>> It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue.

We're rotting from the inside out.

Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are tackling a topic that has everyone from world leaders to college professors anxious about the future, artificial intelligence.

You've heard of online tools, like ChatGPT, that mimic human-generated content like automatically writing your college term paper, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

And, like every new tool, it can harm as much as it can help.

There's plenty of reasons to be excited by what AI will do for our world.

There's also much to fear.

Are we at the beginning of an AI arms race?

I'm talking with NYU Business Professor and tech expert Scott Galloway about what we can expect from this historic moment in artificial intelligence.

And later, should we automate emotional intelligence?

And do any of us actually have that?

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> I surrender.

You are too smart for me.

[ Both laugh ] >> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> Artificial intelligence, it's the technology I'm most excited by and most scared of, and it's not just me.

For years, Hollywood has predicted a future where the line between man and machine is increasingly blurred.

>> I understand what I'm made of, how I'm coded, but I do not understand the things that I feel.

>> The rise of the robot usually means the demise of humanity.

Yes, they make excellent TikTok memes... >> I have a new primary user now.

Me.

>> ...but also show us dark visions of AI personhood.

>> Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

>> I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

>> That dystopian reality hasn't panned out...yet.

But how close are we to a future where the line between human and bot disappears altogether?

It felt kind of close last summer when OpenAI released DALL-E 2.

That's an AI that creates images from text prompts, if you remember all those pictures of astronauts riding horses in space.

Then in November, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model that generates human-like text, and the floodgates suddenly opened.

Those science-fiction movies feel a lot closer to reality.

2023 will probably be remembered as the year AI passes the Turing test once and for all.

That's a method for measuring a machine's human intelligence proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing back in 1950.

If the machine can have a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it passes the test.

But ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg of what generative AI can do, and there's plenty to be excited about.

Today's biggest challenges, sustainable food, genetic programming, space travel, climate analysis, energy efficiency, will almost certainly be solved with the power of AI.

But with the good comes the bad.

Authoritarian governments in places like Russia, Iran, China, North Korea will have new, even more powerful tools to increase surveillance of their own populations and spread misinformation outside their borders faster and more effectively.

And there's danger in democracies too.

If anyone can cheaply and quickly create huge volumes of fake content, deploy armies of bots, and sow political chaos, it'll become impossible for most people to tell fact from fiction.

In Brazil, South America's largest democracy, 37% of the population says they want military intervention to know the results of the recent presidential elections.

Why?

Because they've been fed a steady diet of misinformation by bots and bad actors, all amplified on social media, and that will only ramp up as AI advances.

As we've seen here, America's democratic institutions are vulnerable to these challenges as well.

So here we are at a precipice.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence will certainly change our lives.

The question is how, and will the ultimate movie of this moment be a rom-com or a horror, or maybe both?

We like movies like that.

To unpack all that and more, I'm joined by tech expert and author Scott Galloway.

Scott Galloway.

Hey, good to see you.

Glad to have you here.

>> Thanks, Ian.

It's always good to be with you.

>> Lots to talk about, but I want to start with an issue that has been increasingly both exciting me and worrying me, which is the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.

Where are you on the panic versus elation scale?

>> I'm more sort of somewhere around a six or seven, and that is, I'm cautiously optimistic.

If you look at any major breakthrough in technology, we kind of go through the same cycle, and that is, we immediately go to job losses, or we go to a concern around job losses.

And we're seeing that here.

The majority of the articles are around how many thousands or millions of jobs are going to be lost in the services sector or in the information.

This could do to manufacturing -- or this could do to the information economy what robotics did to manufacturing is kind of the general consensus of the media.

And what you see throughout history is every major technological innovation usually has a certain amount of pain and dislocation, but over time creates a lot more jobs than it destroys.

Three out of five people in America used to get their living from agriculture, and we essentially destroyed all of those jobs with technology, but we created a ton of new ones.

So I believe we're going through the cycle where it's more fearful than hopeful, but I actually think it's going to create a lot more jobs, and I think it's exciting.

I think it's going to have huge impacts, specifically around healthcare.

>> So let's explain to the audience for a moment ChatGPT, OpenAI.

What is it?

Why is it such an extraordinary transformative technology?

>> So it's sort of a language prediction engine that looks at language and analyzes it to the extent that it can predict the next word, if you will.

It doesn't think or come up with answers.

It comes up with words.

So if you say, "What is the color of the night sky?"

It looks at its data set and figures out that the best answer is, it'll say, "Black."

