tech journalism

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Google removed the ability to generate images of people from its Gemini chatbot. We talk about why, and about the brewing culture war over artificial intelligence. Then, did Kara Swisher start “Hard Fork”? We clear up some podcast drama and ask about her new book, “Burn Book.” And finally, the legal expert Daphne Keller tells us how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on the most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, and what Star Trek and soy boys have to do with it.

Today’s guests:

• Kara Swisher, tech journalist and Casey Newton’s former landlord
• Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center

Additional Reading: 

• Google CEO calls AI tool’s controversial responses ‘completely unacceptable’
• Kara Swisher Is Not Here to Make Friends in Her New Memoir
• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher
• Daphne Keller’s FAQs About the NetChoice Cases at the Supreme Court

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. 
Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

When Brian Lam walked away from a high-profile job at Gizmodo to launch a product review blog, he had no plan for how it would make money. He just knew what he wanted: a user-friendly site with reviews that could be read in a few minutes, with the best products clearly listed, all backed up by meticulous research. But when he launched The Wirecutter in 2011, Brian’s business partners worried that the site’s posts were too brief and too infrequent to build an audience on the web, where clickbait was king. Eventually, Brian’s targeted approach paid off; users trusted his recommendations, he hired more writers, and traffic and revenue grew. In 2016, The Wirecutter was purchased for $30 million by the New York Times, where it was rebranded simply as Wirecutter.

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