[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SIMON: So let me just—we are recording. Good.

LULU: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller, and today producer Simon Adler brings us a story from ...

SIMON: My mother's living room ...

LULU: [laughs] Okay.

SIMON: ... watching the television with her.

LULU: This is what we love in our reporting. They scour the Earth, far and wide.

SIMON: Oh, yeah. Going to unknown ...

LULU: [laughs]

SIMON: ... exciting places like the shag-carpeted living room of my mother. No, and so we're sitting there and, you know, my mother's hearing, it's not what it once was. And so, like most nights, she was watching with the closed captioning on.

LULU: Oh. Absolutely same.

SIMON: All right. Right on. Anyhow, I think it was the local news.

LULU: Mm-hmm?

SIMON: Literally talking about things like filling up potholes.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: And as I'm sitting on the floor sort of bored out of my gourd, I have one of those moments where a genuine question popped into my head.

LULU: Hmm!

SIMON: Which was: Those closed captions on the screen, you know, how did those get there?

LULU: Like, is there someone in Sandusky typing as fast as they can?

SIMON: Exactly. Right. Like, is it a human sitting in an office?

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: Or—and this was sort of my real question—like, is this one of those jobs that AI has already taken and replaced us?

LULU: Okay. Okay. Did you have a hunch?

SIMON: I thought it was probably AI.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: Just based on my own real-world experience.

LULU: Based on life right now.

SIMON: Right.

LULU: Yes.

SIMON: And I also thought then that, you know, like, one quick question to ChatGPT and we're gonna get to the bottom of this.

LULU: Right.

SIMON: Turns out that was not—that was not the case, here.

LULU: Hmm!

SIMON: As I looked into this—yeah, I found it was cacophonous in a way I didn't expect. I found ladies swearing at their televisions, students demanding to be heard, and maybe oddest of all, a whole chorus of voices offering us a path through this strange future we seem to be walking into.

LULU: Okay!

[NEWS CLIP: This news broadcast is being closed captioned.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Subtitles, called closed captioning ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Access to television programs.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It puts words into your world.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Closed captioned.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Closed captioned.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: See what's being said.]

SIMON: So ...

BRENDA KELLY FRY: Greg is signing. I will be speaking and not signing.

SIMON: It seems like the best place to start is, you know, all the way back at the beginning.

GREG HLIBOK: One, two, three, four, five. Sign. That's great. Okay.

SIMON: Great.

SIMON: With this guy.

GREG HLIBOK: My name is Greg Hlibok.

SIMON: And his interpreter.

BRENDA KELLY FRY: Brenda Kelly Fry. Certified interpreter for the deaf.

SIMON: Today, Greg is an attorney with a quaff of silver hair, thin-rimmed glasses. He was born deaf in Queens, New York.

GREG HLIBOK: Less than, I don't know, one and a half miles from the New York Mets stadium near the airport. And I come from a deaf family—my parents and two brothers and one sister.

SIMON: And growing up, he says, you know, during the daytime, he felt pretty darned integrated into the larger hearing world.

GREG HLIBOK: I had neighbors who were hearing, and we all associated with each other, communicated with each other. We stayed outside all day until the dinner bell rang.

SIMON: But in the evening, you know, when all good Americans turned on their TVs, he was not.

GREG HLIBOK: It was pointless to watch except for maybe football and baseball games. Because there was basically no captioning. We'd have to look at the TV guide and, you know, they had a symbol that said CC.

SIMON: News broadcasts, the occasional special. That was about it. And it very well might have stayed that way if it hadn't been for Greg.

GREG HLIBOK: [laughs] I guess you could say so.

SIMON: And so, fast forwarding. It is the spring of 1988 on the campus of Gallaudet University. The campus is beautiful and gated. The students are in lots of denim and oversized sweatshirts. I mean, it is your standard-looking college, with one exception.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: It was nearly a hundred percent deaf. In fact, it was basically the only four-year liberal arts college for deaf students in the world.

SIMON: This is disability rights attorney Karen Peltz Strauss.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: I was on the staff of Gallaudet's National Center for Law and Deafness at the time.

SIMON: She is fluent in sign language. And in 1988, on campus, she says tensions were high because ...

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: The position for Gallaudet's president opened up. And until that time, Gallaudet, it had always had a hearing president.

