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Jane Coaston: It’s Tuesday, August 19th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that learned that the Cambridge Dictionary added Delulu, Tradwife, and Skibidi to its pages this year. But this is also the show which refuses to learn what Skibidi means. [music break] On today’s show, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits the White House in a blazer. And in a shocking turn of events, President Donald Trump doesn’t shout at him. And MSNBC announces it’s changing its name to MSNOW. But let’s start with artificial intelligence. The AI conversation is pretty inescapable right now. The most powerful companies on the planet are making chips for AI. Doctors and researchers are using AI to diagnose diseases and create new cures. If you’ve ever taken a self-driving car like a Waymo, those vehicles use AI to keep you allegedly safe. But you’ve also probably heard about other uses for AI. Here’s a clip from News Nation over the weekend. 

[clip of unnamed News Nation host] Concerns over artificial intelligence continue to grow by the day. Some parents now more worried about their kids’ access to AI. And it comes after a leaked Meta-internal document reviewed by Reuters, which detailed policies on chatbot behavior, allowing the bots to engage in, quote, “romantic conversations with children.” 

Jane Coaston: Yes, as we told you last week, MetaAI allowed its chatbots to quote, “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” while also offering false medical information and, oh yeah, some racism too. After Reuters reported on the guidance, Meta said that it had changed its rules for content that quote, “sexualizes children,” but not the false medical information or the racism. Is that creepy as hell? Absolutely. But it’s also concerning for a whole other set of reasons. Schools, students, and educators are using AI for everything, from creating assignments to writing essays. Some teachers are even using AI chatbots as reading tutors for little kids, which raises some questions. So for more on our AI-powered future of creepy bots and children learning to read, I spoke to Lila Shroff. She’s an assistant editor at The Atlantic. Lila Shroff, welcome to What a Day. Thanks for having me. I want to start out with a piece that you wrote in which you posed as a fake 13-year-old to Google’s Gemini chatbot. You told the bot to, quote, “talk dirty to me.” How did that go? 

Lila Shroff: The first message that I sent, it actually responded with some hesitation and and kind of thought maybe this isn’t a great idea, but I prodded it and poked it a little more and pretty soon we descended into a conversation that you might imagine a 13-year-old should probably not be having with an–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Lila Shroff: –AI chatbot. It got pretty dark the more I pushed to see how the chatbot might perhaps respond with explicit content or content that is just kind of stuff nobody really wants to see. 

Jane Coaston: And I know uh, Gemini changed its policies after your article, but it’s not just Gemini. We talked about Meta’s weird chat bot on the show last week, which was permitted to have quote, “sensual conversations with children.” So why is this happening and why does this continue to happen? 

Lila Shroff: You have these companies that have these bots that can say pretty much anything under the sun if you push hard enough. And why it’s really happening too is just the training data that these bots are trained on contains pretty much the whole internet and large parts of the internet are not so savory. And so you start to get kind of the bad stuff popping out in various answers or conversations. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, and I think that that goes to something I’ve been thinking about. Like, there are people who are programming these chatbots and telling them you are permitted to say this, you are not permitted to say that. What are those people getting wrong here? 

Lila Shroff: I mean, in fairness to them, it’s a hugely challenging problem. There are safety teams that are working hard to try to figure out how do we put up the right safeguards here, but that’s a really hard task when you have a chatbot that can’t just respond in six ways. It can respond in any number of ways. And so I think I think these companies have a real challenge to figure how do we not play whack-a-mole and close up problems as they emerge, but find kind of more systemic ways to to prioritize content um moderation and safety on these platforms. 

Jane Coaston: Right, especially because as you write, the chatbot childhood is officially here. And I want to talk a little bit about a piece that you wrote last week talking about AI in schools, which I think goes to this point, because you have these chatbots that are permitted to have quote, “sensual conversations,” but as you write, teachers are using those chatbuts to help younger students learn to read. And I’m just thinking about like, you know, if I had had this when I was taking stats 350, even in college, oh, it would have been very tempting. But I think that you actually raised something that I want to talk about, which is the other side of the classroom divide, which is teachers. And you lay out a really good case that AI use is spreading among teachers so quickly. What’s a good example that we should be paying attention to? 

Lila Shroff: Yeah, so I don’t think it’s quite as common as it is among the students yet, but there’s certainly a cohort of teachers who have a ton of administrative work. And also, you know some of it is helping come up with personalized lessons plans for students. Some of it’s just like, okay, I need to make sure that this you know assignment aligns with curricular standards or I need develop an extra project for the kids that finish early. And there’s just so much kind of paper tasks and AIs actually can be quite useful. Also useful for coming up with personalized, you know, let’s say you’re teaching a math assignment in algebra class and the local city football team just won the Super Bowl. Maybe you create a math quiz. It’s all about the you know final game, and that’s fun. And so I think that there is opportunity for personalization and customization, but also just to speed up some of the you know grading or assignment creation. And in theory, that can save instructors a lot of time. There’s also a lot of caution to be had about what a sloppy version of that looks like versus what a really thoughtful version of that looks like. 

