October 22, 2025 • 12 mins
Adjunct Artificial Intelligence Policy Advisor Chloe Autio joins Kevin Cirilli to talk about the rise of “AI slop” — the wave of low-quality, machine-generated content flooding our feeds. From auto-written headlines to algorithmic art, originality is being replaced by imitation. But maybe the real threat isn’t that AI is taking our jobs — it’s that we’re letting it take our imagination. Kevin and Chloe explore what “Original Intelligence” means, how artists and educators can fight back, and why staying human might be the most radical act of all.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Is artificial intelligence making thinking extinct? Is it programming our
minds to think like artificial intelligence, to think like AI
bots instead of being able to think like humans. Hello Future,
It's me keV and this is a dispatch from the
Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth. The year is twenty
(00:29):
twenty five. My name is Kevin's really, founder of MTF
dot TVs Meet the Future platform.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
My guest today advises the AI.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Companies on all of these questions on how to protect
human thought. Her name is Chloe Autio. She is an
adjunct Artificial Intelligence policy advisor. She also is an emerging
technology policy expert more than a decade of experience advising
leading organizations on technology policy and governance. Chloe, thanks so
(01:00):
much for saying hello to the future. Is AI killing
the way we think?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Hi? Kevin, Thank you so much and thanks for having me.
It's so so great to be here. AI, I would think,
is killing the way that we think. But the way
that we are interacting with or maybe over relying on AI,
maybe making our thinking capability is a little bit weaker.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Okay, So that's terrifying. So you're literally just told me
that it's making our thinking capabilities weaker. What what how
does that even compute? I mean, if we can't think
as civilizations, then we're all just going to become zombies.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Is there any good news?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I mean, I try to be an optimist about this stuff,
but if you're saying that we can't think because AI
is thinking for us, that's not good, Chlo, that's not good.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It is not good. It's really not good. And I'll
be more specific, care probably more specific. What I think
a lot of people are concerned about when we're talking
about AI replacing thinking is that AI is really diluting curiosity.
So if we're treating or using AI as a shortcut,
that really eliminates the struggle around creating or having unique
(02:08):
original thought. The friction that happens in our brains and
our experiences that we're coming up with new ideas, that
is going away the more and more that we rely
on AI to produce these initial thoughts or you know,
quickly turn to chat GPT to answer any questions that
might come our way. So it's not just the thinking
(02:30):
that is being sort of strained perhaps or limited by
how we're over relying on AI in some situations, but
it's really sometimes the curiosity too, and we really need
that curiosity to support and enable that thinking.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
So there's a great article in Time magazine that just
came out. I love this article. Chat GPT may be
eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new miit study.
Let's dive into the study. The study divided fifty four
subjects eighteen to thirty nine year olds from Boston area,
so whatever your thoughts are on Boston, I'm from outside
(03:06):
of Philly. And they divided them into three groups, and
they asked them to write several SAT essays using chatchpt
as well as Google and Nothing at All respectively. So
that's not good if you were in the nothing at
All category. I remember when I took the SATs. I
had a lot of anxiety, but I had to remember
the books. But the researchers used an EEG to record
(03:30):
the writer's brain activity across the thirty two regions of
the brain, and they found that one of the three groups,
the chat gypt users this is wild folks, the CHATCHYPT
users and this is what Chloe's talking about, had the
lowest brain engagement and quote, according to the study, consistently
underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels end quote. So
(03:55):
over the course of several months, chatchipt users got lazier
with each subsct Quinn essay, often resorting to copy and paste.
By the end of the study, Chloe, it's making us lazy.
