A.I. as opposed to what?

One popular use of A.I. - specifically chatbots using LLMS - that I did not foresee is as a source of life advice. Sometimes, people refer to this in the context of therapy, as if the user is using ChatGPT or another A.I. as a substitute therapist. That implies a certain level of intimacy and privacy that probably applies to a minority of the many advice-seeking queries users offer every day. 

When thinking about the effects of anything, we often search for comparisons, and the comparisons we make are often shaped by metaphors we use - I think that's what is happening with how we think about the effects of using A.I. for advice-seeking. Instead of choosing a comparison that comes to mind the quickest or perhaps one that suits our existing biases for or against the phenomenon in question (e.g., how do the answers given by ChatGPT compare to those given by a professional therapist), we might choose our comparisons in a more deliberate way. Instead of starting with the connections our mind makes when learning of a few vivid exemplars, we might first define the field of inquiry - what is the behavior we're interested in, how many folks are engaging in it, and how can I observe a representative sample of it? 

The next step is to consider the behavior in the context of people's lives. Here, the choice of comparison is not what comes to mind for us, but our reasonable guess as to what people engaging in the behavior would have done otherwise. If they didn't have access to ChatGPT, who or what would they have gone to for advice (or would they have gone to anyone or anything for advice at all)? 

Therapists strike me as sources of very good advice on many topics. They're also better than self-help books because they can tailor their advice to you as an individual and they engage in a back-and-forth exchange. There's also some intangible humanity to your connection with a therapist that clearly helps. On the down side, it is hard to access therapy. There are only so many professionally trained therapists to go around. Efforts to make them more accessible by moving therapy online sacrifices some benefits of the therapeutic experience, namely the intangible human connection, in addition to leading to burnout from overbooked therapists. Even a society that is fully committed to serving the mental and emotional needs of its citizens runs up against the limits of therapeutic supply. 

Of course, people have turned to many other sources for life advice, including friends, family, clergy, authors, and artists. You may not approach a movie, TV show, or a novel with an advice-seeking intension, and yet its lessons may be your guide through any number of emotional or existential straits.

Then there are sources of advice that we encounter online: in spaces explicitly marked as such (and which derive their format and logic from newspaper advice columns) but also on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts. Again, these life lessons may not be something we sought out, but they may still inform how we navigate challenging times in our lives. 

As I consider whether its a good idea for people to turn to ChatGPT for advice, I find that the most apt comparison - that is, the most plausible source of advice for most of the people asking ChatGPT for advice - is either googling it, searching YouTube or TikTok, or running across it on YouTube or TikTok via an algorithm. The quality of advice coming from these sources is, well, mixed. In many cases, the answers aren't as high quality as one would get from a professional, but its much more accessible, which is why its used more often. In some cases - googling something that is commonly googled and finding results from trusted sources - the quality is similar to that which you'd get from a professional. 

Are the types of life advice questions users ask ChatGPT more like the impersonal kind that people have, for the past 20 years, tended to google? Or are they more like the personal questions that people turned to friends, family, and - if they have access - therapists for? My sense is that a fair amount of young people have been getting that kind of advice from YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms for the past decade. In that sense, it is an appropriate point of comparison for that type of advice.

I'd imagine advice of this sort given by ChatGPT would be pretty homogeneous when compared to what you would find on social media platforms. The latter would vary greatly in values it reflected, the perspectives and experiences from which it drew. It leaves the existing variety of humanity intact, while ChatGPT probably flattens it. 

I guess I imagine cases in which people get bad life advice - "bad" in the sense that they result in some harm to themselves and/or others - being more numerous on social media platforms than on ChatGPT. I also imagine that the flat homogeneity of its answers won't necessarily spread to other aspects of culture more broadly, as some suspect it will. ChatGPT tends to qualify its advice and allow for some degree of variety and nuance in its answers. By merely asserting that there is some variety and nuance to certain life advice questions, ChatGPT would be contradicting the values of some of its users. This is less likely to happen on social media where answers are sorted by algorithm to confirm the existing biases of users. 

And so that would seem to be the trade-off: leave the echo chambers of social media advice intact - some of which generate harmful outcomes - or replace them with answers that guide most users away from harmful outcomes but homogenize...something. But is it really Culture that's being homogenized if people are encouraged to cope with crisis in particular ways? This is where my speculation reaches its limit and I feel the need for a more systematic examination of the life advice questions people ask ChatGPT and the answers they receive. 

What's a podcast?

Here's a number: more than 1 billion active monthly YouTube users view podcast content of some kind on the platform. 

