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Kevin Roose: Casey, what’s going on with you?
Casey Newton: Well, let’s see. My boyfriend is away for a week for work, and so I decided to entertain myself by buying electronics.
Kevin Roose: You went on a shopping spree.
Casey Newton: I did. I went to the Apple store. And I said, I’m going to get a new iPad Pro with the fancy keyboard. Have you seen the fancy keyboard?
Kevin Roose: No.
Casey Newton: It is like these Mac keyboards, but slimmer. And it is way more than I need, but I just thought it looked so cool.
Kevin Roose: And what are you going to do on that? Just play Balatro?
Casey Newton: Yeah, mostly just check emails. Yeah, it turns out, no matter what — every year, oh, there’s a fancy new laptop, and the battery life is incredible, and the processing power, you wouldn’t believe it. What am I doing with it? I’m checking emails.
Kevin Roose: Yeah.
Casey Newton: Yeah. Am I responding to them? Mostly no. But, oh, boy, can I read an email?
Kevin Roose: No one has ever checked email and ignored it faster.
Casey Newton: No.
Kevin Roose: I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”
Casey Newton: I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer.” And this is “Hard Fork.”
Kevin Roose: Well, Casey, big week in Washington obviously. We had the inauguration of President Trump for his second term in office.
Casey Newton: I noticed you weren’t on the dais. Did you not give him a million dollars?
Kevin Roose: No, I only gave half a million. So I was watching it from the subway down the street.
Casey Newton: Sad.
Kevin Roose: But we did have a lot of news coming out of the tech world in relation to the first days of the Trump presidency. Monday, obviously, at the inauguration itself, we had Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, all of the titans of tech standing right behind the Trump family. Elon Musk was also there, of course. It’s being reported that he’s likely to get an office in the West Wing.
Casey Newton: So what is going on with TikTok because it has been a wild ride. Obviously, last week, we gave our TikTok update where we called TikTok V12 final final use this. But that was not the end of the TikTok story.
Kevin Roose: So what is going on with TikTok? Catch us up.
Casey Newton: Well, Kevin, it goes like this. TikTok was banned, and then it went down for about 12 hours. And then it came back, but only sort of. And so it is now both alive and dead at the same time, existing in a state of quantum superposition with itself. It is Schrodinger’s app.
Kevin Roose: So people who use TikTok opened their apps over the weekend — I believe it was on Saturday.
Casey Newton: Yes.
Kevin Roose: — and saw a message. And Casey, what did that message say?
Casey Newton: Well, Kevin, when people opened the app, they were greeted with a screen that said that TikTok quote, “isn’t available right now.” But it added, quote, “we are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned.”
Kevin Roose: So I want to ask about this message because I thought it was very interesting.
Casey Newton: I learned Mandarin. It was incredible. I never realized that was all that I needed.
Kevin Roose: But we did have some announcements coming out of this first wave of executive orders. The Biden administration’s executive order on AI was repealed. There’s also been an announcement of a new major AI-infrastructure project, which we’ll talk about in a second, called Stargate.
Casey Newton: So TikTok literally is an AI meme service.
Chris Hayes: I want the five dankest memes today. Please, go retrieve for me the five dankest memes.
Kevin Roose: But when you think about AI and attention, do you feel like one of those scenarios is more likely than the other?
Chris Hayes: I feel totally lost on AI, in the sense that I have zero trust for my own instincts of what it will be.
Kevin Roose: So I’m optimistic about this, in part because I read the chapter of your book where you talk about spam and these sort of equivalents of spam in today’s attention environment. And I know that compared to 10 years ago, I encounter a lot less spam in my email inbox than I used to. And that is not because of anything that I’ve done. That’s because AI got better at filtering out spam.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s my hope too.
Kevin Roose: And we’re starting to see this. I know someone who programmed a ChatGPT task the other day to give him a message every morning of everything that Donald Trump did the day before, ranked in order of importance. And like, that kind of thing feels possible to me in a way that it did not a couple of years ago. And that could actually save us some time watching cable news. No offense.
Chris Hayes: Well, we don’t want that. But let me ask you — can I keep asking you questions? Is that all right?
Kevin Roose: Yes.
Chris Hayes: How much are you using ChatGPT in your workflow?
Casey Newton: Constantly, for everything.
Kevin Roose: Every day for everything. Sorry. Yes.
Chris Hayes: I’m not. I feel a little like I’m just walking around, I’m listening to The Strokes in my skinny jeans, like a dude that just stopped. And I can’t — It just seems like a new thing. I got to go interact with a new thing. I don’t want a new thing.
Casey Newton: Wait. Wait. Can I say something about AI and attention, though?
Kevin Roose: Yes.
Casey Newton: Because, Chris, you were sort of joking a few minutes ago about an AI meme servant. That is explicitly what TikTok was set up to be, is we are going to look at literally everything. And just based on engagement signals, we’re going to serve up these things that you’re most likely to enjoy. And the state of the art is already pretty good. I think one reason why TikTok got banned is we have this sense that, gosh, it’s kind of spooky good at understanding what I like.
Chris Hayes: Part of that, I think, is probably true. But I think there’s also something happening, which is the form of things is influenced by the attentional environment they’re in. So one of the things I’ve really been noticing, if you go back and you watch a movie from the 1970s and 1980s, they’re paced so much more slowly.
Kevin Roose: Oh, my god.
Chris Hayes: They are so slow. And why are they slow? They’re slow because, what else are you going to do, dude? You just spent $15 or $6 or $5. You’re in there. You got nowhere to be. You got nothing to do. If Robert Altman wants to take his sweet time setting up the first 20 minutes of this movie — and because things respond to the attentional environment, everything is conditioned to move much more quickly. And so when you try to get something from outside that it feels slow.
Casey Newton: I mean, but again, fast forward to today. Watch the fourth episode of any Netflix show. They didn’t need to make it. You could just delete it and move right on. You know what I mean? Sometimes I think things are still pretty slowly paced.
Kevin Roose: Well, Chris Hayes, thank you so much for coming on. The book “The Sirens’ Call” is available next week, January 28. I have read it. It’s quite good. And I recommend it. Thanks so much for your time.
Chris Hayes: Thanks guys.
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