It is making us lazy.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
It is making us a little bit lazy. And that
is exactly what I was talking about, Kevin, with that friction,
that sort of struggle that is required when we're coming
up with new ideas our brains and the neural networks
in our brains actually they get better. It's like working
out right. The more you strain a muscle, the stronger
it gets. Well, the more you struggle with thinking, the
(04:32):
more you're cognitive development actually improves. You get smarter by
doing hard things with your brain. And so the more
that we are not doing that, the more that students,
the more that everyone is just sort of plopping over
to chat GBT or Claude or Gemini to say, hey,
come up with this idea for this essay, or maybe
even write the essay for me. As we saw in
(04:53):
this study, the opportunity for that struggle, the opportunity for
building that muscle of curiosity and creativity and the brain
it's getting weaker. It is really really scary.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's like I always say, watching a marathon is not
like running a marathon. Watching my Philadelphia Eagles play football
is not me on the game. Okay, if you want
to go to the gym to stay in shape, you
got to go to the gym. You can't watch it
on television. It sounds like that's really the point that
you're making.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Absolutely, absolutely, and there are a lot of things that
we can do. I don't want to make it all negative.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, well give a positive because Chloe, I gotta be honest.
I heard you were an optimist of Right now I'm
thinking of myself.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I don't know if it's is yes.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Well, what I'll say, Kevin is that I think that
this is just an issue that needs more attention, and
that's why I'm so focused on it. For a long
time in Washington, people were really focused on these quote
unquote existential risks from AI, and I'm sure you've heard.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Of some of those.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
These are things like AI, you know, hijacking the nuclear
codes or becoming deceptive and sort of taking over the world.
The capabilities of AI haven't quite reached that level yet
in a way that will have raw to the material impacts,
and so when people talk about the existential risks of
AI in that context, I always try to bring them
(06:07):
back to this conversation that we're having right now, because
this is the one that impacts how we think, who
we are, how we show up in the world as humans,
and I personally think that it is more existential on
an individual and societal level than some of these sort
of terminator ideas.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
So I'm focused on it not just to be negative,
but because I think it is one of the big
issues that we need to be thinking and talking about,
particularly as AI is getting more and more integrated into
children's lives and the lives of students and professionals just
sort of everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
And what I like about the question is that it
puts you back in the driver's seat a little bit.
I mean, it allows you to really, as a human
to think, Okay, am I thinking that? Or is the
artificial intelligence telling me to think that?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Is that me? Or is that just what I'm saying?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And I think we as humans nom a millennial, I
think we sort of first got that does with social media, like.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Is that really happening? Or is that fomo?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Or is that is that what I'm seeing in the reels.
There was a study earlier this year by Chatchept and
MIT and n Gadget has a great rite up on it,
but it essentially these new studies from open Ai and
MIT Media Lab found that generally, the more time users
spend talking to Chatchipt, the lonelier they feel, which sounds
(07:25):
like a really big idea. But then there's part of
me that's like, Okay, well, if you want to feel
less lonely, go outside into the world and talk to humans,
you know what I mean. So I think that a
lot of this to your point, which I totally kind
of just had an aha moment on, is you know
that if you want to be healthy, you got to
eat your fruits and vegetables, you know what I mean.
You don't have to go on some crazy diet like
(07:47):
we all know you should probably have an apple a
day to keep the doctor away. If you want to
feel less lonely, maybe don't have a friendship with the robot.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
It seems so obvious of it, And yet here we
are and this is, as you know, like one of
the big issues that many people are talking about, including
the previous sers in general, you know, wrote a big
report about loneliness, and it wasn't just about technology and
technology's impact on exacerbating loneliness, but it was really just
about how, you know, we have a lot of social
(08:20):
institutions and disconnect in the world just generally, and so
technology has definitely played a role in that, but there
are other reasons why people are feeling disconnected. I want
to come back to really important point that you made
about the parallels between AI and social media, because it
is they are really similar. A study from I think
it was Stanford and Facebook when it was still called Facebook, gosh,
(08:43):
probably almost a decade ago now showed that when people
were getting on Facebook and just scrolling sort of lurking,
if you will, instead of posting and interact. Yeah yeah, yeah,
doom scrolling. And maybe this was even pre doom scrolling,
but just like consuming the stuff that was there instead
of sharing things about their life and getting reactions from people.
(09:04):
Even though it was on social media, those people were
also more lonely, They were less altruistic, they felt less connected.