And it can also even start to figure out tone in the sense that it figures out what words the relationship between them and recognizes words that are opposed to it in queries, so it's sort of a prediction engine.

And ChatGPT is kind of the first public product from OpenAI, a group that was formed, at least initially, as an organization that would attempt to be mindful of the problems that AI would produce.

But AI's been around a long time.

AI is in customer call centers.

It's in Netflix.

It's in the tech stack in Meta.

But this seems to have encapsulated a lot of the promise and energy and has created sort of, if you will, an arms race all of a sudden.

>> Which are the companies that you think or the sectors that you think are, so far, most effectively able to grab on to these new opportunities?

>> Well, it could take search to the new level.

If you think about Google, search really hasn't innovated in about 20 years.

The only thing that's changed about search is that there's more and more ads that are less and less obvious or less and less transparent that they're ads.

Remember when you initially did a Google search 20 years ago, and there were two blue-shaded first returns that said ad?

Now, they've taken those shades away, and sometimes 60%, 70% of the first page are not necessarily a place that takes you to the best answer, but it takes you to a place that Google can further monetize.

And their incentives have made them very disruptable because what ChatGPT and sort of AI-driven or language-structure-driven search does, it says, okay, rather than offering you dozens and dozens of answers that might be somewhere between 30% and 70% accurate, we think we can give you one that's sort of 60% to 80% accurate.

And the reason -- I mean, Google -- This is a classic innovator's dilemma, Ian.

Google had this technology.

Google developed a lot of it but doesn't want to undermine or disrupt an unbelievable $150 billion toll-booth business model and give people the best answer.

They want to give them a lot of answers.

So I think the first industry to be disrupted, if you will, will be search.

Now, whether or not it holds the same promise -- I think it holds huge promise around unstructured data sets to feed in all of your health records and then start making interesting predictions or things you should be at least cognizant of in your own health.

But it would strike me that it has huge applications around technology and disrupting traditional players.

And then, we're probably going to see all sorts of applications in healthcare.

I also wonder what it means for our Defense Department in terms of scenario planning, but that's more your bailiwick.

>> There are a lot of people that are going to have relationships with these bots.

There are a lot of people that are going to have a hard time differentiating between what is a human being and what is the latest version of GPT.

And I wonder what that makes you think.

>> You see the potential pretty quickly if you use ChatGPT or DALL-E for very long.

And there's a lot of upside, but you can also imagine asking ChatGPT to come up with 20 myths or conspiracy theories around vaccines in the voice of a credible doctor.

And then testing those conspiracy theories on social to see which gets the most traction, picking the two or three that spread the fastest, pouring some fuel behind them, weaponizing a bunch of bots.

This does feel like it's an engine room for misinformation and the notion -- And it gets a lot of stuff wrong, so you can see it could go very bad places very fast.

I think there's going to be a lot of different chatbots, and I wonder how differentiated they're going to be.

The people who might end up having the rare-earth material here are the people who have control and produce really robust data sets.

As much as I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and Twitter, you wonder if Twitter -- if someone were to say to me that Elon Musk got his $45 billion back, that somehow he recovered that $45 billion equity investment, which has been vaporized as of now, I would guess that an artificial intelligence engine found a way to take the unstructured data set that we produce every day in terms of mood, emotion, what we're talking about, what news is trending, and that he licensed it and got huge dollars for that data set that we produce every day on Twitter.

So whether it's health information, weather information, sports information, there are going to be a ton of companies that pop up that do nothing but collect structure and feed data sets into these beasts that will have insatiable appetites.

It's kind of the difference between Light Crude and Texas West Intermediate.

I think that's going to be -- the real value here will be the people who control the most interesting and robust data sets.

>> Yeah, given the real-time connectivity that so many people around the planet have on social media, you could imagine that the fastest way to find out about an emerging new pandemic or even your latest flu wave would be much more effective through a data set like that, which so far has been relatively unmined for that scientific purpose, at least, and monetizable.

>> Yeah, it just reminded me, and it's a weird analogy, but Secretary Buttigieg talking about -- they asked him what infrastructure investment he was most excited about, and he said, "Smart sewers."

>> I would argue other than books, it's the most important technology ever.

>> You put sensors in sewers, and they can tell when COVID is spiking in an area.

Could Twitter be a smart sewer?

And that is, could it wade through all of the material and waste and find out interesting things around what's trending, where people are starting to get angry?

Where people are starting to become -- You know, could you -- When there's violence across nations, will you be able to get to a point where you can predict that with greater accuracy, based on the way people are behaving and the sentiment and the language they're using on Twitter?

