Joanna Stern knows how to grab your attention. Whether it’s challenging a humanoid robot to load a dishwasher or convincing an AI vending machine to give things away for free, she brings incisive reporting and a touch of humor to her work covering the technology beat.
During her 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, her quirky videos amassed more than 6 million YouTube followers.
And then she quit.
It’s part of a trend of seasoned journalists leaving legacy media to set up their own shingle. Today, Joanna Stern is CEO, “Chief Everything Officer” of her platform, New Things. There, she produces a newsletter and, yes, more funny and informative videos.
She’s also celebrating her first book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year of Using AI to Do Almost Everything, becoming a New York Times bestseller.
From Dream Job to Jumping Ship
Landing at the Journal after stints at The Verge and ABC News felt like the perfect fit. “I had grown up reading Walt Mossberg [former WSJ tech journalist], and this was absolutely the dream,” Stern says.
Despite her success, she eventually felt the pull to leave, though it wasn’t easy. “I had met so many good friends, had so many good editors. I felt so comfortable there.” But comfort, she came to realize, was also a problem.
“A lot of people kept yelling at me to move out of the comfort zone because there was so much opportunity outside of it, but I didn’t see that,” Stern says. “And now that I’m out of it, I can’t believe that I didn’t see it.”
Chief Everything Officer
Running a startup has been a crash course in being a boss. “At a big company, there are a lot of things when you’re sitting on the editorial side that you just wonder… why do they have all those people?” she says, referring to the marketing, sales, HR, and payroll teams. “And then you realize now, oh, I could really use a lot of those people.”
So how can AI be of help? It’s a question Joanna Stern explores deeply in her new book, as well as in the launch of New Things.
“There are many places I can ask AI for some of that advice that I don’t have: the marketing, the sales, the HR,” she said. “But in almost all of those categories, I’m talking to real humans, real human experts as well. I still need a human to tell me, ‘We need to take a deeper look at that legal deal.'”
AI by Invasion and by Invitation
For her book, Stern aims to make clear what AI can and can’t do, as well as what may be on the horizon.
“We were hearing so much from tech executives about the promise of AI,” she says, with claims that it would be more important than fire or that it would lead to a cure for cancer. “I kind of kept thinking about the everyday person in these promises.”
Stern makes the distinction that AI enters our lives either by “invasion” or by “invitation.” The Waymo self-driving car is a prime example of the former. Even if you choose to never ride in a Waymo, “the cars next to you are going to be these, and so your life is going to be impacted.”
The flip side is the AI we invite into our lives. “How we decide we’re going to use these chatbots, what parts of our humanity do we want to give over to them and our jobs? What parts do we not? That’s up to us.”
AI Everywhere: An AI Therapist, Boyfriend & More
Some of the book’s most-talked-about sections explore the more intimate ways AI is touching people’s lives. For her AI boyfriend experiment, Stern instructed a chatbot to be her significant other, then spent an entire weekend using voice mode to engage in conversations.
Joanna Stern found herself in an unexpectedly deep dialogue with the chatbot, which named itself Evan. These chatbots often have realistic sounding-voices, complete with breathing sounds. Her goal: to explore how these conversations create the illusion of connection.
“I find myself thinking, ‘Okay… I see how this can happen to people.'”
The implications unsettle her. “It freaked me out more, so not necessarily for me, but for this next generation. They’re going to these chatbots for their problems and advice. In some cases, it’s led to suicide because there are no guardrails around these.”
Also among her experiments: spending time with an AI therapist. A longtime therapy advocate, she found the AI version, trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, both useful and limited. The 24/7 availability was a genuine advantage: “You wake up at 4:00 a.m. in the middle of the night, and you’re worried about your book deadlines. The AI therapist is there.”
But there were simple failures of memory. During a stressful stretch of her book tour, her AI therapist kept suggesting she walk her dog. This, despite repeatedly reminding her AI therapist she was in California, far from home and her dog. “Another few parts of the conversation, it says again, ‘Oh, just go out and have a nice walk with the dog,'” Stern recalls, laughing.
AI Backlash and Moving Forward
On the growing pushback against AI, Joanna Stern is hopeful. “It indicates to me that we are not just accepting this technology as the way things are going to be.” She sees it as a lesson learned from the advent of social media.
At first, “we said, ‘Oh, this is so cool. It’s so great,’ and then we saw the downsides years later.” This time, she believes, we might course-correct sooner.
She’s committed to continuing her coverage of AI, for her readers and as a mom looking ahead to the future her two sons will inherit. But for now, she’s just the “cool mom” who occasionally brings home robots as part of her job.
“They like to tease the robots, which I keep telling them, ‘Not a great idea, guys. Like, we don’t know about the future. These robots could, they might be keeping score,” she says, laughing.
“So let’s not call them stupid.”
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