SIMON: Yeah. In its 124-year history, all of them were hearing.

LULU: Missed opportunity in the leadership department.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: Oh, absolutely. And so the students on the campus said, "You have got to choose a deaf president." And the faculty said the same and the staff said the same.

SIMON: And according to Greg ...

GREG HLIBOK: I was a junior. I was in my junior year.

SIMON: ... who was actually the student body president as all this was going down. He and his classmates ...

GREG HLIBOK: We were very optimistic.

SIMON: Because of the three finalists for the job, two of them, Harvey Corson and I. King Jordan, they were deaf. And the third candidate, a woman by the name of Elisabeth Zinser, not only was she not deaf, she didn't even know sign language.

GREG HLIBOK: No.

LULU: Okay, okay.

GREG HLIBOK: I mean, Zinser had no support on campus.

SIMON: And so March 6, 1988 ...

[NEWS CLIP: In fact, students here behind me have been waiting all day outside the gates of Gallaudet University, while inside, the board of trustees have been meeting trying to pick a new president.]

GREG HLIBOK: We were all gathered in the gym, in the fieldhouse, waiting for them to make the announcement. And around, say, seven o'clock ...

SIMON: It happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We picked Dr. Elisabeth Ann Zinser as the seventh president of Gallaudet.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: No!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Because she is a very talented educator.]

LULU: Oh, no. Oh, no.

SIMON: Yeah. They went with the hearing lady.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Elisabeth Ann Zinser. She is the new president of Gallaudet University.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Dr. Elisabeth Zinser, who is neither deaf nor able to speak sign language.]

LULU: Why? Did they say why?

SIMON: Well, at least one of the explanations was pretty darn ugly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The university trustees chairman defended the selection, saying deaf people are not ready to function in the hearing world.]

SIMON: And the students—well, they go berserk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (Student shouting)]

GREG HLIBOK: We were all upset.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (Student shouting)]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We feel damn angry about this. It makes me upset.]

GREG HLIBOK: Very upset.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We've been ready for 124 years.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah!]

GREG HLIBOK: We just felt like they—somebody just slapped us in the face.

SIMON: Things were escalating ...

GREG HLIBOK: Everybody was on the streets.

SIMON: ... and escalating ...

GREG HLIBOK: I mean, people were throwing things.

SIMON: ... and escalating.

GREG HLIBOK: Then I told them, "Stop. Do not damage, do not vandalize anything. No violence, please." Because I knew that many people don't have the experience of seeing deaf people—we were sending the wrong impression. We were sending the wrong message. Sometimes, you know, the first impression is the lasting impression, so I didn't want the hearing people seeing us as a wild bunch of people. So, you know, we gathered at the front of the gate, in front of campus, and said, "Let's get organized." And that's when we started making plans.

SIMON: First things first, Greg and a couple of the others ...

GREG HLIBOK: We drove to buy a chain from the hardware store. We brought the chain back and we locked all of the gates on campus.

SIMON: They hot wire some of the school buses and drive those in front of the gates.

GREG HLIBOK: Blocking those entrances.

LULU: Huh!

SIMON: So now it's really blocked off.

LULU: Batten down the hatches of the whole university.

SIMON: Yes.

GREG HLIBOK: And in the morning ...

SIMON: As the administration arrived ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We don't want the university to open. We want a deaf president first.]

GREG HLIBOK: Ninety-nine acres was totally shut down.

SIMON: The students vowing to keep it that way until the board replaced Zinser.

GREG HLIBOK: With a deaf president now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Deaf president now! Now!]

GREG HLIBOK: That was it.

[NEWS CLIP: Students succeeded in shutting down the school in peaceful protest.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Deaf president now! Deaf president now!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Deaf president now!]

SIMON: Picture folks on each other's shoulders waving signs, banging drums. Almost immediately, faculty and staff like Karen joined the cause.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: We had a—we had a great time. It was—it was a party.

GREG HLIBOK: We marched around, we had different presentations and we had donuts.

SIMON: And at least once they pulled the fire alarm—which, you know, didn't bother the students, but bothered anyone who could hear.

LULU: Oh-ho! Metal! That's awesome!

SIMON: By the end of the first day, Greg had become the official spokesperson.

[NEWS CLIP: We have the president of the student body, Greg Hlibok.]