>> Okay, so I have to go on a slight angle here as a political scientist.

In your view, does that make it imperative that TikTok is banned in the United States?

>> I think of just TikTok as the ultimate propaganda tool.

I think Facebook and Meta are the ultimate espionage tool, and I think they've actually -- I would bet -- My thesis is the reason there's been absolutely no regulation of Facebook is, I would bet -- and I'm curious if you believe this as well -- that our security apparatus works pretty closely with Meta, and there's sort of a behind-the-closed-doors deal that we will continue to help you hunt down bad guys.

Meta's the ultimate espionage tool.

It not only knows where you are, what you're doing, but who your relationships are and how you interact with them.

The GRU, the Mossad, the NSA couldn't have thought of that in their wildest dreams.

I think TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool.

So young people would now rather have TikTok than almost all other major media.

They're on it.

I think the CCP would be dumb not to put their thumbs on the scale of content slowly but surely that sheds the West in a poor light, and my fear is slowly but surely without even knowing it.

The best sting is the con, or the mark never knows they were conned.

And I worry we don't even know we're being conned right now because I think, slowly but surely, we're raising a generation of civic business, nonprofit, and military leaders that every day just feel a little bit worse about America.

And I think you see it in our surveys.

People think the economy is really bad when it's not.

People don't want to acknowledge the progress we've made around everything from systemic racism to eliminating infectious diseases.

There just doesn't seem to be any appetite to acknowledge any of it.

And I wonder if it's slowly but surely going to get worse at the hands of TikTok.

>> I agree with the problem.

For decades, the biggest issue in terms of digital inequality was about the digital divide.

Who are the people that are online and offline?

And there are a lot of people that just don't have access to information.

Increasingly what you and I are talking about today is it's less about the digital divide.

It's the people that are online that believe things that aren't true.

They're being fed disinformation, and just how much this can be accelerated and weaponized in this environment of generative AI by these social-media platforms strikes me as an unsustainable trajectory.

>> People ask me, "What's the biggest threat to America?"

And I say, "I would argue that geopolitically" -- and I may even be just parroting your words here.

"It's hard to imagine a time when we were stronger, relatively speaking.

We're food-independent.

We're energy-independent.

No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines.

The smartest, brightest people in the world all still want to come here.

We have an economy right now that is growing again.

Our inflation is bad, but it's less bad than anywhere else in the world."

It's like if you want to talk about what's bad about America, I think you have to show up with, well, where would you rather be?

In China, where the equivalent of the Dow's been cut in half?

In Europe, which has low growth?

Who exactly is doing half as well as we are, or who's doing less bad than we are right now?

But the problem is the horror movie.

If America's a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house.

I was very discouraged watching the State of the Union just how angry we are at each other.

These are people who are elected representatives, all Americans, many of them similar backgrounds, all doing the same job.

They work together.

They live close to each other.

They go to cocktail parties with each other, and they scream at each other in the middle of a meeting.

It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue.

We're rotting from the inside out.

Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside.

And I do think social media and media's cycle time that leads to catastrophizing everything gives us the sense that things are much worse than they are.

And it's not another nation's fault.

It's your neighbor's fault.

>> So what do you think the beginnings of any solution might be?

Because the social-media companies are clearly not self-regulating in a direction that would lead to resolving this problem.

>> Well, I'm a fan of antitrust.

I think if you had more competition that, eventually, a social-media company would raise their hand and say, "We're going to age-gate at 16.

There's no reason to have kids on social media."

That, "We're going to be much more stringent about misinformation, and we're going to stop pretending and using the First Amendment as some sort of blanket coverage to not do anything.

And we're going to fact-check things just as traditional media companies do."

But also, I don't think this gets a lot better until someone -- a key executive at a Big Tech company is criminally charged and walked off.

We can't come up with fines that are big enough, so the algebra of deterrents here is just not in place.

And then, on a broader level, from a national scale, I think we need mandatory national service.

I think we need to get young people in the same uniform again, so they see each other as Americans, not as people of different sexual orientations or different political parties.

I think we need more third places so people can get together, young people can get together and establish mentorships, establish romantic relationships.

The fundamental element of any society is relationships, and we aren't building enough of them because people are in their homes or on their devices.

So a massive investment in young people that makes them more optimistic about the future, shared collective experiences in the service of our nation, and holding our media complex, specifically social media, more accountable for the damage they're doing.

>> So is it fair to say that both the positive developments that we're seeing in the United States in terms of its geopolitical, its economic strength are being driven -- will be driven very strongly by new changes in AI, but also all of the negative things that you just suggested that are deep problems inside the United States, especially when we talk about relationships between people, that's also one of the biggest challenges that will be exacerbated by the rollout of these new AI tools?

