are celebrities good role models essay

Celebrities as Good Role Models Essay

Introduction, celebrities as role models.

In the introduction it is affirmed that celebrities have positive elements needed to become role models, hence explaining why most of them inspire others. In the body section, media personalities Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey were analysed.

Angelina has strong values, which can be seen in her personal life as an international adopting parent and also in her role as a UN goodwill ambassador. Oprah’s success in her career and her philanthropic work teaches others how to be professionals and how to use their wealth selflessly.

These celebrities still have some flaws; but they have not let their past get in the way of their societal impact. In the conclusion, it was affirmed that celebrities’ accomplishments are easily identifiable to the public, as is the case with Angelina and Oprah, and this makes them good role models.

Since celebrities demonstrate what it means to be an extraordinary media personality, then they serve as exemplary role models. Angelina Jolie and Oprah are positive role models as seen through their career accomplishments and charity initiatives; they did not let their dark past defuse the change they instated in society.

Some celebrities illuminate their position as media personalities through the right behaviour and attitude. A role model is one whose attitude and behaviour conform to that which people expect of a person in that role. Actress Angelina Jolie exemplifies this positive role through involvement in humanitarian work and her personal life. She has worked as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations for several years.

Jolie took the personal initiative to contact the UNHCR concerning troubled regions of the world. She visited several African refugee camps in 2000. As a field agent of the UN, Jolie went to Pakistan and Cambodia to do mission work in refugee camps.

These trips started after she became the goodwill ambassador in 2001. The celebrity has visited approximately thirty countries in an attempt to create awareness about the plight of refugees. She has brought media attention back to forgotten civil conflicts. Furthermore, Jolie covers her own expenses during these missions, and shares the same deplorable conditions with other UN workers.

She undertakes these humanitarian missions bravely as seen through her entrance into conflict zones (Allen-Mills, 2008). Some celebrities may refrain from visiting dangerous places like Darfur and Afghanistan, but Jolie has not shied away from these regions. Her attitude and behaviour as a goodwill ambassador are exemplary and typical of a good role model.

Celebrities can inspire others to imitate them through their values and goals. In addition to visiting refugees, Jolie has done a lot of media campaigns and lobbying work. The celebrity even made a documentary about poverty-stricken communities in East Africa. She has worked with politicians and other bodies in Washington.

Jolie launched several foundations intended on helping children in conflict zones and those in the US who are immigrants. The actress’s long list of humanitarian awards testifies to her commitment and passion for people in need. Angelina Jolie’s accomplishments in this area illuminate the positive part that celebrities can play as role models.

She has dedicated her life to making the lives of others better, and this is something that the public can emulate (McFay, 2005). Society can also draw positive lessons from Jolie’s personal life.

The actress has adopted three children from three poor countries; that is, Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Her international adoptions teach people how to surpass cultural and geographical boundaries in order to unite the human race. These actions reflect the values of self sacrifice and care that others can imitate.

Role models do not have to be perfect; they only have to do their best in prevailing circumstances. Angelina Jolie has had a dark past since she experimented with drugs during her youth. Furthermore, the celebrity had shaky relationships in her 20s and 30s.

Other people also claim that her humanitarian work keeps her away from her 6 children. All these imperfections illustrate that she is only human, so they do not mirror her accomplishments.

Some celebrities inspire others through their career accomplishments, and Oprah Winfrey is one such person. Her world famous show highlighted numerous instances of goodwill and care for others. She defied numerous odds to become the richest African American in the US.

Oprah overcame child abuse, poverty and negativity to make it as a talk-show host (Avtalion, 1998). Furthermore, she has encouraged literacy through formation of her own book club. This media personality has also promoted health and fitness by launching O-Magazine as well as talking about health issues on her show. In fact, this emphasis on good health and nutrition led to Dr. Phil’s and Dr. Oz’s careers.

The latter professionals have spearheaded the fight against obesity, psychological issues and lifestyle diseases in the US. Furthermore, Oprah has taught people about the importance of spirituality. She has done this in a way that includes even the non-religious. Oprah’s role as a female entrepreneur is also inspiring to many.

The media guru used exceptional and bold tactics to buy the Oprah show and own her own network. She has created a franchise of inspirational programs and businesses. Young people can definitely look up to her when starting their careers. Many women also admire her as an influential figure in the business world.

Since celebrities make a lot of money, they can serve as examples on what to do with immense wealth, which makes them role models for others. Oprah has engaged in a lot of charitable activities. The former talk show host opened a South African Leadership Academy for underprivileged girls in 2007.

She started by donating 40 million to the charity and has given an opportunity to children who would never have gotten such a chance. Oprah has also made donations to various charities. One of the most notable ones was Project Cuddle, which focused on the plight of abandoned babies.

Furthermore, the media personality has encouraged and publicised various causes on her show and on other media outlets (Quast, 2011). Oprah’s example illustrates that celebrates can inspire others to use their wealth selflessly.

One may question a celebrity’s ability to become a role model based on his or her personal life. For instance, Oprah has never been married nor had children. Therefore, one may doubt her ability to act as a role model since families are society’s basic unit.

Celebrities have all the elements needed to become positive role models, hence explaining why most of them inspire others. Two female media personalities, Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey, have proved this assertion by their relentless drive in their careers and their philanthropic work.

Angelina’s values and use of her role as a media personality have inspired others. Oprah’s career accomplishments and charity work teach others how to be professionals and how to use their wealth selflessly.

These celebrities still have some flaws; nonetheless, their imperfections do not discredit all the positive work they have done. Celebrities’ lives are easily identifiable to the public and can thus make them good role models.

Allen-Mills, T. (2008). The other side of Angelina Jolie. The Sunday Times , p. 13.

Avtalion, O. (1998). Oprah Winfrey: A role model. The New York Times , p B8.

McFay, E. (2005). Angelina Jolie: Angel in disguise . California, LA: Icon Press.

Quast, L. (2011). What career women can learn from Oprah Winfrey. Forbes , p. 4.

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Bibliography

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Pros and Cons of Celebrity Role Models

Last updated by nicolas desjardins on 21 april 2022.

Table of Contents

As with everything in life, celebrities are often not what they seem to be on the surface. By choosing the right celebrity role model, you can learn positive values that will help make you into a better person over time. On the other hand, there are plenty of celebrity role models whose lives are highly irresponsible and not worth imitating, so it’s important to make sure you pick the right one before spending too much time on them.

This article covers both sides of celebrity role models to help you make an informed decision about which ones to spend your time on and which ones to avoid completely.

Voir cette publication sur Instagram Une publication partagée par Madison LeCroy (@madison.lecroy)

What Is a Celebrity Role Model?

We all know that to be successful, we must look up to our role models. We are taught from a young age that we should try to emulate our heroes so we can be like them. But with more celebrities being arrested for drug charges and other bad things, there is some debate on whether or not it’s okay to look up to celebrities as role models.

Some celebrities qualify as celebrity role models even though they may be considered controversial by others. The most important thing anyone needs to keep in mind when determining if their hero is worthy of their respect and admiration lies in his/her actions and morals.

Why Do People Look Up to Celebrities?

People turn to celebrities for lots of reasons: They might want to know what certain people are doing that makes them so successful, or they may just feel inspired by a celebrity’s story. Whatever their reason, many people look up to famous people as role models.

While some celebrities are worthy of emulation, others may not be worth your admiration. Read on for tips on figuring out who you should try to emulate and who you should probably look at more critically.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Celebrity Role Models?

Many celebrities have become role models for people who look up to them. However, there are many pros and cons to using celebrities as role models. Below are both sides of these arguments, depending on how they affect society.

Pros of Celebrity Role Models

It’s worth taking a look at celebrity role models. For starters, celebrities are appealing to many consumers since they have already succeeded in their industries. If you idolize someone who has made it big in their chosen field, that can motivate you to do whatever it takes to reach similar levels of success. The following are the pros of celebrity role models .

1.   Celebrities Are More Approachable

There’s something about celebrities that makes them seem more real. The reason why people go to watch movies starring their favorite celebrities is to get a glimpse into their lives – through gossip sites, tabloid magazines, social media pages.

There’s a certain connection that we feel towards celebrities; after all, they are only human. We tend to relate to them better than with our teachers, our bosses, or politicians because it is easier for us to imagine that we can be like them.

2.   Celebrities Promote Diversity and Inclusion

Yes, many celebrities have done positive things for diversity by raising awareness about different issues that plague our society, such as racism. Celebrities can be effective in helping people understand other cultures or lifestyles that are not necessarily similar to their own.

However, if we’re using them as role models to create social change then we must also acknowledge that celebrities can take advantage of their positions as well.

3.   Celebrities Show Us Our Potential in Life

The biggest positive aspect of celebrities is that they demonstrate our potential in life. Many people look up to celebrities as role models. We all have strengths and weaknesses, but we can still accomplish great things if we put our minds to them.

They are also the relatable type of person who happens to be famous.  No matter what social class or race you may belong to, there will always be someone you can relate to and get inspiration from. Celebrities show us that with determination and hard work anything is possible in life.

4.   They Are Creative with Their Looks

Celebrities are indeed super creative with their looks. Each celebrity has a distinctive personality, so they all have different ways to display themselves. Some like to wear make-up while others will show their natural skin.

There is no set standard when it comes to how you should look to be seen as beautiful by other people in society. They can inspire us to be creative with our looks instead of copying what everyone else does.

Cons of Celebrity Role Models

One problem with celebrity role models is that they are celebrities. No one is perfect, celebrities included. We admire them for their fame, talent, beauty, and skill.

They appear to have a perfect life; they are rich , famous , healthy – more than any of us can ever dream to be. But in reality, celebs are people too. They have all of those same faults that we do and sometimes worse.

1.   Celebrity Role Models Can Create False Expectations

Some people view celebrity role models as perfect, but they’re often far from it. For instance, even stars who’ve publicly admitted to having troubles with addiction, are held up by some young people as flawless examples. Reality is far from that image; any celebrities have made headlines for behaving recklessly or breaking laws.

2.   Celebrities Are Not a Guarantee for Success

Yes, many celebrities started from humble beginnings, but that does not mean they will lead us down a path to fame and fortune. Celebrities are human beings just like us – we can learn many things from them, but fame is subjective. Some celebs were born for it; others got lucky, therefore you should never count on other people for your success. You cannot assume what works for someone else will work for you. Instead, follow your dreams and achieve your success.

3.   Celebrities Are Still Real People with Real Problems

Celebrities have a huge amount of power, but they’re still real people with real problems. Some have low self-esteem just like many normal people; others struggle with drug abuse or negative emotions. Don’t forget that your favorite celebrity has a life just like you do—and it isn’t as perfect as it seems on television.

4.   You never know their whole story

Celebrities often have PR teams, managers, and legal firms to run interference between them and their fans. Even if a celebrity doesn’t consciously want to mislead their audience, they can’t share their entire story because they’re actively trying to be someone else.

Bottom Line

While there are many negative aspects to being a celebrity role model, you mustn’t simply throw all celebrities under the bus. This world would be far less interesting without some of our favorite famous figures. But if you look hard enough, there are plenty of good qualities to take away from these people.

Nicolas Desjardins

Hello everyone, I am the main writer for SIND Canada. I’ve been writing articles for more than 10 years and I like sharing my knowledge. I’m currently writing for many websites and newspaper. All my ideas come from my very active lifestyle. I always keep myself very informed to give you the best information. In all my years as computer scientist made me become an incredible researcher. I believe that any information should be free, we want to know more every day because we learn everyday. You can contact me on our forum or by email at: [email protected] .

winner winner · 28 February 2022 at 1h39

Nicolas Desjardins, thank you for posting such helpful articles. I was struggling on this subject, fortunately, I just came across your site which has just given me ideal ideas for my presentation. Thumbs up to you

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Are Celebrities Good Role Models for Teens?

Throughout adolescence, your teenage son or daughter will go through the process of developing their identity, and they may feel they found that in a celebrity, influencer, movie star, rapper, or other notable figure. They may look up to these famous people to help them determine their own values, goals, beliefs, style, and more. As a parent, you may wonder, “Are these celebrities good role models for my teen?” 

Table of contents

How can kids be fans but not lose themselves   , are celebrities good role models  , negative ways celebrities can influence teens  , positive ways celebrities can influence teens , how to help your teen distinguish between useful and damaging role models , staying plugged into the celebrities your teen is following .

Jeana Thomsen, executive director at New Haven , a residential treatment center in Utah, explained why teens may be drawn to those who are famous and in the public eye. 

“Often, celebrities have large followings, and teenagers feel part of something.”  

By being a fan of a celebrity or well-known figure, your son or daughter may feel like they’re a part of a community and may establish connections with other fans. In theory, this could fuel a deeper influence on your teen, as the more connected they feel, the more that celebrity may affect the development of their identity. 