And whether we're talking about AI or social media or
just being in the world, what we know is that
if you interact with people more, you're going to be
a happier person, and because connecting with humans is something
(09:26):
that we all really really need as humans. And so
it's just interesting, how, you know, And I think it's
important to point out that some of these problems or
these these dynamics, these themes, they come back over and
over again, whether we're talking about social media or AI.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
But that's when you're talking to these companies, when you're
advising these companies. But are they building their product with
that in mind? Or are they just trying to get
get you hooked on AI, get you hooked on the robots,
so that so that when you're talking to them, you
just become addicted to them, you know, you feel like
you have to use them to do your job. Or
because candidly, I think a lot of people would argue
(10:03):
with social media, what we saw was they were just like,
we don't you know, it's really not about you being
connected to your high school class when you drive away.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
It's about you being addicted to the product.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Right, or it began there and slowly became something else.
Because the way that incentives and the structure of our
sort of commercial society works, right, I mean, there's a
great Atlantic article. I think it was in The Atlantic
all about how we've really made this transition from social networking, right,
which is about connecting with people, to social media, which
(10:34):
is about consumption. And that consumption, to your point, is
exactly you know what is sort of like pulling us
out of the physical world and more onto the online
world where we're getting sort of absorbed by and addicted
to these technologies. To address really quickly your question about
you know, what companies are doing, most all of these
(10:54):
companies have really, you know, well trained social scientists who
are trying to figure out sort of how to not
just optimize the user experience on the platform, but also
keep people off the platform when it becomes unhealthy. Obviously,
there are some companies that prioritize this more than others.
(11:15):
But we're seeing, i think, in a really interesting way,
a new emergence of dating apps and dating relationship focused
companies that are really really focused specifically on how human
interactions with platforms can actually improve human interactions in person.
And it's probably a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah, Chloe Autio, thank you so much for coming on
the program to really talk about that and how it's
changing and everything you really help me understand so much
of that.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Chloe Autio.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
She advises the AI companies on all of these big questions,
and she's got more than executive experience really. I mean,
she's Director of Public Policy at Intel Corp. Where she
led public policy development and engagement on all of these issues.
Chloe Audio, adjunct Artificial Intelligence Policy Lives. Thanks, thank you,
Is artificial intelligence making thinking extinct? Is it programming our
minds to think like artificial intelligence, to think like AI
bots instead of being able to think like humans. Hello Future,
It's me keV and this is a dispatch from the
Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth. The year is twenty
(00:29):
twenty five. My name is Kevin's really, founder of MTF
dot TVs Meet the Future platform.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
My guest today advises the AI.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Companies on all of these questions on how to protect
human thought. Her name is Chloe Autio. She is an
adjunct Artificial Intelligence policy advisor. She also is an emerging
technology policy expert more than a decade of experience advising
leading organizations on technology policy and governance. Chloe, thanks so
(01:00):
much for saying hello to the future. Is AI killing
the way we think?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Hi? Kevin, Thank you so much and thanks for having me.
It's so so great to be here. AI, I would think,
is killing the way that we think. But the way
that we are interacting with or maybe over relying on AI,
maybe making our thinking capability is a little bit weaker.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Okay, So that's terrifying. So you're literally just told me
that it's making our thinking capabilities weaker. What what how
does that even compute? I mean, if we can't think
as civilizations, then we're all just going to become zombies.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Is there any good news?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I mean, I try to be an optimist about this stuff,
but if you're saying that we can't think because AI
is thinking for us, that's not good, Chlo, that's not good.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It is not good. It's really not good. And I'll
be more specific, care probably more specific. What I think
a lot of people are concerned about when we're talking
about AI replacing thinking is that AI is really diluting curiosity.
