474 – Exploring the AI generation gap: why young people seem skeptical about AI

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 474, four hundred and seventy four, entitled Exploring the AI Generation Gap, Why young People Seem Sceptical about ai. It was published on Thursday, the 2nd of July, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm going to be joined by Katie Keith from Barn2 in a few short moments, but before that, some very short housekeeping.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Katie Keith. Katie penned an article a little while ago, which I will link to in the show notes in which she described a situation which she is increasingly experiencing, and that is one of fatigue, mistrust, possibly even hatred of AI amongst the younger generation.

Now, I can personally subscribe to the fact that this is happening amongst the younger people that I know. There seems to be this real appetite for describing AI in negative terms. It's creating a future in which job security is going to be really difficult to capture, and obviously the younger generation are going to be the recipients of that. And there's the whole environmental thing as well.

And so that is the topic under discussion today. We go at it from so many different angles, and it's really, really interesting. So it's not the usual debate, scepticism of AI. This is much more geared towards the younger generation, and it's absolutely fascinating. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Katie Keith. Hello, Katie.

[00:03:08] Katie Keith: Hey.

[00:03:09] Nathan Wrigley: Fresh off the plane from Word Camp Europe in Krakoff. How is your journey back?

[00:03:15] Katie Keith: Yeah, absolutely fine. Went smoothly. It's nice when they do Word Camp somewhere that pretty much everyone has a direct flight to.

[00:03:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And what did you make of Krakoff? I was utterly blown away and I'm not just being hype hyperbolic. I really thought it was one of the most profoundly great places I've ever been. It was wonderful.

[00:03:34] Katie Keith: Yeah, I realised I know nothing about Poland. I, it was beautiful. It was, seemed like a very wealthy place, which I didn't realise. The buildings were beautiful, historic, immaculate, seemed to be a very safe place. Really good restaurants and shops and everything. I had no idea.

[00:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, me neither. And the one word which I've taken away is, crack off. At least, I dunno about wider Poland, but crack off. Super clean. Really

[00:04:01] Katie Keith: everything was clean. Yeah.

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: clean. I, spent a few hours playing a game with a friend of mine where we tried to find litter and we failed. There was no letter to be found.

anyway, so there we go. I hope you had a productive time. I'm guessing you were there, under the auspices of Barn too. Were you manning a booth or just doing the networking track?

[00:04:23] Katie Keith: Yeah, just the networking really. And I had two team members with me to catch up with as well, so that's always a good opportunity to see my team in person.

[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: Out and I thought that was a really great event. Personally, I had a really nice time, very well organised and beautiful venue and what have you. But we're not here to chat about WordCamp Europe strangely enough. 'cause just before I got on a plane to WordCamp Europe, a few weeks before that 29th of May, Katie took to the blogging and came up with an article entitled The AI Generation Gap, why Young People Are Sceptical.

And it really hit a nerve with me. And so I reached out to you and here we are today. I dunno if you feel you are able to summarise that article, just to kick us off and then we'll get into the debate, but just tell us who was involved, in the processing of that and which people were under the microscope and I'm guessing there was quite a lot of family members and stuff.

So just tell us what it was about.

[00:05:19] Katie Keith: Yeah, the background was basically my Twitter is just my random thoughts. I don't put a lot of time into each tweet. I just tweet what I'm thinking. So one morning I woke up thinking, isn't it weird that everyone I work with who tends to be either Gen X or millennial, is so into AI and so positive about it?

And yet every young person I meet, including my own teenager, is really sceptical and thinks it's evil. And I thought that's a weird contrast. So I just did a random tweet, which I spent 30 seconds on asking people's thoughts about that. And I did not expect it to go viral. It got something like 30,000

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh boy.

[00:06:02] Katie Keith: likes.

And it was crazy. It got about 250 comments. It really struck a chord with people, which I was not expecting. It was just a random thought. So obviously there's something going on there. And in the end I collated the 250 responses of people speculating as to why and if there is this generation gap and published a post on barn two.com.

So it's barn two.com/ai-generation-gap in which I, gave the reasons. And it was interesting. It wasn't necessarily the reasons I expected that people thought that young people were so sceptical. like you'd think that losing your job was, and or not getting a job 'cause of AI would be the biggest reason.