One way to help teenagers be fans without losing themselves is to encourage them to engage in activities outside of social media and fandom.  

“If they’re busy with other things, they feel good about activities they’re engaged in, and they feel successful in other endeavors, they’ll be less likely to need belonging and validation from liking or imitating a celebrity,” Thomsen said.  

She also recommended supporting healthy, real-life relationships with family and friends to negate some of social media’s effects on teens . If they’re engaged with others, they’ll be more likely to have a balanced view of celebrities. 

“Yes and no,” Thomsen said in response to this question. She explained that some celebrities can be positive role models, especially when they serve as mental health advocates and activists for critical issues, using their platform to create awareness, foster acceptance, and encourage action.  

“Some celebrities have causes that are important to them that can be healthy for teenagers.”  

She pointed to examples of body positivity and conservationism. Celebrity mental health advocates and those who’ve gone through recovery like Selena Gomez , Ariana Grande , and Michael Phelps are also helping break the stigma around mental illness, prioritizing their mental health and seeking treatment. Recently, the Olympics and other notable competitions have brought the issue of professional and student-athlete mental health to the forefront. 

What other celebrities are good role models? Those famous for taking a stand, such as environmental activist Greta Thunberg, gun control activist David Hogg, and female education activist Malala Yousafzai, can have a positive influence by encouraging teens to organize around the issues they care about that have social and personal value. 

However, some celebrities can be bad role models.  

“Other times, celebrities are open about using substances and showcase that on social media, which can influence teenagers in an unhealthy way,” Thomsen said.  

Examples of bad role models include influencers like RiceGum, who’s posted offensive content, and Jake Paul, who’s faced sexual assault allegations.  

The Influence of Celebrities 

Whether celebrities are good or bad role models, they can influence your teen’s identity, values, attitudes, and behaviors. Those who flaunt their status may influence young people to value superficial aspects of their lives like brand names and their image. Influencers and celebrities who share edited or unrealistic images could affect a young person’s self-esteem and self-image, leading to body dysmorphia (a body image disorder) and eating disorders in teens . 

• Normalizing behaviors like smoking or substance use .  
• Promoting violent or criminal behavior like vandalism, fighting, or driving under the influence. 
• Modeling poor decisions around relationships or sex. 
• Promoting dedication to hard work. 
• Modeling how to positively handle situations when they make mistakes. 
• Talking openly about mental health issues. 

The good news is you can help your teen understand the difference between the positive behaviors, values, and attitudes of those who influence them and the negative ones. 

If you want to help guide your teen in understanding the influence these figures may have over behavior, attitudes, values, and other aspects of their life and identity, you need to first have a strong connection with your son or daughter. This means focusing on trust, empathy, reciprocity, vulnerability, and healthy intimacy between you and your teenager.  

“Teens are more willing to listen to someone who they know loves them,” Thomsen said. “Once they know this, it becomes easier to have conversations about this with them.” 

Once there’s an established connection, she suggested saying something to the effect of “I’ve noticed you paying a lot of attention to (insert celebrity). Tell me what you like about them.”  

Once you’ve asked the question, actively listen to the response.  

“This works a lot better than saying, ‘I’m concerned about the people you’re following on social media,’” Thomsen said.  

You still might have concerns, but you need to seek understanding before lecturing or trying to change their mind. 

Are celebrities good role models for your teen? They may be mental health advocates or influential activists for important issues, or they may be promoting drug or substance use, an unrealistic body image, or materialistic standards. The only way you’ll know is if you understand who’s influencing your teenager. 

To that end, Thomsen recommended that parents have access to their children’s phones. She recognized that every family will handle this differently. 

“Some parents manage the passwords on their children’s phones so that they can log in anytime and check things. Other parents require that they can follow their children on social media. Many parents use parental controls that don’t allow their children to download apps without permission, which helps them keep an eye on what’s going on.”  

While setting boundaries around cellphone usage is a critical step, your relationship with your teen is just as important.  

“Staying connected and keeping the lines of communication open are essential,” Thomsen said. 

Embark is the most trusted name in teen and young adult mental health treatment. We’re driven to find the help your family needs. If you’re looking for support, contact us today !  

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Why Are Celebrities Good Role Models

By: Author Valerie Forgeard

Posted on Published: July 28, 2022  - Last updated: July 31, 2023

Categories Self Improvement , Inspiration , Leadership , Society

Famous people are often admired by their fans. Not only can they influence the lives of their fans, but they’re always good role models to look up to. Sometimes celebrities can even be better role models than parents or teachers because they’re constantly being branded.

A Celebrity Is a Public Figure Who’s Usually Famous or Well-Known and Admired by People

Celebrities are famous or well-known people who’ve achieved fame in a particular field, such as acting, singing, dancing, sports, modeling, or politics.

They’re often in the public eye, which makes them more accessible, and they can use their fame to draw attention to issues or causes they believe in. A celebrity can also get involved in charities and fundraisers to help people who need help.

They’re Often Admired by Many People Because They’ve Worked Hard to Be Successful

Many celebrities work hard for their careers and make a lot of money because they’ve talents many people like to see on TV or in movies.

You may think celebrities are actors, artists, politicians, or athletes. But that’s not always the case! Celebrities can be anyone famous or well-known in the public eye (e.g., speakers, CEOs, influencers, etc.).

It’s important to know that celebrities can be both bad and good role models because everyone has their own mistakes, but sometimes you need someone to inspire you and motivate you on your life path, even if you make mistakes along the way!

A Good Role Model Is Someone You Look Up to and Who Inspires You to Become Like Them in the Future

There are many ways to define a role model, but usually, it’s someone who inspires you and teaches you something valuable. This can be anyone from your parents or grandparents to your friends, teachers or celebrities.

It’s Important to Have Role Models in Your Life Because They Help You Form a Picture of the Kind of Person You Want to Become

People often think that a celebrity can be a great example of how to live your life because they’ve it all figured out, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Celebrities are just people. They struggle with problems like anyone else, but sometimes they can’t talk about them publicly because they want their image to be perfect. Sometimes it’s easier for us to see celebrities as perfect than others because we don’t know them personally and don’t understand what goes on behind closed doors at home or on set.

Celebrities Are Often Strong Role Models, Especially for Young People

Celebrities are often strong role models, especially for young people. They can be powerful forces in our lives, giving us hope and inspiration. They can help us see the world through different eyes, learn about new ideas, and even help make a difference in our communities.

It’s not uncommon for people to say that the U.S. needs more positive role models like Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Malala Yousafzai, Michael Jackson, Miley Cyrus, or Greta Thunberg. We need role models who show us how to become better people and give back to the world. People who inspire us to do more than just survive and make money – but to make a difference in the lives of others.

The truth is that everyone has the opportunity to be a role model – whether it’s your parents, grandparents, or teachers in school – we all have someone who looks up to us at some point in our lives. But with celebrities, there’s no direct connection, so we choose what we want to see.

Why Celebrities Are So Influential

The world is changing, and people want to follow the voices that speak to them. Celebrities have always inspired many people, but nowadays, they also show their vulnerability and discuss their psychological problems. They show that they’re real people, making them likable.

They Live Their Lives in the Spotlight, and So It’s No Wonder That They Can Reach Millions of People With a Single Post on Instagram or Twitter

We live in a world where everyone struggles with something, and we all want someone who understands us. Celebrities can show us that they’re human too because they’ve been through the same thing as us, or at least something similar.

Nowadays, celebrities also show their vulnerability. They’re influential because they show that they’re real people.

They talk openly about their mental health issues, like famous singer and actress Lady Gaga, who told Oprah Winfrey about her mental health issues and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or Kylie Jenner, who published an emotional post on social media about her constant struggle with anxiety.

Celebrities Are Good Role Models Because They Can Inspire Many People to Take Action

Many celebrities have become more environmentally friendly and use their fame to encourage others to do the same. They’re also known for taking care of their health and physical fitness by exercising regularly and eating healthy.

More celebrity role models are becoming involved in charitable causes in their communities or worldwide by volunteering for non-governmental organizations or organizing fundraisers for people who need help with medical bills or food donations.

Some celebrities also speak out on political issues close to their hearts. These celebrities may even use their celebrity to raise awareness about important issues such as poverty, discrimination, or injustice.

They Can Set a Positive Example for Young People to Follow

Celebrities are essential to our culture, and we often look to them as role models. Depending on who they emulate, this can be a great thing or a terrible thing.

On one hand, it’s great that people look up to celebrities and want to be like them. On the other hand, it can hurt young people’s futures if these celebrities aren’t positive examples for them.

The good news is that many celebrities strive to be positive role models for the youth. They can set a positive example for young people and help them gain self-confidence while they’re young.