So if we're treating or using AI as a shortcut,
that really eliminates the struggle around creating or having unique
(02:08):
original thought. The friction that happens in our brains and
our experiences that we're coming up with new ideas, that
is going away the more and more that we rely
on AI to produce these initial thoughts or you know,
quickly turn to chat GPT to answer any questions that
might come our way. So it's not just the thinking
(02:30):
that is being sort of strained perhaps or limited by
how we're over relying on AI in some situations, but
it's really sometimes the curiosity too, and we really need
that curiosity to support and enable that thinking.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
So there's a great article in Time magazine that just
came out. I love this article. Chat GPT may be
eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new miit study.
Let's dive into the study. The study divided fifty four
subjects eighteen to thirty nine year olds from Boston area,
so whatever your thoughts are on Boston, I'm from outside
(03:06):
of Philly. And they divided them into three groups, and
they asked them to write several SAT essays using chatchpt
as well as Google and Nothing at All respectively. So
that's not good if you were in the nothing at
All category. I remember when I took the SATs. I
had a lot of anxiety, but I had to remember
the books. But the researchers used an EEG to record
(03:30):
the writer's brain activity across the thirty two regions of
the brain, and they found that one of the three groups,
the chat gypt users this is wild folks, the CHATCHYPT
users and this is what Chloe's talking about, had the
lowest brain engagement and quote, according to the study, consistently
underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels end quote. So
(03:55):
over the course of several months, chatchipt users got lazier
with each subsct Quinn essay, often resorting to copy and paste.
By the end of the study, Chloe, it's making us lazy.
It is making us lazy.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
It is making us a little bit lazy. And that
is exactly what I was talking about, Kevin, with that friction,
that sort of struggle that is required when we're coming
up with new ideas our brains and the neural networks
in our brains actually they get better. It's like working
out right. The more you strain a muscle, the stronger
it gets. Well, the more you struggle with thinking, the
(04:32):
more you're cognitive development actually improves. You get smarter by
doing hard things with your brain. And so the more
that we are not doing that, the more that students,
the more that everyone is just sort of plopping over
to chat GBT or Claude or Gemini to say, hey,
come up with this idea for this essay, or maybe
even write the essay for me. As we saw in
(04:53):
this study, the opportunity for that struggle, the opportunity for
building that muscle of curiosity and creativity and the brain
it's getting weaker. It is really really scary.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's like I always say, watching a marathon is not
like running a marathon. Watching my Philadelphia Eagles play football
is not me on the game. Okay, if you want
to go to the gym to stay in shape, you
got to go to the gym. You can't watch it
on television. It sounds like that's really the point that
you're making.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Absolutely, absolutely, and there are a lot of things that
we can do. I don't want to make it all negative.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, well give a positive because Chloe, I gotta be honest.
I heard you were an optimist of Right now I'm
thinking of myself.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I don't know if it's is yes.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Well, what I'll say, Kevin is that I think that
this is just an issue that needs more attention, and
that's why I'm so focused on it. For a long
time in Washington, people were really focused on these quote
unquote existential risks from AI, and I'm sure you've heard.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Of some of those.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
These are things like AI, you know, hijacking the nuclear
codes or becoming deceptive and sort of taking over the world.
The capabilities of AI haven't quite reached that level yet
in a way that will have raw to the material impacts,
and so when people talk about the existential risks of
AI in that context, I always try to bring them
(06:07):
back to this conversation that we're having right now, because
this is the one that impacts how we think, who
we are, how we show up in the world as humans,
and I personally think that it is more existential on
an individual and societal level than some of these sort
of terminator ideas.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
So I'm focused on it not just to be negative,
but because I think it is one of the big
issues that we need to be thinking and talking about,
particularly as AI is getting more and more integrated into
children's lives and the lives of students and professionals just
sort of everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
And what I like about the question is that it
puts you back in the driver's seat a little bit.
I mean, it allows you to really, as a human
to think, Okay, am I thinking that? Or is the
artificial intelligence telling me to think that?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Is that me? Or is that just what I'm saying?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And I think we as humans nom a millennial, I
think we sort of first got that does with social media, like.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Is that really happening? Or is that fomo?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Or is that is that what I'm seeing in the reels.