But that was actually only number two. And number one was just a more of an ideological distrust of organisation, of institutions and big tech. So it was more of an ideological issue, which older people don't seem so concerned about. But most people accepted that there is a generation gap, which ironically is the opposite of what normally happens with new technology, which is that the young people embrace it and the older people are lagging behind.

[00:07:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's it. It's, so I'll just paraphrase all of that. So I, read it all, but the tweet that you initially put out was what got me into this. And, and basically I'm of a certain age, I'm definitely not in the younger generation, let's put it that way. But I have enormous reservations about AI and a lot of the things that the young people say, I, can totally get on board with, but I'm just gonna plant this seed at the beginning.

and I am not expressing this as my opinion. I'm just gonna get this out the way. 'cause it's a curious thought that occurred to me and I said it to you just before we hit record. And that is that when I was much younger, so when I was still living at home, let's say I was old enough to have an independent, credible set of thoughts, but not old enough to be out in the workplace where I was fending for myself.

I can definitely point to myself, my future self can point at my previous self and say, you were much more idealistic back then. so regardless of what I did or didn't do during the day, the food would arrive on the table. My parents were extremely good parents, they kept a roof over my head.

They kept me fed and watered and clothed and all of those wonderful things. And so I had loads of time to just pontificate about the world. And, I did, a lot of pontificating, much to the annoyance of my parents, and I remember getting into arguments about them and they would state a position, let's say it was a political position or something like that, and I would come back with this other position.

And then as time wore on and I went out into the world and forged my own future and had to look after myself, I don't remember the ebbing away of that idealism, but at some point it seems to have left me. and I don't mean I've got no idealism left, but a lot of the reality of the world and the sort of grind that you have to do replace that idealism.

So I'm gonna plant that at the beginning and, ask if you've got any thoughts on that. So that is to say the younger generation are in a different position. They don't have responsibilities, they probably don't have the mortgage. They're carefree, for want of a better word. what do you think about that idea.

[00:09:38] Katie Keith: it's always been known that people tend to be more idealistic and also liberal politically when they're younger, and then they tend to move more to the right as they get older. So I think those things are connected and it, I agree that yeah, the ai attitude as a whole does tend to follow that trend.

But I would say that you are fairly idealistic, Nathan, compared to a lot of WordPress people. For example, I'm thinking of the Twitter thing and the joining of Blue Sky, and I have seen you acting on principle in a way that a lot of, people your age don't. So you, I don't think you've completely lost that.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: very kind of you. I can definitely sense that the, me of now would definitely get into an argument with the me from previous, years. But really it's not really about me. It's more that I wonder if there is some, if there's a, there, if being slightly more carefree when I was younger allowed me to have those opinions and then the sort of brutal reality of life makes those opinions more difficult to maintain.

Again, I'm not really trying to state a parti a particular position, but I'm just lodging that as a possible thing. Okay. So let's move to your, if you are willing to discuss, your child in this, can you summarise, it'd be great if we could just drag them in and tell, wind them up and say, go for it. But can you summarise on, their behalf what the problem is? What is the fear? What's the ide ideological barrier that they fear and worry about?

[00:11:16] Katie Keith: Yeah, so they're 14, nearly 15. And I think they're fairly typical because whenever I meet another young person, I often ask them about ai and they typically have a very same view, very similar viewpoint, which is that it's a useful tool. Apparently most young people who are sceptical of AI use it every day.

The usage is, yeah.

[00:11:38] Nathan Wrigley: great. Yeah. That's

[00:11:40] Katie Keith: the usage is really high. A young people among young people. But it's more of an attitude, a scepticism, a cynicism against it. for mine, they seem to, this is ideological. They have a perception that it's cheating. and then there's a lot of information from the school, for example, about using it to cheat.

And they sometimes think I'm cheating if I use it to write, say a job description or whatever in my work instead of doing it by hand. So when I'm like, it's just a tool. I'm reading it, I'm editing it, I'm giving it a prompt about exactly what I want in the job description. So it's not cheating. It's just a tool like spell check isn't cheating at pretending you can spell, is it?

And people have accepted that for a long time. So there's the cheating argument. And they're also, they are quite into, art and drawing. And they think that particularly art, ai art should literally not exist. They almost think it should be banned. They really hate it more than AI for professional, writing purposes or calculations or whatever.