When a Celebrity Has a Bad Influence on Young People, It Can Have Disastrous Consequences

When a celebrity negatively influences kids and young people, it can have disastrous consequences. Just because celebrities are on a pedestal doesn’t mean they should be considered a positive influence.

Just Like Any Other Person, a Celebrity Can Be a Bad Role Model for the Youth

Some of the most famous role models are known for their bad behavior, such as violence and substance abuse, which can be a disaster not only for their mental health but also for the mental health of their young fans if they follow their celebrity role model.

Unfortunately, Some Kids and Young People Look Up to These Stars and Try to Emulate Them by Copying Their Actions and Beliefs

They use them as an excuse for why they do things that aren’t good for them or society as a whole. For example, in today’s pop culture, some celebrities are known for easily losing their temper, which makes young people think it’s okay.

Another example of how celebrities can negatively influence the youth is when they use swear words in public or advertise certain products just for the sake of money. Kids and young people who idolize these celebrities often copy their behavior by swearing around their friends or siblings just because they see their favorite celebrity doing it on TV, on social media, or in online videos.

Celebrities Have Their Role Models, Too!

You should also remember that celebrities aren’t the only ones who can be role models. They can also be a source of inspiration for other celebrities or be influenced by others.

We all know how much influence celebrities have on our lives, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that they also look up to others. Many of them were inspired by their childhood heroes.

Celebrities don’t always pick their role models at random. Some grew up seeing them on TV or social media and admired them as children. Others became fans after meeting them in person or learning about their accomplishments through the media. And some celebrities even had parents who were famous before them!

Famous people are often admired by people for their good qualities. They can positively impact society if they take their role seriously.

Role Models Don’t Have to Be Celebrities

When looking for a role model, it’s essential to understand that your role model doesn’t have to be someone famous. Your role model can be anyone who inspires you and makes you feel good about yourself. It can be someone who inspires you because he or she’s successful in his or her career or has overcome challenges in life.

Some people look up to celebrities as role models, but if your role model isn’t a celebrity, that’s fine! The most important thing is to find someone who inspires you and makes him or her your role model.

I’ve several people I look up to and admire – including my mentors, my life partner, and people I’ve met while traveling – and there are also celebrities I admire, like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Lutherking Jr.

For me, it’s not important whether someone is famous or not, but whether he’s done a good thing for the world and whether I can learn from him or her.

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• How Celebrities Influence Teens and Why it Matters

• Empowering Teens

For better or worse, celebrities have a powerful impact on how teens view themselves and how they see the world. In fact, it’s easy to underestimate how much celebrities influence teenage attitudes and behavior.

Celebrities can have a positive influence on youth. In fact, they can serve as role models. But famous people, whether they’re singers, actors, and other celebrities, can also provide unhealthy examples. In particular, celebrity influence on body image and substance use is often detrimental to teen mental state. This has led to an unprecedented need for adolescent mental health treatment across the country.

Teenagers need guidance on how to interpret celebrities’ influence. Adults can engage with kids around media. In addition, they, therefore, support how children process what they’re seeing and hearing. Moreover, parents and teachers can use celebrities’ stories as entry points into important discussions about health and personal choices.

The Impact of Media on Teen Body Image

Research shows that teen body image is shaped by many factors. These include friends and family, where the teen lives, and their cultural background. However, celebrity images have a profound impact on teen body image.

The Today Show and aol.com collaborated on the “Ideal to Real” body image survey . As a result, the survey found that 80 percent of teen girls compare themselves to images they see of celebrities. Moreover, among those girls, almost half said that celebrity images make them feel dissatisfied with the way they look.

Therefore, appearance is among teenagers’ top concerns, teen girls in particular. In her book  Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World , author Lisa Bloom reveals that 25 percent of young adult women in the US would rather win America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize.

How Celebrities Influence Teen Eating Disorders

Why does celebrity influence on teen body image matter? Because body dissatisfaction is linked to mental health challenges, including eating disorders, depression , anxiety , and low self-esteem. Studies find that young women who consume media with many images of an unrealistic “thin ideal” are more likely to exhibit symptoms of disordered eating . In addition, the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that nearly half of girls ages 13 to 17 wish they were as skinny as the models in fashion magazines.

