Joanna Stern’s “Great Gen AI Experiment”

If you're experimenting with AI—or want to but aren't sure where to start—award-winning tech journalist Joanna Stern spent a year doing it so you don't have to. Her new book, I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything, releases on May 12, and it's as useful as it is funny: Stern tries everything from AI health coaches to robot massages and an intimate relationship with a chatbot, and reports back honestly on what actually works.

The following is a (slightly condensed) excerpt from the book, written as a mock research paper. —SM

TITLE: The Effect of AI Search on One Subject’s Information Diet

RESEARCH QUESTIONS: What happens when you let artificial intelligence curate 100 percent of your information intake for a year? Will you become smarter or more ignorant? And who’s really in control when AI controls what you know?METHODOLOGY: Hi, I’m the subject. It’s me. I handed over all my web searching and information discovery tasks to AI for the year. No Google or any other search engine. Only ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools could answer my questions or suggest what I should learn about. I even changed the default search engines in my web browsers to those AI tools.

DATA COLLECTION: At first, it felt strange to stop googling things—a bit like walking down a paused escalator. But it quickly became second nature to just get “answers” instead of a list of blue links. I replaced Google altogether for questions like these:

• KIDS’ QUESTIONS. “Can turtles fart?” (Answer: They pass gas through their cloaca—a multipurpose opening for waste and reproduction.)
• MEDICAL ADVICE. See the previous Dr. GPT log.
• RECIPES AND COOKING. “Provide a simple meatball recipe, including my secret ingredient: ketchup.”
• HOME ADVICE. “What temperature should the kids’ rooms be at?” (Answer: 70°F, and “whatever feels cozy.” Not 74°F just because it’s cold outside. We own sweatshirts. We own socks.)
• RANDOM LIFE ADMIN. “From “How often should tires be rotated?” to “How many ounces in a cup?” (Answers: Every five to seven thousand miles, and eight ounces, respectively.)
• WORK RESEARCH. “Find me a list of companies working on AI and radiology.”
• TRAVEL. “Best day to fly to Chicago for cheap.” (Answer: Tuesdays, with returns on Fridays.)
• WEIRDLY SPECIFIC HOW-TOS. “How to remove dog scratches from a leather couch.” (Answer: Buy leather conditioner. Trim pup’s nails.)
• NEWS AND CURRENT EVENTS. “Summarize the latest news about tariffs.”

CONCLUSION: I went back to Google only for maps and finding a business’ contact information. But when it came to general knowledge, AI became my default.

The real magic of AI search was the multimodal part—combining audio, images, video, and text in one query. I lost track of how many times I pointed my phone’s camera at something in the house and said out loud, “How do I fix this?”

But that doesn’t mean AI is a magical oracle. One time, I aimed ChatGPT at my garage door, which was struggling to open. Using the video feed, it confidently diagnosed a faulty sensor. Spoiler: That wasn’t the problem. There was no fault sensor. It was a broken spring, which I discovered only after calling an actual garage expert, one with a ladder and opposable thumbs.

That’s the main downside: the hallucinations. As we learned in the Non-Boring AI Glossary, large language models have a bad habit of confidently making things up, including citations, dates, entire events that never happened. They don’t actually know the truth; they just predict what words are likely to come next, which sometimes means inventing details out of thin air.

AI never made something up so egregiously that I went and did something truly unhinged or believed something completely bonkers. But then again, I was often checking its work.

The other downside of using AI search is that I don’t visit primary sources as often. That’s especially worrisome for me as a journalist. What if people skip my work entirely and settle for the quick summary of it? For me, though, going back to sources is second nature. Big decisions or deeper info means double-checking facts; that’s just part of my daily life now. And even with that extra step, using AI is still faster than slogging through a dozen blue links and pop-up ads to get what you need.

FUTURE AREAS OF RESEARCH: Unlike the forthcoming Great Gen AI Experiments (one for every season, like a deranged Hallmark movie series), this one stuck.

My attempts to replace creative works—music, books, and so on—with generative AI didn’t exactly endure, but swapping out search for chatbots? That’s a habit I’ll keep well beyond this year.

From the book: I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joanna Stern. Copyright © 2026 by Joanna Stern. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Bio: Joanna Stern is an Emmy-winning tech journalist and author of I AM NOT A ROBOT: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, about her year letting AI take over her life. She is the founder of New Things, where she publishes newsletters, videos and more about consumer technology. She’s also NBC News’ chief tech analyst, regularly appearing on TODAY, NBC Nightly News and beyond. Stern spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, where her personal tech columns and videos made her one of the most-watched voices in consumer technology. Her 2021 documentary E-Ternal won an Emmy for Outstanding Science, Technology or Environmental Coverage. She is also a two-time Gerald Loeb Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She frequently appears on radio and podcasts, including The Vergecast. Previously, she was a technology editor at ABC News and The Verge. She lives in New Jersey with her wife, their two sons, a dog and more gadgets than a Best Buy.