They do not want AI art to exist because it takes money away from real artists. It's cheats because it tries to mimic real art in many cases. And they just completely, fundamentally disagree with that. And I believe they think the same about music, but their fashion is more about the art side of things.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we are touching on two points there. The first one is cheating and the second one is art. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tackle those in reverse order, if that's right, and dig more into the sort of art side of things. And, I wonder, so this is a question for you. If you are in, let's say, a supermarket, and there's music going on in the background, you might describe it as music, that kind of music, which you're not really intending to listen to, but it's there and it, creates an atmosphere or something like that.

Do, you care that music is created with AI because you're not really engaging with it, that there's no sort of notion that, oh, somebody really, they were inspecting their own soul whilst they made that? no, It's just like some nonsense going on in the background. So does the context matter?

in other words, if I'm listening, if I'm sitting down on my sofa and I'm listening, dedicated time listening to music, and I'm hearing some lyrics and, all of that, is that different from music which may be created in order to be in an elevator or a supermarket or what have you? What do you think about that?

Does the context matter for the art?

[00:14:24] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think music's a really good analogy. I'm not necessarily a big listener of what I would call vacuous pop music. one, it's very formulaic. It's written just to sell the records and not from any passion. And people have thought that wasn't real music for a long time way before ai. So is AI music any different to that?

I think that's a fair point, and I would argue that applies to art as well, because pre ai, we've always had real art that somebody has, put their heart and soul into and just say clip art or something. The sort of, nonsense art that you might put in a PowerPoint presentation or used to illustrate something.

Nobody thinks that's art. So if AI is just replicating that non-art, on the one hand, does that matter? But on the other, it was still somebody's job to create those things, even if it wasn't true art. So if we get to the jobs argument, then you could argue that's still bad.

[00:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: So that's a really interesting thing, isn't it? And, again, as you were saying that, and you've strayed into the art topic and by art in that sense, I presume you meant like visual stuff,

[00:15:36] Katie Keith: Oh, sorry. Yes.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But, I was thinking, again, the context seems to matter to me.

I don't, I haven't really given this too much thought, but let's say for example, I'm walking past the Vodafone shop on a high street in the uk and I see an ad for a, a brand new phone or something like that. And it's, trying to express how great this new phone is or something. I'm not sure that I care too much about how that image got in that window, where it came from and what have you.

But if you were to put me in the Tate Gallery or any gallery anywhere on earth where it's showing pictures, that picture doesn't belong a, no, no formula that could have created, that Vodafone picture belongs. And what I think I'm trying to say is that I would like my art to have been painfully won, to have been, the artist went through a process of struggle, failure, victory.

And certainly I think there's an element of I can't do it. There's you can do that because there's some bright spark in your head that I don't possess. But also in the case of music, and art, of course, you've laboured over many years to create the skill that enables you to do that, to play the piano chords or play the harp or pick, paint the picture with the brush and the paint and all of that.

And there's a bit of me that wants that, but I'm not sure where that boundary lies between the Vodafone ad and the art in the tape. Modern, for example. I'm not sure on that spectrum where I suddenly go, no, wait. That's not acceptable. And because of that I'm conflicted 'cause I just don't know where that line is.

And that is curious to me. 'cause I want to hate it all, but I don't think, I do hate it all. Does that make sense?

[00:17:32] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think it doesn't matter Sometimes the only way that it matters for the Vodafone ad is if you're talking about employment. And I struggle with that argument as well. We're not discussing that yet. But I think that things change and you need to change what your skills are sometimes to become a prompter or whatever.

But, there's been lots of times in history when machines were invented, like the industrial revolution, people had to maybe stop farming so much and join the factories. Not very nice example 'cause no one wants to work in a factory, but the labour force has changed throughout history. so some jobs are lost, but others can be created.

[00:18:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that, that is really interesting. The, thing about the, actually, do you know what, I'll come back to that in a minute. We'll talk about jobs in a moment. 'cause I feel I wanna get through this cheating bit first. and, and I get that as well. I still feel if I see somebody do something with ai, I don't know, they write a prompt, write me an email, explaining to my boss why I'm gonna be 15 minutes late, I'm on the train, and they hit go and then they send whatever is spat out by that.

Or let's say AI coding or what have you. There is a little bit of me which thinks, that's a weird shortcut. Why? Again, I suppose it goes back to the art. Why are you not learning the skill so that a, you can pick up the problems when they inevitably occur. And I guess it's a little bit like the mediaeval farmer who suddenly, not mediaeval.

