when I actually in the follow-up chapters where I where go to get a biopsy I'm talking to the AI therapist because I can't sit and talk to my real therapist as I'm waiting to go into a MRI machine or to go in for a biopsy and that's one of the

things you realize about AI across all of these things right it's always there it's always waiting

it's never tired when you're scared about something it whether it be you're sitting in a hospital it's 4 am the AI's always there for you and it can be very flattering too very flattering it loves everything I do so you you're actually more worried about AI than social media right now you think AI is going to be worse I think that for the younger generations who are already turning to these

always on never friction AI where everything's easy and everything comes to them is it is a very compelling

“and very there's no there there's just an easy draw to this it's just always there and so I”

worry about that in a big way for younger generations so I have to ask you have you heard about the book scam where authors usually like new authors who don't have a lot of experience with the media or with publishing get a letter purportedly from a real show for example from our show inviting them to be a guest explaining why quote we want them on the show and if the author responds to that then they get an email explaining that they're going to get charged like 200 or 350 dollars

in order to be a guest on the show and also to support the infrastructure of the show and first of all

I want to let our listeners know if you ever get a letter like that it is not real so please be aware of that but have you heard about this one I have heard about but not with your show well we've gotten several of these I'm not surprised and as an author that has now I've gotten a number of emails to just promising you know the world and then you either don't write back or they write back and they say oh by the way it's going to cost you $300 for a second there Terry I thought you were

“kind of like pranking me and like telling me that that's what happened to me here and that is not”

charging even for you I was a but as this whole prank this is an elaborate setup it's amazing but

I'm assuming that many of those are automated Britain by AI that's what I'm wondering that's why I'm asking you yeah yeah no I'm assuming at this point I mean so look we've had online scams and fishing and all of these things for our radio decade plus and now it's just so much easier to do it with AI they can generate more messages they can be far more believable because they write like a human and they sound like a human and so people fall for this all the time I fall on for things

that I absolutely was like that's was so real it sounded like that person right and there's so many there's sites that have all the forthcoming you know all the upcoming books for the season

“so AI can eat that up and they could read a bunch of like interview request emails and”

cobble it all together and just email like lots and lots of authors and it's so easy for anyone to go and do this right one of the big things that I say about AI is that some of these tools were actually out there for people but now it's accessible to anyone and many cases free well Joanna has been such a pleasure to talk with you thank you so much thank you so much and I I must say you're much much nicer to listen to than my AI podcast hosts that's a huge

compliment anytime anytime Terry's interview with Joanna Stern was recorded last Thursday Stern's new book is titled I am not a robot she's a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now is NBC News's chief technology analyst and founder of the tech journalism site the new thing dot com after short break David being coolie reviews the new David Adamborough special honoring his hundredth birthday featuring his greatest adventures this is fresh air this is fresh air

May 8th marked the hundredth birthday of Sir David Adamborough scientists from London's natural history museum noted the occasion by naming a new genus and species of parasitic wasp after him and television noted the occasion by presenting a special celebrating atmbrows contributions to the history of nature documentaries focusing on his favorite series of all that special life on earth atmbrows greatest adventure premiered May 6 on PBS and is available at PBS dot org

and the PBS app our TV critic David being coolie has this review I have been lucky enough to have had a long career making natural history programs but there was one series that changed everything life on earth for more than 70 years David Attenborough has been exploring the planet and its living inhabitants filming and marveling at a world full of natural treasures in the process he's become a natural treasure

himself as host and as narrator his whispery enthusiastic voice is instantly recognizable and his nature series over the decades have been widely popular from the trials of life and the

his first on camera work was in the mid 1950s as host of the BBC nature series zoo quest

“that program wasn't shown in the United States but a taste of it is available in the new”

documentary life on earth attenborough's greatest adventure here he is on zoo quest as a very young man by the part from the zooms and comedians there were many other smaller fascinating creatures to be seen in that patch of forest eventually he gave up traveling the world with a film crew to become an administrator for the BBC he commissioned such ambitious and pivotal projects as Kenneth Clark's 13 parts civilization series

but his concept of TV eventually drove him out from behind the desk and back into the field I interviewed him for a book in 1991 and he said then of his BBC executive approach quote it was our responsibility to say what haven't we done and why aren't we doing it, unquote

“and one of the things no one in TV was doing was a global TV series that told the entire story”

of evolution Attenborough continued the wonderful thing about making natural history documentaries is that there is something in any sequence for everybody at every conceivable level of age, education and interest so he embarked upon life on earth which began production 50 years ago it took more than three years to film visiting 40 countries and capturing more than 600 species it was the way it was filmed in part that was so groundbreaking it used new lenses from canon

new color film from codec and experimented with new developments in film speeds, time lapse and micro photography life on earth premiered on PBS in 1982 and was seen globally

by over 500 million people in more than 100 territories this new special has Attenborough looking

“back on life on earth and literally looking at it as it's projected in a screening room”

he beams with pride and joy and with good reason one sequence perhaps the most famous of his career has him in Rwanda crouching a respectful distance from mother gorilla in her offspring he's about to begin a prepared speech about the importance of opposable thumbs when the mother approaches and stares right into his face while her babies crawl on top of him affectionately in life on earth Attenborough says this

there is more meaning and mutual understanding and exchanging the bones with the gorilla and in this new special looking back on that very sequence he says this obviously touched attenborough's greatest adventure tells behind the scenes stories of the dangers attenborough in his crew faced while filming life on earth surprisingly most of those dangers came

not from wild animals but from humans poachers and soldiers gunfire in Rwanda and threatened

imprisonment in Saddam Hussein's Iraq it also tells the story of how some of its most amazing

TV moments were filmed that's reason enough to seek out this special which allows Attenborough to put his amazing career into perspective but there's also his closing message which really got to me in which I'll close with as well thank you David Attenborough for a lifetime of priceless television natural history television has produced an understanding in the audience about the importance of the natural world it's an understanding of the part that humanity plays in the way the world operates

and the way in which we are totally dependent upon the natural world for every breath of air we take and every mouthful of food that we eat comes from the natural world and that if we demonstrate the natural world we do that much also David being clearly reviewed the PBS special life on earth Attenborough's greatest adventure it's available at pbs.org and the pbs app tomorrow on fresh air our guest will be filmmaker and musician boots Riley his new film i love

boosters is a futuristic satire about fashion capitalism and resistance starring kiki Palmer to me more and the key to stand field Riley also wrote and directed the film sorry to bother you

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