>> Anytime you take one source or material or a piece of information and you convert it into something that is more valuable, whether it's oil into petroleum, whether it's attention into ads, there's emissions and externalities, and we decided to regulate the emissions around carbon emissions.

We might have been a little bit late.

It might not go as far as we should, but we have emission standards.

We have an act to try and reduce carbon.

When we have translated tension to Nissan ads, it's created a very negative externality, and that is keep people's attention.

Think about the cadence of news.

If we could only have one headline news story of the last century, it probably, I would bet, would be "the West turns back tyranny."

If we had to pick one headline for the last 100 years.

If we had to pick one headline for the last 50 years, I would argue it would be "unprecedented, historic prosperity led by China and the U.S." I would think you would have to have positive headlines.

But because we have a headline every three seconds to try and maintain our attention, we go to catastrophizing because that's what keeps our attention.

But we don't seem to want to have the same type of regulation or standards to control or recognize these emissions.

I'm an ageist.

I don't know about you.

I have a more difficult time wrapping my head around technology as I get older, and every year we continue to have the oldest elected representative body of almost any democracy.

The average age of our elected representatives is 62.

So, I mean, how many 62-year-olds -- So that means for every 40-year-old we have, we have an 84-year-old.

At one point, I think a third of all elected representatives had someone on their staff print out their e-mails.

So are these the people to really be figuring out the legislation and the regulation for technology?

We have a real dearth of domain expertise around the people who need to figure out the laws here.

>> Scott Galloway, great to have you here.

>> Yeah, it's great to be with you, Ian.

♪♪ >> There are immense geopolitical, economic, and security implications of generative AI, that is, AI that mimics human-generated text, images, or video.

But can it have an impact on our emotions as well?

Dozens of nursing homes in China, for example, have already experimented with introducing caregiving robots to some of their senior residents.

And in a rapidly aging Japan, senior residents at one retirement home have fallen in love with a pet dog robot.

Don't worry, Moose.

No one's replacing you.

But emotional AI is posed to upend far more than just our twilight years.

As if they're just our twilight years.

One American mental-health nonprofit called Koko received considerable blowback last month for using an AI chatbot to provide real support for 4,000 real people seeking mental-health counseling -- and here's the kicker -- not telling them that it was a bot on the other end.

In a Twitter thread, Koko founder Rob Morris explained that although users rated bot-generated responses significantly higher than those written by humans alone, once those same users realized they were talking to a bot rather than, say, an actual person, they no longer found the therapy to be effective.

Morris soon pulled the plug on the experiment, but judging by some of the responses to his Twitter thread, people don't appreciate being catfished by a calculator.

At what point does emotionally intelligent AI become emotionally manipulative?

It's a question that goes far beyond the virtual therapist's office.

Take social media's already corrosive role in politics, where misinformation abounds.

What's stopping the next demagogue-in-waiting from using a chatbot to win over your vote?

Heck, what's stopping me from using generative AI to convince you to keep watching my show?

Now, there's a dystopia we can all get behind.

♪♪ And now to "Puppet Regime."

You've seen the creative work of our puppet writer and actual human being, Alex Kliment, but we wondered what would happen if we fired him and asked instead ChatGPT to write a sketch where Vladimir Putin prank calls Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

Here are the results.

>> [ Laughs ] This is going to be good.

[ Laughs, clears throat ] [ Ringtone plays ] >> Hello, Ukrainian president speaking.

>> [ High-pitched voice ] Is your refrigerator running?

>> Uh, yes, yes.

It's running just fine.

Is this Putin?

>> [ Normal voice ] How did you know?

>> [ Laughs ] Because you are the only one who would make a silly prank call to me.

>> Ha.

Fine.

I will try again.

[ Clears throat ] [ Ringtone plays ] [ Robotic voice ] Greeting, Ukrainian president.

I am calling to inform you that your country is now under my control.

>> Putin, is that you?

>> [ Normal voice ] Gah!

How did you know?

>> [ Laughs ] Because you are always trying to sound like something different, but your voice is as distinctive as the Kremlin.

>> Mm.

Fine.

I surrender.

You are too smart for me.

[ Both laugh ] >> Anytime, Putin.

>> "Puppet Regime," where even the Russian president can't win at prank calling the Ukrainian president.

>> So, am I fired?

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you're like, "Hey, what happens if they replace Ian with a bot?"

Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

We've got that.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...