Let's go into I don't know the, 1890s or something like that. When the tractor came along. You can imagine some guy in a field with his hoe hoeing, and then he looks over the hedge and he is my, my rival farmer over there, or my neighbour, he's got a tractor that's cheating. He's not allowed to do that.

That's like taking the labour and making it a 10th of what I'm having to do over here with my hoe. And so these kind of things definitely come around in history. The problem that I think we've got is that there's been no point in history where our intelligence has been surpassed. So for example, the industrial revolution, everybody could retreat to blue collar, white collar work because we still have this vanguard of, no machine, no big metal machine, which moves a loom or turns a cog or whatever.

It may do it, it can't think. But now we're in this era where, we have all the machines, Braun has gone, humans have lost that battle. And now we are fast losing our capacity to be the most intelligent thing in the room. And once we've lost the battle for intelligence, I don't know, I don't know what, where's the hill that we go to stand on at that point.

So this idea that we'll create a, whole new line of work, I'm not sure that holds, it'd be interesting to hear what you think about that.

[00:20:41] Katie Keith: It's hard to imagine what will be happening five or 10 years or whatever. At the moment, we have not reached a GI. It's very debatable whether we ever will, where it's fully as intelligent and right now it really needs a human guide to do anything good, whichever field you're working in. You need to prompt it properly and check it and edit it and all of that stuff.

And that's why we're overrun with AI slop because people think they can just publish whatever the AI does without human input. And that's why we're getting these horrible YouTube videos where you can tell that the script is just written by ai. I'm so sensitive to that, it just annoys me.

[00:21:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh Lord,

[00:21:21] Katie Keith: when it's, even when it's read out by a human, they have clearly used AI for the script and it makes it unwatchable.

So I think that, right now anyway, you still need humans to guide the AI to get good results. And to pick up what you were saying about the whole tractor analogy, I suppose we need to think about what is the goal of our work. I would argue that with farming, the goal of our work was to produce as much food as possible, as efficiently as possible.

Therefore, tractor is a good thing, which is why art is such an interesting analogy, because that is not about efficiency. The output is the creativity, not what the product at the end is. Coding is more like a tractor where you want a software product as high quality and as efficiently as possible so that you can achieve more from your work overall.

So that's why I would draw that distinction.

[00:22:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. And I can totally grab hold of that. There's something very, let's say, quite sterile about coding or that kind of thing, tractors, coding, that kind of thing. Whereas there's something a little bit more difficult to grab hold of something beautiful and wonderful about the artistic side of things.

Okay. Let's get into the whole job thing then quickly, and let's use music as an example, because I think this might be something that comes back to bite us in the future. and that is, we've now got AI being really credible at creating m and honestly, if you'd have asked me this question five years ago, one of the things that I thought would never, ever happen in my lifetime was that, any kind of machine would be able to create a song.

I genuinely thought that was some Rubicon that would never get crossed. And then here we are, the year 2026, it's oh yeah, you could do that. It's easy, and, the, and also how surprisingly quick, quickly, we all adapted to that being normal five years ago. no. Can't happen now. Oh, yeah.

it's a quarter of a sense over there at, OpenAI, you can get some music made no problem. And we all just treat that as normal. But the, but the point that I wanted to make was in, in that whole enterprise of making songs incredibly cheap to make, we, will remove, we have removed, we are removing that job as an industry.

And so this is quite dear to my heart because there are people in my family who wish to work in the music industry and, if you weren't a successful sort of rock band or band that could do touring or what have you, there was always some fallback work that you could do in the meantime to make sure that you were solvent.

And that would be things like, I don't know, you create music for, commercials or you create music for TV or film or radio or something like that. And, it's not, necessarily the, kind of music you would maybe wish to create, but it pays the bills. I'm imagining that as an industry is just gone.

where, the supermarket needs that music or the elevator needs that music. Why would you pay a human being to do it if good enough at one US cent is acceptable and so that industry gets hollowed out, those jobs no longer exist. There's no opportunity for people to come in because there simply isn't that kind of work.

There's only so many bands that can go on tour in a year and actually make money, and we're faced with this future where that industry collapses and then map that in the future to almost every other industry. WordPress, plugin developer, WordPress theme designer, and so on and so on. That really starts to worry me because I think we're going into this whole thing with our eyes a bit closed, and so there's no question there, but I wondered if you had thoughts on what I just said.

