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SO Sarah O'Keefe On Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

“And so we have to be more interesting and fundamentally less professional as writers in order to prove that we're real human beings.”

Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer · AI Builders · November 2026

“And so we have to be more interesting and fundamentally less professional as writers in order to prove that we're real human beings.” — Sarah O'Keefe, Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

Context

She had just described writing her first post-AI book: editors now leave in over-the-top lines, because taking them out makes the text look machine-written. This was her conclusion about how AI is changing human writing.

Listen to the episode → More from Sarah O'Keefe → More AI Builders quotes →

Transcript

Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer Around 43:50 into the episode
Sarah O'Keefe

…but I don't think that's necessarily a pro use. That's just a really obvious usage. If you speak multiple languages, ask it the same question in multiple languages and notice that or ask it to translate, not translate, but answer in that language and notice that the answers are different.

Matt Stauffer

Fascinating. I've never. All right. Is AI going to ruin the world?

Sarah O'Keefe

So it is September 2026. So far, no. Ask again next week or maybe later this afternoon. I think that the LLMs know. Large language models are just large language models. They are not that big a deal. And it's not that difficult to manage an autocomplete engine. The people that are operating them that are using them in irresponsible ways are a big problem. Should you glue an inference engine onto like a bioweapons lab? No, you should not. Are they going to? Almost certainly yes. Am I happy about it? No.

Matt Stauffer

Yep. Yep. All right. And your last question is, what is the most controversial take you have about AI?

Sarah O'Keefe

I think that people really wanted an easy button and they turned off their brains when AI came out. There's like, oh, this is great. This will save me a pile of money. And now, because of the way publicly traded companies work, it is a, it's not quite a Ponzi scheme because there's definitely some…

Matt Stauffer

I really shot myself in the foot not being supposed to answer when you guys get these questions because it's some of the best stuff. First lemming to step back from the cliff. Wow. Okay. Well, it'll all be fine. Okay. There you go.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

“The research says that it takes as few as 50 or 100 documents to poison a public-facing AI with bad information. So the implication is I should be able to get good information in there. We'll turn that to good. But it's a lot of work and it's very hard to control.” — Sarah O'Keefe, Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer “It is actually quite difficult to get the AI to say, I don't have that information. That information doesn't exist. That scenario doesn't exist. So what it's going to do is invent an answer, right? Because it's designed to produce content. That's what it does.” — Sarah O'Keefe, Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer