Dr. Edward Lenert returns to Plutopia to discuss his year-long, million-word engagement with large language models and what that experience reveals about AI, thought, trust, creativity, and danger. The conversation explores AI as collaborator, sophist, orchestra, and sometimes unruly engine—capable of useful synthesis, persuasive narrative, memory, and error correction, but still dependent on human accountability. Lenert, Jon Lebkowsky, and Scoop Sweeney also examine wicked problems, AI agency, copyright and fair use, Hollywood’s fear of synthetic performers, and the political power of narrative, especially through Lenert’s concept of “political kayfabe,” where people participate in shared myths not because they are true, but because they preserve and transmit what they already feel.
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Ed Lenert:
I was working with AI, and I was talking about journalism with it. We were exchanging sentences about journalism, and I started a sentence about both sidesism. And I accidentally reached for the quote mark, but instead hit the return key. What happened next was quite extraordinary. The AI completed my thought as if I had written it. So, what I’m getting from that is that after a certain number of conversation exchanges, dialogue with the AI, the number of possibilities where a conversation can go gets continually narrowed down, and that the AI is then operating in a narrower space and is able to reach what I find to be useful conclusions because of the constraints that have been put on it by the prior words that came before it.
