I Am Not a Robot: My Year of Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything

Tech journalist Stern debuts with an entertaining exploration of AI’s impact on everyday life. Stern spent a year using as many AI tools as possible, enlisting the technology to monitor her health, provide career advice, plan meals, and travel. The results alternate between hilarious, hopeful, and foreboding. On vacation in Phoenix, Stern, her wife, and their two young children agreed to be chauffeured by self-driving cars wherever they went. On one excursion, the Waymo driving Stern and her seven-year-old son braked sharply and veered within a few feet of a concrete wall, apparently reacting to Stern’s videographer, who was leaning out the window of another car. “It was the only time I’ve ever been genuinely scared in one of these cars,” Stern says. Elsewhere, she reflects on enrolling in a college class, where she quickly learned she could get good grades while putting in minimal effort thanks to ChatGPT, sparking worry about the technology’s impact on critical thinking. Still, Stern acknowledges that without the editing, researching, data processing, and interviewing assistance provided by AI, writing this book would have taken her at least six months longer. Stern’s balanced, clear-eyed assessments and crisp, funny prose (“I was teetering on the edge of the AI-byss”) make this stand out among the growing crowd of books on AI. Illus. (May)