SIMON: And by the second day, media from all over the country had poured in.

[NEWS CLIP: In their signing and in their faces you see their conviction.]

GREG HLIBOK: PBS, ABC.

[NEWS CLIP: The demonstrations ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The demonstrations continue.]

SIMON: I mean, this became a national news story, culminating with Greg appearing on Nightline to debate the incoming president, Elisabeth Zinser.

LULU: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Doctor Zinser, please go ahead.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Zinser: Thank you, Ted. As president of Gallaudet University, I want to indicate that the university is an extraordinary institution. It deserves to have continuing strength into the future in its mission as an educational institution.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Hlibok: Excuse me. Are you implying that a deaf person can't continue that for the future?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Zinser: Not—not at all.]

LULU: Okay, so that's Greg? So Greg in the red tie, gray suit?

SIMON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got, like, a split screen going on. There are captions on the bottom of the screen. And Greg, who you're about to hear again, talking through an interpreter, is on the right side of the split screen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Hlibok: ... have failed then. If they haven't provided any deaf leaders, then obviously Gallaudet hasn't done a good job. If they have done a good job, then there should be a deaf president, someone qualified to do this.]

LULU: So intense!

SIMON: Yeah, they're—it gets heated—like, as Zinser tries to get going, here again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Zinser: What I'm really saying is that I do believe that deaf individuals have great capacities.]

SIMON: He cuts her off again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Zinser: I truly believe that a deaf individual one day will be the president.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg Hlibok: No, that's old news. I'm tired of that statement, "one day," again and again.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All right folks. Let me—let me—excuse me one second. Let me ask ...]

LULU: Okay, so—so this—this debate was captioned. Do you think that was, like, a special move? Or was ...

SIMON: Yeah, so this broadcast was actually open captioned, meaning that everybody who tuned in saw the captioning on the bottom of the screen.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: However, like, that was not the case for the vast majority of the coverage of the Deaf President Now protest. And in fact, even—even the broadcasts that were closed captioned, like, to receive those closed captions, to get them to show up on your screen, you needed to have one of these very expensive, clunky decoders. So ABC is sending ...

LULU: Oh, like, in your house.

SIMON: In your house, connected to your television. Think of it like a VCR, but it's a VCR that just allows your—your television to receive the closed captions.

LULU: So very few people of just, like, the general American public would be seeing these captions?

SIMON: Oh yeah. Like, nobody. Yeah.

LULU: Which—like, it's so frustrating to think that was, like, the day-to-day norm for deaf folks at that time. But I mean, there's just something, like, particularly frustrating to imagine the folks who can't access a broadcast that is literally concerning their rights and their access, you know?

SIMON: Yeah. And I think that's probably part of why you see this sort of chain reaction of events coming out of this moment. So less than a week after the protest starts ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (Students cheering.)]

SIMON: ... Zinser resigned, and was quickly replaced by one of the deaf finalists, I. King Jordan.

GREG HLIBOK: Everyone was just signing and jumping and cheering and screaming, and everybody was so happy.

SIMON: But then you also have a whole bunch of laws get passed in the years following: this thing called the Decoder Act, that required all televisions to have that closed captioning decoder built into it.

LULU: Hmm.

SIMON: A little thing called the Americans With Disabilities Act.

LULU: Hmm!

SIMON: And eventually, the 1996 Telecommunications Act. And that bill basically is what brings captioning into living rooms everywhere.

LULU: And the mandate is what?

SIMON: It's that by, like, the early 2000s, all new English language broadcast television had to be closed captioned.

LULU: All? Every—everything that goes out?

SIMON: With, like, very, very few exceptions, everything has to be captioned. And I mean, Karen and Greg, they were central in pushing this requirement into the bill.

LULU: Wow. Like, that is such a—like, go, Greg! Like, go Greg, go Karen. I mean, that's a huge win.

SIMON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they say, like, it all sort of started at Gallaudet.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: That's absolutely correct.

SIMON: Once more, Karen Peltz Strauss.

KAREN PELTZ STRAUSS: The protest introduced society to the way that deaf people communicate. They introduced society to captioning and sign language interpreters. And they impacted congressional votes.

SIMON: Yeah, so that's the why.

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: Right?

