Oprah Meets AI

Midway through Oprah Winfrey’s one-hour primetime special on ABC, AI and the Future of Us, the YouTube-popular tech expert Marques Brownlee does a laptop presentation for the former talk-show host. He asks Oprah to give him a phrase that AI might use to imitate his voice in near-real time.

Seconds later, the AI-faked voice of Brownlee reads, in a convincingly conversational tone, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” It’s audio-censored for network TV, but a stunned Winfrey mutters, “Holy shit.”

A sense of overwhelmed resignation permeates Winfrey’s hour on AI, minus time for commercial breaks on TV and on Hulu, where it lives permanently. Over and over, as she interviews tech moguls such as OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and elder tech statesman Bill Gates, FBI director Christopher Wray and others, Winfrey asks a lot of questions about where artificial intelligence is going and why it’s moving so fast right now this second with fascination, but also fear.

The answers, which the special explains in timelines, interviews with regular-people talking-head interstitials relating their experiences using AI, history montages and Winfrey’s own closing argument, get surprisingly full play for such a brief running time. AI is big and amorphous; it includes everything from self-driving cars to Amazon’s Alexa speakers to ChatGPT to a million other existing and emerging technologies. It exploded forward with a tech breakthrough from Google in 2017 and has been powering up exponentially every year since then.

To get your head around what happens next and explain it in terms that a non-tech audience can understand is a challenge that Oprah, somewhat miraculously, manages to accomplish.

That doesn’t mean the special isn’t without its problems. Weeks before the special even aired, tech pundits were excoriating Winfrey for glamorizing the AI industry with her choice of interviewees. Some expected the host to gloss over AI’s dangers in ways that her previous special did on Ozempic and weight loss. You could say just by airing an hour of prime-time TV on the subject, AI is getting a major validating moment in the spotlight.

But that’s not what happens on AI and the Future of Us; instead, Oprah presents a serious set of fears and anxieties about AI and asks tough questions, particularly of Altman, whom she dubs perhaps the most dangerous man in the world. He doesn’t like that, of course, and this young tech billionaire, who looks like a John Hughes movie antagonist, is clearly feeling the strain of so much responsibility on his shoulders as he helps chart AI’s future. He knows AI could go horribly wrong, and Altman says he’s talking to people in government every few days to mitigate these threats amid a global AI arms race. Altman also believes AI will solve many issues around education and health in ways we can’t even imagine yet and that utility of AI, as with many technologies, will outweigh its drawbacks.

If you think that’s just hype, Bill Gates would beg to differ. The father of computer software people hate believes AI will absolutely eclipse PCs, phones and even the internet as the most important technology to emerge in his lifetime.

Oprah admits at the top of the hour that AI has “bedazzled” and fascinated her, but by the hour’s end, particularly after a chat with novelist Marilynne Robinson, Oprah sounds a warning bell. Robinson posits that we are entering another cycle of denying the beauty of our own humanity in favor of mechanizing the things that make us human. “We’re not enough in love with our own existence,” Robinson tells Oprah. That, she says, is very dangerous and the people controlling AI’s future seem to have a dim view of what it means to be human.

She’s right, of course, but Oprah is savvy enough to acknowledge that AI is here to stay, it’s only going to get more powerful and influential, and our best choice, perhaps, is to deploy it responsibly and well, even as bad players inevitably use it destructively.

Speaking to the camera, Winfrey tells us in conclusion, “This moment requires a different level of alertness, awareness about who we are and where we’re going. What’s real and what’s not. What’s artificial intelligence and what is human wisdom.”

We can and will adapt, she says, but we can’t forget: “The stakes for all of us could not be higher.”

Cover image of Oprah created by an AI Image Generator.