Regular human being Oprah is going to teach us all about AI

Oprah is, of course, a completely regular human being—which you can tell, because we wrote only her first name just then, with complete confidence that no human being on the planet was going to fire back a confused “Well, which Oprah did you mean?” So who better to help us regular folks understand the world of artificial intelligence, which has been encroaching ever more steadily into the human experience over the last few years, then a person we are reasonably sure could get away with murdering us, or any given person reading this, with only minor consequences?

This is per Variety (not the murder part), which reports that Winfrey is set to host a primetime special for ABC, titled AI And The Future Of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special,” scheduled for September 12. During the special, Winfrey will interview Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and a number of other tech pundits and public figures, explaining how artificial intelligence will presumably make it easier for our gardeners to maintain our 42-acre estates, or generate book lists that will allow us to seize control of the entire publishing industry with a wave of our hands. Y’know, regular people stuff.

Best we can figure—on the basis that Oprah doesn’t need to do goddamn anything, because she’s Oprah—there must be a certain level of personal interest at play here, with the trailer for the special playing into the idea that Oprah has the same worries about all this stuff as the rest of us. (We can make jokes about her having the resources to hunt humans for sport, but her ability to speak to people on their level remains one of Winfrey’s great gifts as a broadcaster.) We will note that the guest list, and the slant of things in the trailer for the special, feel weirdly weighted toward how great AI is going to be once people stop using it to fuck up their homework/movie marketing campaigns, so we’ll stay nice and skeptical until the thing actually airs.