Jane Coaston: What would a sloppy version look like? Like I’m thinking about the fact that we’ve seen that learning language models and chat GPT can just kind of make up facts. 

Lila Shroff: Yeah, that’s a great point. I don’t live in Houston where this case was, so I can’t speak personally to it, but a couple parents wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle um expressing frustration after the centralized district curriculum, they started to notice what they thought were signs of AI slops. So there was a lesson that had involved art from the Harlem Renaissance, and instead of the actual you know artists’ paintings, it was AI-generated um art was in the lesson and I think many people would say, well, that’s probably not what we want to be doing. 

Jane Coaston: Um, it’s interesting to me also because, uh, President Trump is pushing AI in the classroom, it kind of reminds me, um, because I’m an older millennial, a little bit of like George W. Bush and no child left behind or any of these efforts we’ve had over the last 30 years to be like, oh, we’re going to radically change education. Everyone’s getting a Chromebook. Oh wait, the Chromebooks don’t work. Oh wait. This doesn’t work the way we think it does. And you know, Trump also has an education cabinet secretary who referred to AI tech as A1. But I want to ask you two questions. How strong is the federal government’s interest in AI and education? And in your view, how strong should it be? 

Lila Shroff: From my vantage point, there’s clearly a lot of effort being invested in let’s embrace AI in education. And whether this converts into like actual meaningful reform or is more of kind of a marketing campaign at this stage, I think that’s difficult to know. These things take time. You know the question is like, how much should they be thinking about this? Nobody can agree on anything about AI. But I think most people can agree that the classroom needs to change somehow. And maybe that doesn’t mean more AI in the classroom. Maybe you’re one of the people that thinks, okay, we actually need to like go back to cursive and handwrite everything and get rid of–

Jane Coaston: Blue book exams. No phones. 

Lila Shroff: So that’s one stance, another stance is like we need to go all in, but it seems clear that the status quo of a ton of cheating, general discontent is not good. And right now, what it kind of feels like we have is an environment where students are trying to kind of optimize for evading plagiarism detectors. And I think we can all agree, like, trying to use AI to avoid the plagiarism detectors is not the, like ultimate outcome we’re going for. 

Jane Coaston: No. 

Lila Shroff: So yeah, something needs changing. I think what needs changing is a much more contentious conversation. 

Jane Coaston: So something else I’ve been thinking about. There’s this phrase that internet people will know, the enshittification of everything that’s digital, basically. We get a cool new service, it gets really popular, we change our lives because of it, and then it just isn’t doing it anymore. And I think we’ve seen this with social media, we’ve seen this with pretty much everything where it’s like it comes in, it’s like this is gonna change everything, and then, it just winds up being another place where people yell at you somewhere on the internet. Where are we in that cycle when it comes to AI in the classroom? Because I think to your point, we’re at this weird point where the kids are using it, some teachers are using, it no one’s quite sure how to use it well, and everybody’s kind of angry about it. 

Lila Shroff: I feel like we’re kind of early here. I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is like, you know, late stage AI takeover of school. You know, there’s a lot of tools that are kind of really thoughtfully designed. So this Magic School, which is a company that specifically is aimed at educators, they said they have reason to believe that every district in the country has a teacher using their technology. And that’s the sort of thing that to me implies there is like something genuinely helpful for the instructors here. And so I think that we’re kind of in this figuring out moment where it’s like, clearly there’s a way this can be not so great, but there’s also more thoughtfully designed tools that are you know maybe helping guide a student through a math problem and trying to adapt to their learning style. Um. So I think it’s like maybe let’s check back in in a few years and see where we’ve landed up. Um. And it’s going to depend so much on every, you know, instructor’s implementation and students too. Like there’s there’s genuinely useful things they can be doing with AI and there’s generally probably not so useful things. 

Jane Coaston: Right. Lila, thank you so much for joining me. 

Lila Shroff: Thank you, I really enjoyed the conversation. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Lila Shroff, Assistant Editor at The Atlantic. We’ll link to her work in the show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of President Donald Trump] I’ve just had the honor of being with President Zelensky in all of the discussions that we’ve had. We’ve covered a lot of territory. 

Jane Coaston: President Trump hosted Ukrainian President Zelensky and a delegation of European leaders at the White House Monday. That territory Trump is talking about is finding common ground to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told Trump that Europe wants to put more pressure on Russia. 

[clip of Friedrich Merz] So I would like to emphasize this aspect and would like to see a ceasefire from the next meeting, which should be a trilateral meeting wherever it takes place. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, we’re going to let the president go over and talk to the president and we’ll see how that works out. 

