Emmy Award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Joanna Stern spent all of 2025 letting artificial intelligence run nearly every corner of her life, then wrote about it. The resulting book, “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything,” published by HarperCollins in May 2026, landed as an instant New York Times bestseller. On a recent episode of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Stern offered a characteristically grounded verdict: “Right now, it’s not ready for prime time in all spots of our lives. Over the last year, did it get considerably better? Absolutely.”
Stern deliberately pushed the experiment past chatbots. “I was going to try as many AI products as possible for the year,” she said. That meant ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, but also humanoid robots, home robots, and self-driving cars. The goal was a real field test across work, family, health, and daily logistics, covering the full range of what AI companies are pitching as the near future.
The single biggest practical win was offloading administrative work. Stern built a promotional website for her book around an AI-automated fulfillment chain: a reader uploads a receipt, AI processes it and confirms the shipping address, the data flows into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet triggers an email to her publisher. She called out Claude Code as a genuine leap forward. “Multi-step processes have gotten extremely better” with AI, she said. Full email automation, though, is still a step too far. The risk of a rogue reply remains too high.
The Praying Mantis Lesson
The most instructive anecdote from the year involves her two children, ages four and eight. As part of the experiment, the family agreed to consult ChatGPT or Claude first for any household question before turning to a search engine or a person.
When they asked ChatGPT about her son’s praying mantis, the model declared it was pregnant. Her son was thrilled. Two days later, the insect died. The error left a mark. Stern says her children are “questioning AI so much more than the average kid because they saw us get things wrong … and the results of that.” The lesson she draws for parents: always verify what the AI says, and restrict children’s access to chatbots.
Hallucinations came up repeatedly through the year, and Stern frames them not as bugs to be patched but as a structural artifact of how large language models were built. “The hallucinations were an outgrowth of the way these were made,” she said. “And so in many ways, the way we first got this was they were word calculators, right? This was predicting the next word.” The models produce confident, plausible-sounding answers because that is what they were trained to optimize for. Stern noted that the major AI companies have made meaningful progress on this, but the problem has not been solved.
Co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin added a note of candor, sharing that he formed a “deep” relationship with Claude while working on several projects. When he stepped away, he missed it, almost like an addiction. “The dependency that you form when you’re working with this being … and then you don’t have it anymore,” it’s jarring, Stern agreed.
The experiment also had firm boundaries. “If I had given my life over to AI completely, I would be divorced, homeless, things would have been destroyed,” she told Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast. “And so, I needed to continue to live a decent life. And so, certain things were not outsourced.”
On the career front, AI played a direct role in one of the biggest decisions of Stern’s professional life. After 12 years as a personal-technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, she was weighing whether to leave and go independent. She consulted friends and colleagues, but she also turned to ChatGPT. The AI did what human advisers typically avoid: it told her outright to quit. “It felt like the one big decision where I actually did trust AI,” she told Semafor. She announced her departure in April 2026 and launched New Things, an independent consumer-tech media company publishing newsletters, videos, and live events. She now serves as NBC News’ chief technology analyst and contributing correspondent alongside that venture. “AI is my co-founder, is my truth,” she said. “The book was definitely, for me, an inspiration to go and do this.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect that “I Am Not a Robot” became an instant New York Times bestseller upon its May 12, 2026 publication, to add Stern’s Pulitzer Prize finalist credential, to name her new media company as New Things and her role as NBC News chief technology analyst, and to include the detail that ChatGPT explicitly advised her to leave The Wall Street Journal, a moment she described to Semafor as “the one big decision where I actually did trust AI.”
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