Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?

Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.

Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.

And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.

And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.; The New York Times, August 4, 2026

 BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times; I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

"This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age...

A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance."