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CN Cal Newport Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author who writes about technology, work and focus, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, A World Wit...

“No one talks to Google in complete sentences. No one says, hey, Google, I have a question about the capital of Australia. Could you please let me know what that is? No, they just type in Australia Capital Enter, right? Because we don't anthropomorphize that particular AI-based system. … The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident.”

Prof G Media · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“No one talks to Google in complete sentences. No one says, hey, Google, I have a question about the capital of Australia. Could you please let me know what that is? No, they just type in Australia Capital Enter, right? Because we don't anthropomorphize that particular AI-based system. … The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident.” — Cal Newport, Prof G Media

Newport, a computer scientist, arguing that a chatbot doesn't need to talk like a person to be useful. He says ChatGPT was never meant to be a major OpenAI product and caught the company off guard when it took off in late 2022. If courts start holding the makers liable for harms, he expects the human-sounding conversation to go.

Transcript

Prof G Media
Speaker 3

Okay.

Ed Elson

What do we know about how OpenAI and how other AI companies are handling these issues? And is that clip an accurate representation of their response?

Cal Newport

…Anthropics actual business plan. We don't really know how exactly they plan to deal with this. My personal opinion on this is that anthropomorphized chatbots is a bad idea. There's no reason why we need to talk and receive text in fluent English from a chatbot for them to be useful. The example I often give is Google. Google is an example of a tool where we interact with it to get information. No one talks to Google in complete sentences. No one says, hey, Google, I have a question about the capital of Australia. Could you please let me know what that is? No, they just type in Australia Capital Enter, right? Because we don't anthropomorphize that particular AI-based system. We just know it's a source of information. That might be where we need to go. And it's where I think we probably should go. The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident. ChatGPT was never meant to be a major product of OpenAI. That caught them off guard when it began to take off in late 2022. So if criminal liability is upheld at even the state level, which is what Florida is trying to…

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