[00:25:25] Katie Keith: Yeah, it's a tricky one. one thing I think about quite a lot is that whenever humans in the past have invented time-saving technologies, it has not really brought them much time. Example would be domestic appliances, which largely enabled women to go out to work and how so they had even less time than when they were washing their clothes by hand.

And each time we use the extra time that we have got. I can say that with my own work, I probably have 10 x to my output with ai, but I'm working the same or more because I now have so many ideas that I want to do. And all this extra stuff is possible. I'm not just sat on a beach despite living near the beach.

I am working just as hard because I believe I can achieve more. So certainly a lot of jobs have already been lost with ai, but that's not necessarily universal. An example would be, I think it was Clickup that recently let go a large number of their staff, but they're actually spending more overall.

It, was a, it was an adjustment. So the people that are making like 10 x or a hundred x output increases with ai, they are saying we can pay you, a million dollar salary. In some cases they're actually planning to pay their people more, but that fundamentally changes the type of work that employers are willing to pay for.

And it certainly get rid, gets rid of some jobs particularly, and this affects young people, the lower end jobs that require less skill, which is more of a threat to them.

[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that low end, like I'm imagining a ladder, and at the bottom is the ground where the ladder's, firmly planted and at the top is the top of the ladder. And that's like where you want to get to by the end of your career. And each step is a step toward that. and it feels like AI fundamentally knocks out the bottom three or four wrongs because those kind of entry level jobs, certainly for development in the WordPress space, they disappear.

And so if they've disappeared, the agencies get hollowed out because we can get the ai or more senior people can do the, the AI thing. So those rungs of the ladder disappear. And then in the future, the people who are now children rock up and, okay, where do I begin? where's the beginning?

Where's the first rung on the career ladder? that ship sailed in the year 2025, at some point. And so that really, that, I think is real. obviously we're, we are in the period where we're imagining that to be real, and I can't prove that's gonna happen. But the idea that click op, that was a really interesting example, the idea that click op have got rid of a load of people and they've spun it as, we're gonna pay a few people a million dollars.

Let's see if they actually pay people a million dollars, shall we? Let's see if any of that actually happens, or if they, simply don't. But that whole career ladder thing, what do you think about that? root it in your business, are you gonna be getting AI to do the development work in the future that a junior person might have done?

So what I'm basically asking is AI gonna supplant some of the work that you would have had humans do?

[00:28:50] Katie Keith: My approach at the moment is that I expect my humans to do more with ai to achieve more, to be more efficient, to basically produce more software features more quickly than if they were doing it by hand. And I'm making that more and more of an expectation that they have to work in that way. Like to use the farming analogy, why would a farmer a farm owner be willing to pay somebody to plant to use the hoe when they had a tractor that they provided?

so I'm getting more to the stage where I don't want to pay for the old ways 'cause it's less efficient. I am not planning to get rid of people. I want to achieve more in order to grow the business faster.

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's interesting. Okay. That's a different calculus. Slightly, but subtly different. Okay. And in terms of the efficiency bit, you, mentioned that, you can do let's say 10 x what you could do before, but I suppose the problem is, so can everybody else, and if everybody else can do 10 x what you did before, there's, you are not more efficient than anybody.

Everybody's just equally as efficient, but they're using ai and so we get onto this sort of treadmill that nobody can get off, which is okay, we've now gotta pay all the AI companies, all this money. We've gotta be using ai. It's completely inevitable. And there's a bit of me, which kind of wishes that humans as a whole would just go, can we just do a bit less, we really would to have four days off a week and work three days a week.

That would be great. there's enough efficiency out there to do things like that. And yet we're all in a mad scramble, aren't we? Because we live in a competitive world and we see company X over there deploying AI yesterday, and we haven't even thought about it. let's get on the AI bandwagon that I think is a little bit of humanity that we've allowed to be, how to describe it, hijacked by the billionaires.

And they're very effective marketing, let's put it that way. What do you think about that? That we simply crave to be more efficient. And if everybody craves that efficiency, we're all headed for an early grave because we'll never stop. there's no end in sight for that efficiency drive.

[00:31:07] Katie Keith: Yeah, that is true. But if you don't, then you're left

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: And Right.

[00:31:11] Katie Keith: like you get the choice. so that is a dilemma I tweeted yesterday, about how I feel like I am 10 x more productive and yet I am not working any less because there's just I so much I want to do now. I know what's possible. Just like I said a minute ago, somebody replied and said, have you 10 x your profits?

I'm like, no, my profits are down actually because, it's interestingly, and this is not really a coincidence, all of this AI stuff has coincided with a decline in the, probably the WordPress space. Certainly a big proportion of WordPress products have declined. That is largely due to threats from AI for various reasons.

And so it is not like we are seeing massive growth. maybe AI have in our own businesses has slowed the decline that we would otherwise have had. But I'm not making more money than before ai.

[00:32:12] Nathan Wrigley: Here's an interesting thought, right? let this one sink in. About six months ago, I'd say. So it was just before Christmas. I interviewed a guy called Andy Bell. Now, I dunno if you've come across Andy Bell, but Andy Bell runs a very successful, web development studio. He used to work with WordPress.

He's now no longer using WordPress, he is he's like an Alister. His list of clients is insane. And he decided at some point, I think it was 2024, late 2024, there was no bit of his business which was gonna touch AI at all. So if you wanted him to use ai, he wasn't gonna work with you. If you use AI in your business, he won't work with you.

and that's a very, how to describe it. That's a very opinionated hill to stand on. And for a whole year or thereabouts, I'm probably misremembering this story. For a whole year, this became a real struggle and the business declined. And then he announced it on social media, which he hadn't done before.

He was just doing this all quietly in the background. He said, this is the position of our agency. we're not gonna touch any AI or anything like that. Okay? Now he's busier than he's ever been because there are enough people out there willing to open their wallet to have nothing to do with ai.

So what do you make of that? is there any bit of you which would embrace something like that and go back and say, we're the WordPress co plugin company that will never use ai, that will only employ humans, that won't even work with people that use ai. Andy has pulled it off, but I wonder if Andy's unique.

[00:34:02] Katie Keith: I think it's highly likely that there will be a backlash about AI in certain contexts. I'm particularly hoping there'll be a backlash regarding AI in YouTube videos because like I said, that really annoys me. And so if, and I know some people, like my husband, even if he detects that a YouTube video is a script, is AI or something, he'll just stop watching immediately.

I'm a bit less principle 'cause it annoys me. But if it's an interesting topic, then I'll just sit there, see thing for a

[00:34:33] Nathan Wrigley: again, isn't it?

[00:34:34] Katie Keith: Yeah. but some people will refuse to watch. I, have actually put comments on YouTube videos saying that I found this very difficult to watch because you used AI for your scripts, to hopefully feedback.

But I think there might be a wider backlash against ai. Art is probably gonna be the first one, but possibly people will use it as a badge, a selling point. I know that Kevin Gary from Etch recently put some, a little badge on the his site to say hand coded not using ai. And actually that caused some controversy on Twitter and people were saying to him, why does it matter if you used ai?

The point is the outcome, and the quality and all of that. But there is this movement. we are looking at making our own website more human. For example, we, I've just signed off a design to put pictures of team members at the top of our

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.

[00:35:29] Katie Keith: because everything's so faceless these days.

So even though, sure, we use AI in our work in a hopefully appropriate way where we check it properly and all of that and use professional developers to guide the ai, we are a company with real people behind it and we want our customers to know that. So I think there might be a kind of a more organic movement on its way where we need to show our authenticity and that will attract customers.

[00:35:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I dunno if you accidentally used the word organic there, but that was the perfect analogy because can you remember, like when you were a kid and I was a kid, that the whole kind of organic movement and environmentally friendly products movement began, you could suddenly, for the first time ever, you could buy like washing powder that the credentials of which were, it's putting less chemicals into the environment and, washing up liquid to do your pots and pans and things like that.

and it was considerably more expensive. And yet people bought it because they understood that wider context of, you know what, I'm gonna be a good citizen of planet Earth. I'm gonna do the right thing by the entire planet. I think that maybe what Kevin's doing and what you are beginning with your website, I think there's something in that you've done an incredible job.

Like you personally, you have done an incredible job of making yourself No, and it feels like there's, a, there. You could totally leverage that. it's me, it's Katie, I'm doing these things. This is the business that I run, and I wonder if that kind of thing is gonna be much more effective in the future.

like building up that personal brand, shooting the video of you doing a thing, watching your team, shooting videos of your team, the real face on the website and things like that. I can't say for certain that will win out against the massive productivity gains, but I really hope it does. I, really hope there's a future in which being authentic and being, not anti ai, but just not using AI has a fighting chance.