Aside from being another data point indicating that more and more people are getting information and entertainment through podcasts, this fact also raises the question of whether the term "podcast" brings to mind something you listen to or something you watch. Podcasts - as audio-only content - have been around for 20 years, deriving their name from a particular Apple device for listening to music and other audio content. Podcasts, as a category, were fairly niche for most of that time - the vast majority of Americans, let alone people around the world, did not listen to any podcasts. Starting in 2013, they start to trend upwards, though not at the hyperbolic or exponential rate of, say, adoption of social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Gradually, podcasts became part of the average American's information diet. But like social media, video streaming platforms, and every other high-choice information medium of the 21st century, podcasts offered seemingly infinite variety in terms of topics and perspectives. A few superstars dominated the podcast charts, but the distribution tail was long and listenership fragmented - most listeners never listened to the most popular podcasts. 

During the pandemic, video streaming took off, owing its popularity to the prolonged shutdown of traditional media production. It's funny/sad to look back to the early stages of the pandemic at TV producers' attempts to approximate the experiences TV viewers were used to. The dissimilarities between television (particularly live TV) and this pale imitation were striking. This moment also democratized video production in the sense that the production tools - lights, camera, set design - used by TV talk show hosts were ones readily available to regular folks. It familiarized more audiences with low/no-budget talk show production. As long as you were charismatic, good-looking, and had access to interview other charismatic, good-looking people, who cared what your background looked like, whether you were on a broadcast network, or whether or not you had a studio audience? 

I recently asked a student whether she listens to any podcasts, and after saying that she didn't, she mentioned that she was recently on a podcast (which made me wonder: what would it mean if more people were either guests or hosts of podcasts than actually listened to podcasts? Might the same have been true for blogs during their initial heyday?). At least she thought it was a podcast - she wasn't sure, because it was on YouTube and it was something you watched, not something you listened to. This should give any podcast researcher pause - make sure you understand how your study participants define the term "podcast."

I'd noticed that some of the podcasts I'd listened to on Spotify had added a video component. Of course, traditional news sources like The New York Times had been pushing reluctant writers in front of video cameras for years, since the early days of online video. The visual aspect didn't add much - it wasn't as if they edited together b-roll and interview footage, which would have meant recreating the traditional television news format on a different medium. It was just people talking - either to each other or to us. It seems to have been the rise of TikTok, Twitch streamers, and YouTube-as-first-screen among Gen-Z folks that prompted the more widespread integration of video into formerly audio or text content. Video was just a means by which to reach the large audiences already on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, not a means of adding much in terms of aesthetics or meaning.

During the pandemic boom in video streaming and podcasting, I recall realizing the importance of pre-production and editing (not live editing, as is used in sports broadcasts and other live events, but post-production editing) in the context of these shows. Those were the key separators between live streamers and podcasters, the qualities that made the former feel like an attempt to connect and converse with the audience and the latter feel like an attempt to entertain them, to put on a show. Then there were scripted podcasts like Serial or S-Town which resembled - in their production scale and in their feel - documentaries. Scripted non-fiction video podcasts - perhaps too short and informal to be called documentaries - are common, and as with their audio-only counterparts, they require more time to create than simple streaming content. Somewhere in between, you had podcasts like Freakonomics that edited scripted segments together with interview clips, something more like long-form journalism. 

But rather than written journalism, it's radio that is the obvious antecedent to podcasts. How different is the streamer directly addressing his audience for hours on end from Rush Limbaugh? How different is the group of friends joking around about news, entertainment, and one another's private lives from Howard Stern? Television talk shows - daytime and late-night - are another template. How different is an intimate podcast interview with a celebrity from Oprah? And how different might their effects be on individuals or societies?

Though there are plenty of similarities between talk radio, TV talk shows, and podcasts - enough to make scholarship on those cultural forms a must-read for anyone interested in the effects of podcasts - I can think of two important differences. The first concerns the number of podcasts - many more than were available through local or syndicated radio, through broadcast or cable TV. A lower barrier to entry means more entrants to the marketplace, and so the market for podcasts - in its scale and dynamics - is closer to the market for music: millions of creators, a few superstars, a really long tail. There might be less audience churn than with music, as audiences develop a para-social connection to podcasters and podcasts don't seem as evanescent as musical trends. 

As with any long-tail marketplace, it's a mistake to only study the distribution head (and I feel like a broken record for saying this again, but...) most listeners are not listening to whatever is trending. They're fragmented across the long tail. It's possible (even likely, I'd argue) that the thousands of niches served by millions of podcasts resemble niches served by magazines in the 20th century. Most of the niches and, collectively, most of the podcast audience consist of benign special interest content (think model train podcasts). But there's no way to know until we analyze the content along the long tail.