There was a study earlier this year by Chatchept and
MIT and n Gadget has a great rite up on it,
but it essentially these new studies from open Ai and
MIT Media Lab found that generally, the more time users
spend talking to Chatchipt, the lonelier they feel, which sounds
(07:25):
like a really big idea. But then there's part of
me that's like, Okay, well, if you want to feel
less lonely, go outside into the world and talk to humans,
you know what I mean. So I think that a
lot of this to your point, which I totally kind
of just had an aha moment on, is you know
that if you want to be healthy, you got to
eat your fruits and vegetables, you know what I mean.
You don't have to go on some crazy diet like
(07:47):
we all know you should probably have an apple a
day to keep the doctor away. If you want to
feel less lonely, maybe don't have a friendship with the robot.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
It seems so obvious of it, And yet here we
are and this is, as you know, like one of
the big issues that many people are talking about, including
the previous sers in general, you know, wrote a big
report about loneliness, and it wasn't just about technology and
technology's impact on exacerbating loneliness, but it was really just
about how, you know, we have a lot of social
(08:20):
institutions and disconnect in the world just generally, and so
technology has definitely played a role in that, but there
are other reasons why people are feeling disconnected. I want
to come back to really important point that you made
about the parallels between AI and social media, because it
is they are really similar. A study from I think
it was Stanford and Facebook when it was still called Facebook, gosh,
(08:43):
probably almost a decade ago now showed that when people
were getting on Facebook and just scrolling sort of lurking,
if you will, instead of posting and interact. Yeah yeah, yeah,
doom scrolling. And maybe this was even pre doom scrolling,
but just like consuming the stuff that was there instead
of sharing things about their life and getting reactions from people.
(09:04):
Even though it was on social media, those people were
also more lonely, They were less altruistic, they felt less connected.
And whether we're talking about AI or social media or
just being in the world, what we know is that
if you interact with people more, you're going to be
a happier person, and because connecting with humans is something
(09:26):
that we all really really need as humans. And so
it's just interesting, how, you know, And I think it's
important to point out that some of these problems or
these these dynamics, these themes, they come back over and
over again, whether we're talking about social media or AI.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
But that's when you're talking to these companies, when you're
advising these companies. But are they building their product with
that in mind? Or are they just trying to get
get you hooked on AI, get you hooked on the robots,
so that so that when you're talking to them, you
just become addicted to them, you know, you feel like
you have to use them to do your job. Or
because candidly, I think a lot of people would argue
(10:03):
with social media, what we saw was they were just like,
we don't you know, it's really not about you being
connected to your high school class when you drive away.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
It's about you being addicted to the product.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Right, or it began there and slowly became something else.
Because the way that incentives and the structure of our
sort of commercial society works, right, I mean, there's a
great Atlantic article. I think it was in The Atlantic
all about how we've really made this transition from social networking, right,
which is about connecting with people, to social media, which
(10:34):
is about consumption. And that consumption, to your point, is
exactly you know what is sort of like pulling us
out of the physical world and more onto the online
world where we're getting sort of absorbed by and addicted
to these technologies. To address really quickly your question about
you know, what companies are doing, most all of these
(10:54):
companies have really, you know, well trained social scientists who
are trying to figure out sort of how to not
just optimize the user experience on the platform, but also
keep people off the platform when it becomes unhealthy. Obviously,
there are some companies that prioritize this more than others.
(11:15):
But we're seeing, i think, in a really interesting way,
a new emergence of dating apps and dating relationship focused
companies that are really really focused specifically on how human
interactions with platforms can actually improve human interactions in person.
And it's probably a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah, Chloe Autio, thank you so much for coming on
the program to really talk about that and how it's
changing and everything you really help me understand so much
of that.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Chloe Autio.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
She advises the AI companies on all of these big questions,
and she's got more than executive experience really. I mean,
she's Director of Public Policy at Intel Corp. Where she
led public policy development and engagement on all of these issues.
Chloe Audio, adjunct Artificial Intelligence Policy Lives. Thanks, thank you,
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