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: Like, why we have all of these closed captions today. But the how—like, how they were going to make all of these hours and hours and hours of those closed captions, well, that's where this story gets just delightful, number one. And number two, I think starts to say a bit about what—what the future of access to information and media is going to look like for all of us.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: And we will get to that in a moment, but first ...

MEREDITH PATTERSON: I mean, up to that point, live closed captioning had only ever been produced through highly trained, specialized stenographic shorthand.

SIMON: Imagine a court reporter with that strange keyboard.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Just like fire fingers. Just ...

SIMON: Exactly.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: That is how captions are being made. So you've got dozens, perhaps hundreds of people sitting in offices with the television ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Could be the last play for ...]

SIMON: ... being pumped into their ears through headphones. And they're just typing away at lightning speed.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: But by the beginning of 2003, it was becoming apparent that not enough steno writers were available to match the growing amount of content that needed to be captioned.

SIMON: This is Meredith Patterson.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: President at the National Captioning Institute.

SIMON: And back when she joined basically as an entry-level employee, she was handed this problem.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Yes. At the very beginning.

SIMON: Okay, so you are there. You're this, like, junior member of staff.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: I was very junior, and maybe that's why I was tasked with experimenting with some software that we called the "black box."

SIMON: Okay.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: It was basically a very simple early day speech recognition technology.

SIMON: You know, like a speech transcriber. And her hope was that she could just take a live television feed ...

[NEWS CLIP: Good evening, everyone. I'm Kevin Christopher.]

[NEWS CLIP: I'm Nancy Cox.]

SIMON: ... plug it in and create the captions that way. However ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (garbled tape)]

SIMON: ... when they tried that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (garbled tape)

MEREDITH PATTERSON: It was inaccurate. It would miss a lot of content.

SIMON: Little things like the news broadcaster throwing to the weatherman would totally trip it up. It didn't include punctuation. And accents of any kind were an issue. However, what it could do pretty darn well was transcribe her voice, which led to a sort of crazy idea.

SIMON: Could you just, like—could you do the thing that we're about to talk about?

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Could you do the thing that we are about to talk about? Question mark.

SIMON: Okay, so let's try it a little bit faster.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: So let's try it a little bit faster.

SIMON: I won't be stopping so much.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: I won't be stopping so much.

SIMON: We're talking about the news.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: And we are talking about the news.

SIMON: It's going to be a very interesting day with the news today.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: It is going to be a very interesting day today.

SIMON: What if she just echoed every word said on television into the computer? Maybe she could close caption that way.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Period.

SIMON: [laughs] Okay. Yep. You can do it. Wow!

LULU: Oh. My. God.

SIMON: She called it ...

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Voice writing.

LULU: Voice writing? Huh. That's a funny name for, like, being a parrot, being a human parrot. Why is that so comic? It's just so funny.

SIMON: Oh, Lulu, we are just getting started here.

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: So first thing's first. To see if this was even possible ...

MEREDITH PATTERSON: I would sit in the back of the room during internal meetings ...

SIMON: Picture just a sterile conference room with a dropped ceiling.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: … trying to be innocuous, repeating everything they said. Everything. I practiced at home sometimes on just random newscasts or people on TV.

SIMON: And while she got really, really good at this, like, that didn't mean that the captions were coming out really good, really well. As she started doing this echoing into the computer over and over again, it—it would miss words or have trouble understanding her—her English, her voice. And so Meredith decided to meet the machine where it was at. She set out to learn to speak computer. And we're gonna get to that ...

[COMPUTER: And we are going to get to that, comma ...]

SIMON: ... right after a quick break.

[COMPUTER: ... right after a quick break. Period.]

SIMON: Stephanie I'm gonna call you right back to see if that fixes the echo, okay?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Sure. Sure, Simon. Call me right back.

SIMON: Okay.

LULU: Radiolab. Lulu here with Simon Adler, who is telling us a story about how student protest led to a mandate that closed captions be beamed through all of our screens. And we were just moving onto the wild echoey way that captioners hoped to actually get them to us.

SIMON: That's right: voice writing. And along with Meredith, who you heard before the break ...

SIMON: Let's see. One, two, three, four, five. I don't know why that fixed it, but it did. Yeah.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Strange. Okay. Okay.

SIMON: ... this lady right here, Stephanie Veverka ...

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Director of production at the National Captioning Institute.

SIMON: ... set out to figure this out.