The size and diffuseness of the podcast market means that no single podcaster has the kind of reach that broadcasters had in the 20th century. Joe Rogan has something like 11 million listeners to each podcast while Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, in their heyday, had 20 million each, and that was at a time when the U.S. population was 2/3 the size, and a decent chunk of Rogan's listeners are from outside the U.S. It's worth dwelling on this point because it applies to many podcasters, streamers, and influencers. On the one hand, they have a global reach that broadcasters in the era of nationalized media markets could only dream of. But if we're trying to discern how much attention share they have (and I'd argue that attention share is a precondition to having influence), then you should be using the global population as your denominator, not the national population. In that case, no podcaster has more than 1% of the population's attention, and nearly all of them have less than .001% of it.

The second difference is regulation, or lack thereof. Howard Stern frequently butted heads with the FCC, and Rush Limbaugh had to placate the kinds of sponsors that would have likely steered clear of some of today's most popular podcasters. In the absence of FCC content regulation, edgy talk show hosts become edgier podcasters, moving their small-but-significant audiences closer to the fringes of society. Platforms regulate their content, too - creators can still get de-platformed - but it takes a lot more to get de-platformed than it took to get fined by the FCC. Meanwhile, provocateurs expand the Overton window.

But Rogan, like Stern (but perhaps not like Limbaugh), has to maintain some variety in order to maintain his large audience. Their critics tend to focus on particularly outlandish, offensive, or dangerous moments on their shows, but a quick survey of their output suggests that its not all like that, that they attempt to cater to multiple audiences. Don't like what you're hearing? Skip that episode and tune back in later. If we care about influence, we need to take into account how content varies by episode - not an impossible task so long as researchers can analyze podcast transcripts and look for keywords. 

Just as talk shows were spaces for discussion and commentary relating to social issues, political issues, and current events, so too are podcasts. Terms like "infotainment" and "soft news" can be applied to the category, though some podcasts - in format, production, and reception - are more clearly in the tradition of documentary filmmaking or journalism, and that's the genre of podcast that excites me the most. Documentaries continue to find audiences on streaming platforms, and there is no one type of documentary. It's a vibrant cultural form. Meanwhile, journalism continues its long quest for a business model to replace the one that produced a golden era of civic awareness that is swiftly receding into the past. There are a lot of people in the podcast "space" right now - audiences, creators, investors, platforms. But the medium hasn't reached maturity; it hasn't found its Orson Welles or its Dorothea Lange. For these reasons, if I were to place a bet on a means by which to tell a non-fiction story that had real impact, I'd bet on the podcast. 

What did Americans watch on TikTok?

It's a seemingly simple question with a seemingly obvious answer. If you've read anything about TikTok, you probably assume that most Americans are watching influencers who talk about politics, fashion, weight loss, and a broad, amorphous category of behaviors called "trends." Those who write about TikTok - not just journalists but academic researchers - tend to write about what they're interested in, what has the biggest impact on society or the economy, or what is trending. What is trending on any large platform like YouTube or TikTok represents less than 5% of what users are watching, so it's not a good starting point for answering this question. 

Instead, it's better to start with a representative sample of Americans and ask them to report URLS of the last ten TikTok videos they watched, which is what we did in April of 2024. Why ten? People tend to get tired of copying and pasting URLs after that, and we believe this allows us a view of most Americans' TikTok viewing habits that other approaches do not offer. 

After collecting roughly 3,000 URLs from roughly 300 Americans, we watched each video and categorized it based on its topic. Topics ranged from music and dance to true crime to news, politics, and social issues. Recognizing that many videos were "about" multiple things (a comedy skit that was about animals and relationships), we assigned as many topic labels to these videos as was warranted. We then calculated the share of videos in our sample that belonged to each topic category. Here is what we found.

It is hard to characterize Americans' TikTok viewing in terms of topic. It may be tempting to look at the highest bars in the chart and talk about how TikTok is mostly a light-hearted platform where Americans watched comedy and dance videos, but those two categories, cumulatively, account for less than half of the videos in our sample. Another way to describe the viewing is "fragmented," which is misleading and oversimplifying in its own way. To get a better understanding of what types of content Americans watched on TikTok, it helps to have a point of comparison. 

We also asked our representative sample of Americans to provide the URLs of the last ten YouTube videos they watched. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two platforms. 

Relative to YouTube, TikTok was used by Americans to view more comedy content and content about relationships while YouTube was used more for educational videos (e.g., tutorials) and clips from movies and TV shows. But the diversity of topics is broad on both platforms: not only can you find content on a wide variety of topics on both platforms; Americans tended to watch a variety of content. Based on this admittedly rudimentary analysis, it's best to think of cross-platform differences in Americans' short video diets (and perhaps, by extension, the identities and purposes of the platforms) as tendencies rather than in absolute terms.