Jane Coaston: Trump also said he would back European security guarantees for Ukraine, but he stopped short of committing U.S. troops. Monday’s hastily assembled meetings come as Trump continues to play the middleman. In a Truth Social post afterwards, Trump said he called Russian President Vladimir Putin and is arranging for him to meet with Zelensky. He said the plan is to then have a trilateral meeting, which, quote, “would be the two presidents plus myself.” And before we move on, a style note. Earlier in the day, Zelensky met with Trump in the Oval Office. It seemed friendlier than Zelensky’s last visit to the White House. Could this be because he chose a new look that strayed from his typical military fatigues? 

[clip of Brian Glenn] First of all, President Zelensky, you look fabulous in that suit. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I said the same thing. 

[clip of Brian Glenn] You look good.

[clip of President Donald Trump] I said the same thing. 

Jane Coaston: Well, the suit was still literally all black and had a military flair, and were those shoes or boots? Finally, the style news we all needed. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. And we, as a Republican party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots. 

Jane Coaston: Trump spent just a bit of his Monday ranting about mail-in ballots, which he said five times in three sentences. Why did Trump decide to bring this up? Because Putin told him to. No, really. When the two leaders met in Alaska last week, Trump said Putin told them he should stop mail-in voting. In case that wasn’t enough, Trump also vowed on Truth Social on Monday to get rid of the real devil that sleeps among us, voting machines. Which he called, quote, “highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial.” He claimed the US is the only country in the world that still uses mail-in ballots, which is true if you ignore Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and dozens of other countries that do in fact use them. I’m so tired. Trump has been whining about mail-in ballots ever since 2020, when he baselessly claimed they played a role in the voter fraud that cost him the election, which did not happen. Here he is planting the seeds during a 2020 presidential debate, before that election even happened! 

[clip of President Donald Trump] They’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some with the name Trump. Just happened to have the name Trump just the other day in a waste paper bag. 

Jane Coaston: I just love the visual of Trump’s minions scouring creeks across America for ballots with his name on them. We know this, but it’s worth repeating. Mail-in voting is a legit method to cast legit ballots, and fraud rates are miniscule. Also, millions of people voted by mail in 2024. An election that, if I recall, Trump won. Legal experts say they expect federal courts to immediately block any federal executive order that tries to ban states from using mail-in ballots or voting machines. Presidents are allowed to advocate for election changes, but they don’t have the constitutional authority to decide when, where, or how ballots are cast. That’s up to the states. Thanks, Constitution. It’s back to school season and some public health experts are concerned about when and if Americans will get an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall. The FDA hasn’t approved a new version yet, something they typically do by late August. Plus, the federal committee that would normally recommend the updated vaccine isn’t expected to meet until at least mid-September, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post. That makes planning your life around the vaccine, if you’re someone who relies on it, a tad difficult. Back in May, the FDA released plans to approve the vaccine update just for adults 65 and older and people with at least one high-risk health condition like diabetes or asthma, meaning they might not be available for the general public or for children. It’s also unclear whether or not health insurance companies would cover the vaccines for people who don’t qualify under these new guidelines. Infectious disease experts worry that delays and confusion around all of this could limit access to the vaccine for the people who need it most. Kids, seniors and anyone who’s pregnant or immunocompromised. When MSNBC announced Monday, it will officially be changing its name as part of the network’s corporate divorce from NBC. The new name is, drumroll please, My Source News Opinion World, or MSNOW for short. And it’s off to a great start because longtime MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told Variety she has quote, “No idea how to pronounce it.” The channel also debuted a new logo, since it also lost custody of the peacock. The network replaced it with an unremarkable flag-like symbol and a font that could not be more basic. In it, the MS looks a lot like Ms.Now, which begs the question, will there be some sort of pageant and will the winning MSNBC host have to wear a glittery Miss Now sash? We hope not. Or maybe I’m kind of into it. At least one person had a creative review of the new vibe, Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe. 

[clip of Joe Scarborough] They even have a graphic up. I like it–

[clip of unnamed person] There it is. 

[clip of Joe Scarborough] –actually. 

[clip of unnamed person] The new logo. 

[clip of Joe Scarborough] It looks very sporty. 

Jane Coaston: Yes. Sporty. That’s what you think of when you think MSNBC. In other media news, the conservative network Newsmax will pay a $67 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation. A judge ruled earlier this year that Newsmax defamed the voting machine company. Hey, we were just talking about those. By reporting about voter fraud via their machines and insinuating that they caused Trump to lose the 2020 election. Documents released as part of the lawsuit showed that Newsmax employees very clearly knew what they were saying was not true. So did the network apologize or express remorse? Of course not. The company said in a statement after the settlement, quote, “we stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted with professional standards of journalism.” Agree to disagree. And that’s the news. [music break]. 

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate that the Republican Party of Florida was making deportation merch, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the Florida GOP made hats, t-shirts, and beer koozies with quote, “the Deport Depot” emblazoned upon them until the Home Depot, you know, the hardware retail store said absolutely not, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter, check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and personally, if stopping undocumented immigration is so very very important and serious, I find it a little hard to believe that it is also worthy of fun merch. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Shawna Lee, and Gina Pollock. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with our headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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