[00:37:37] Katie Keith: Yeah. Yeah. whether or not you use it, there does seem to be something about, people want to know the real person. It's not just a robot. but we, one thing we haven't touched on, which also follows from the word organic is the environment. when in my, the responses to my tweet, surprisingly, the environment was only the seventh biggest concern that people thought young people had regarding ai.

But typically, you were talking about being ideological and principled when you're younger. Young people are more concerned about the environment than older people. everybody is concerned about the environment, but young people are often more passionately, so for various reasons. And so that's a factor as well.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've seen, I the problem we now face is that we live in a world where we watch things online like YouTube and what have you, and I have no idea anymore. And this is another issue we could get into. Probably there's no time for, I've no idea of the authenticity of almost anything that I'm watching anymore.

So I, I watch a, let's say a YouTube video about the latest Facebook data centre and how the water supply for the people living near that data centre has been, made impoverished because there's less water in the water itself appears to be mucky. Now, I don't know the truth of that, but let's imagine for a moment that that is true.

What, are we doing? what is that? That we allow this stuff to happen? And so I'm gonna round it off with the last point that I wrote down and the, bit that I wrote on the paper here is billionaires. and it feels to me as if an awful lot of this is being done by a very small handful of people who stand to get really incredibly wealthy off the back of this.

And you hear about them, like making provision for having some kind of catastrophic bunker somewhere so that they can escape the inevitable backlash. And it do, it does concern me that, that appropriation of all the world's capital into the hands of a few companies, that bothers me a bit as well, to be honest.

And, working in an open source project, I'm sure that the parallels can be drawn. That's not necessarily an ideal outcome. And overpromising from said billionaires as well. I dunno how many times we've heard from the founders of all of these different AI companies that it's gonna do this next year, it'll do this six months from now, it'll do this thing.

And it is oh, really? And did it do that? No, never did that. Okay, fine. I can't argue. It's brilliant. It's common in leaps and bounds. It's way more impressive than I thought it would be, but it certainly isn't what was promised. And and I'm probably glad for that, in all honesty. So I'll just throw the billionaires thing at you and maybe you want to dodge that bullet.

I don't know.

[00:40:27] Katie Keith: Yeah, they're playing a game that we can't necessarily understand the rules to. They have created something that is genuinely useful and transformative, and we can achieve things that we never could before. So we can't deny that. But a lot of what they say and what they promise and what they predict is they don't even think it's realistic.

It's all to do with the weird financial game they're playing of their infinite loop of investment without profits and all of that stuff that I don't really understand. But I think a lot of what they're saying is hype in order to get people to continue investing rather than a true prediction.

[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also it feels like a lot of people have now got the intravenous drip of AI into their, company. the company's now almost entirely reliant on ai. and whilst they don't have any actual metrics to bring to bear on this, there does seem to be this looming sort of sword of dames in the future where the prices are just suddenly gonna go up, where the investors into all the AI companies suddenly want, they wanna be repaid for the incredible amounts of money that they've given out.

And my understanding is that at some point, the cost of what we are now used to as ai, the tokens that we purchase and what have you, that will dramatically increase. But at that point, the intravenous drip is firmly in us. We're not able to pull it out. And so that also worries me that we're heading to a future that we suddenly won't be able to afford.

And the things that we've come become used to, we can no longer do. And that will be strange as well. So there we go. Yeah.

[00:42:09] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's true. that's been happening with tech for a while. Netflix would be an example where it used to be a lot cheaper and better. I think it's in that book and ification that talks about that, how they get you hooked and then they worsen the quality, increase the price. So it does seem likely that's coming for ai.

The only thing I can perceive that might potentially stop that would be competition. There is genuinely competition between different AI providers such as Anthropic and open AI and so on. And so maybe they will need to stay competitive to compete with each other.

[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. all I can say is it's uncertain times. it's a miracle that we are where we are technologically. It's an absolute marvel. Nobody can deny it, whether or not it's got the human race's best incentives at heart. I think the jury's out. I think we'll have to wait and see, but I hope we don't wait and see until it's too late.

Let's just put it that way. Katie, Keith, unless you've got any other, things that you think we missed out on, we'll knock it on the head there. thank you very much for talking to me today and, now go and reassure your daughter that everything's gonna be just fine.

[00:43:22] Katie Keith: Thanks for having me.

[00:43:23] Nathan Wrigley: You're very welcome.

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