SIMON: Okay, so here's my first question for you.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Yes sir.

SIMON: And I noticed this with Meredith as well. I think your voices have been forever changed by the work that you have done.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: [laughs]

SIMON: There is a precision and a spacing that makes sure that not a single syllable goes by without the listener being able to catch what it was. Do you think I'm right?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: I think you are mostly right, yes.

SIMON: Okay.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Well, let me back up. When we began with this voice writing line of work, the computer software wanted to hear you sounding like a computer.

SIMON: What would that sound like? Can we—can I get a—can I get a demo?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Absolutely. That would sound like something like this, comma, something that is very articulate and also very robotic-hyphen-sounding. Period. Very quick, sometimes clipped. I hear you laughing. I know.

SIMON: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: This is how we spoke for hours and hours of our day.

SIMON: She says her vocabulary had to change as well.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Yes, because there were certain difficult words for the software to distinguish. For example, "in," "an," and "and."

SIMON: Like, she'd say into the computer, "and," but it would hear, "an." Or she'd say, "in," and it would hear, "and." And so the workaround she found was to train the computer to hear a specific real word when she would say a totally made-up word.

LULU: Like a little code?

SIMON: Yes. So she—instead of saying the word "in," I-N, she would say ...

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Inly.

SIMON: Inly?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Inly. I-N-L-Y. Inly.

SIMON: Which the computer would then hear and print on the screen as, "in."

LULU: [laughs]

SIMON: Well, how did you—how did you go home at the end of the day and start talking like a normal person again?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: It could be difficult to speak like a normal person after leaving. This job really did change me.

SIMON: Because "inly" was really only just the beginning. I mean, once she figured out this hack, she began developing and deploying hundreds and hundreds of code words to work around the software's shortcomings.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Homophones could be very difficult for the software. "To," "too," and "two," for example.

SIMON: The fix?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: "Tookoo," for T-W-O. "Toodaloo" for T-O-O." So if a sentence is, "She has two daughters in college, too," I would echo that as, "She has tookoo daughters inly college, comma, toodaloo. Period." So that is ...

SIMON: So wait. Wait, say that once more. Say that once—say it again.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: "She has tookoo daughters inly college, comma, toodaloo." I mean, it's a whole language that you then have to remember and follow.

SIMON: As Stephanie's brain melded further and further with her machine, she figured out she could trick it in other ways to make her life easier. So for example ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George W. Bush: My fellow Americans ...]

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Back when George W. Bush was still in office, that's how he was referred to on the air, "George W. Period Bush."

SIMON: Eight syllables. Way too many to spit out over and over again. And so ...

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: I trained my software to print, "George W. Bush," when I said, "GB."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hillary Clinton: I accept your nomination!]

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: Hillary Clinton became, "Hilco." Barack Obama became, “Bombo.” Rudy Giuliani at the time was, "Ruju."

SIMON: [laughs]

MEREDITH PATTERSON: "Question mark." That has too many syllables.

SIMON: Again, Meredith Patterson.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: I trained the system. Every time I said, "poof," it would print the question mark symbol.

SIMON: They learned they could trick it into not hearing and printing certain words, both the obvious ones ...

MEREDITH PATTERSON: The software had a bit of a naughty side, and would produce the most inappropriate choice when it had the ability to do so.

SIMON: Right.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: And so I spent an entire day of work saying every profanity word you could come up with into the system.

SIMON: Programming them out.

LULU: So if it heard [bleep] it would just do nothing?

SIMON: Exactly.

LULU: Oh, neat!

SIMON: And then there were some weird ones that they had to program out as well.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: The word "garage," because when you're captioning local news, a lot of things happen in the garage. [laughs] The fire started in the garage, the man hid in the garage.

SIMON: But when Stephanie would echo the word "garage" into the computer ...

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: The software would, nearly without fail, print, "crotch."

SIMON: … creating some wonderful misunderstandings.

[NEWS CLIP: A Moline couple has transformed ...]

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: ... their crotch ...

[NEWS CLIP: ... into a haven for rock climbers, hoping to address a community need that we weren't even aware of.]

SIMON: And I mean, this thing, voice writing, well, it became the industry standard for closed captioning. I mean, if you ever saw a closed caption after 2003, it was probably ...

LULU: This?

SIMON: ... put there through this technique.

MEREDITH PATTERSON: At our peak, we had over 150 voice writers, and that was across—across the country. We had a lot of people in California—aspiring actors—and they were probably captioning 400 to 500 hours a day.

SIMON: A day?

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: A day. Yeah.

SIMON: Meaning thousands and thousands of hours of television each week were accessible to the deaf, and thousands and thousands of hours of work were spent by these voice writers really forming relationships with their machines.

STEPHANIE VEVERKA: I think the best voice writers really learned how to move with the software, almost like dancing. Because it wasn't enough to just tell the software how to respond to you. You needed to respond to it to really achieve the highest accuracies when you were on the air.

LULU: So is this how we are still doing it? Are the captions going through this, like, anonymous, like, office building full of human parrots?

SIMON: Well, it's no longer really an office building.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: Because the pandemic has made a lot this work remote now.

LULU: Okay.

SIMON: And the pandemic changed more than just where the captioning was being done. When the pandemic hit, due to everything going online, due to all of the constant press conferences happening, there is a—once more a flood of stuff that needs to be closed captioned. And now they don't have enough voice writers to cover all of this stuff.

LULU: Hmm.

SIMON: And so they are once again in this position of, "Oh man, how do we—how do we—how do we keep up?" And by 2020 ...

LULU: Mm-hmm?

SIMON: ... that technology they had started playing around with back in the early 2000s, just, like, the black box, AI running the feed directly into the computer, it works pretty damn well. It works well enough that you basically no longer need a human in the system at all. Meaning this dance? It's winding down, it's coming to an end. Today, Meredith says AI is doing around 50 percent of the closed captioning the National Captioning Institute is hired to do.

LULU: Wow!

SIMON: And they haven't hired anyone to fill any roles that have become vacant in the last two years.

LULU: Another human bites the dust.

SIMON: Yeah, I think—it's tough, because I as a person, I as a professional am thinking and worrying a lot about how these new AI tools are going to impact me, my livelihood and my—my craft. And well, this is in one way a story about a bunch of people being replaced by those sorts of tools. It's also a little bit of a story about how to use those same tools with a smile, to, like, approach those tools with some excitement and with some creativity.

LULU: The tools that are—that are replacing you?

SIMON: They may, eventually. But, like, yeah, why shouldn't you enjoy your time with the hand grenade before it goes off, you know? Like ...

LULU: Okay. Okay. [laughs] Wait, wait, wait. But—okay, what's your analogy here?

SIMON: Sure. I think what I'm trying to say is that our voice writers, they were trying to get their machine to produce accurate text. And of course now we are asking AI to do all sorts of other things for us, from designing a drug, to helping us process our feelings, to making a picture, to writing a song. But it can't do those things well without us. It—it needs us to help it, to play with it.

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: And I mean, while it is so easy to just be down or scared or turned off by these new tools ...

LULU: Or opposed to them for running on stolen human work and guzzling energy.

SIMON: Sure, yes. That too. But I think regardless of how you feel about these tools ethically, what these voice writers show is that back-and-forth, that dance, it can yield some—some very unexpected and world-changing results, positive world-changing results, like millions of people having access to information they otherwise would not have had.

LULU: It is pretty tremendous what it's done for the disability community. And I do have to say, like, just a few weeks after ChatGPT came out, this one professor I talked to who worked at a community college was just, like, "You know, for my ESL students, this is a game-changer. Like, it's just awesome. This is an access thing. It's an empowerment thing. It is good. It is opening doors." You know? So the access point of view, that is a nice way to not just feel afraid. I'll give you that.

SIMON: Yeah. And to be clear, I'm not here to say don't be scared, or that the machine isn't going to eventually steamroll all of us.

LULU: [laughs]

SIMON: But we're not there yet.

LULU: Yeah.

SIMON: All we have is now, Lulu.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

SIMON: And so maybe we should do our best to take a cue from these voice writers and, you know, dance with the machine for a bit.

LULU: This episode was reported and produced by Simon Adler, with original music and sound design by Simon Adler. It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Anna Pujol-Mazini. Special thanks to Elsa Sjunneson. And by the way, if you'd like to read this week's episode or pass some more accessible version along to a friend, you can, as always, find a transcript on our webpage or a closed-captioned version on YouTube.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Jonathan, and I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Laks, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Danielle from Madrid. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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