Celebrity influencers play into this trend when they document their extreme diets or use language that can be triggering for those with eating disorders—such as when the entertainer Kim Kardashian recently expressed gratitude for being told she “looks anorexic.” News outlets covered a conversation between the Kardashians and the backlash it spawned. When celebrities minimize the severity of eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, or endorse taking unhealthy products to suppress appetite, they are emulating dysfunction.

Furthermore, for celebrities that are as exploited for their physical bodies as often as the Kardashian family is, they are shirking an opportunity to reframe the narrative around healthy weight. Hence, teens are told that looking skinny defines your worth. This messaging is superficial, heartbreaking for many, and can be deadly for those who suffer with life-threatening eating disorders.

And it’s not just teen girls who are affected. Research shows that young men also experience body dissatisfaction and depression as a result of viewing media images. And this body dissatisfaction can lead to unhealthy, excessive exercising among male teens.

Positive Celebrity Influence on Teen Body Image

However, some celebrities influence the body-image discussion for the better. For example, the singer Lorde called out a Photoshopped image of herself on Twitter. She noted that one photo showed her with “perfect” skin while the other was real. “Remember, flaws are ok,” she tweeted.

Other celebrities, including Rihanna, Beyoncé, Melissa McCarthy, and Jennifer Lawrence have spoken out against the ideals of beauty promoted by the entertainment and fashion industries.

“You shouldn’t be pressured into trying to be thin by the fashion industry, because they only want models that are like human mannequins. You have to remember that it’s not practical or possible for an everyday woman to look like that. It’s not realistic and it’s not healthy.” —Rihanna

Substance Use and Celebrity Influence s

Celebrities influence teens in other ways as well. When stars post images of themselves drinking or smoking on social media, they normalize substance use. Furthermore, they make it appear attractive and cool. This is one way that social media can have a negative impact on teen mental health .

Moreover, teens often idolize celebrities and want to be like them. Therefore, if they see images on Instagram of a favorite singer or actor using drugs or drinking, they might be tempted to do so as well.

For example, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study looked at teenagers who frequently listen to music that contains references to marijuana. Subsequently, they found that these teens are more likely to use the drug than teens with less exposure to such lyrics.

In addition, for every hour that American teens listen to music, they hear more than three references to different brand names of alcohol. Researchers say that this might contribute to teen drinking. In addition, researchers at Dartmouth Medical School found that movie characters who smoke cigarettes influence teens to try smoking. Therefore, media influence on youth can contribute to risk-taking behaviors.

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Celebrities Can Raise Awareness and Reduce Stigma

Many celebrities are open about their struggles with addiction and mental health. As a result, they help to reduce stigma and raise awareness. For example, before reportedly entering rehab after an apparent drug overdose earlier this summer, Demi Lovato released a song about relapse, titled “Sober.” Consequently, the song inspired young people nationwide to open up about their substance abuse and mental health challenges.

Lovato has struggled for years with drug abuse, alcoholism, depression, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders . While her recovery continues, her song helped increase understanding around relapse and addiction. For many people, relapse is part of the recovery journey. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to address the underlying issues and build better coping strategies.

In addition, pop star singer Ariana Grande has been frank about her battle with PTSD and anxiety following a bombing at a concert venue while she was performing. Moreover, the model Bella Hadid has shared about her social anxiety. And England’s Prince Harry has spoken publicly about the trauma of losing his mother, Princess Diana. Subsequently, he and Prince William formed the Heads Together initiative . The project tackles stigma, raises awareness, and provides help for people with mental health challenges.

These are just a few of the many celebrities who have shared their struggles with the world. As a result, celebrities influence the public’s understanding of these issues.

How to Talk to Teens About Celebrity Influence

How does media influence teens? Because pop culture plays such a big role in teens’ lives, celebrities influence the way teens think and what they talk about. Therefore, parents can use celebrities’ experiences as avenues for talking about sensitive subjects.

Thus, celebrity anorexia cases offer opportunities to talk to teens about how dangerous the “thin ideal” can be. And they can discuss healthy ways to stay fit and eat well. Moreover, stars who speak out about coping with mental illnesses demonstrate that people with such diagnoses can be successful and happy.

Parents might ask teens what they admire about the stars they follow. What qualities do they want to emulate? Perhaps creativity, passion, or dedication? What can they learn from the lives of celebrities who have struggled with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or substance use?

Some teens are upset when they find out about a celebrity’s struggles. Therefore, parents can offer a different viewpoint: Stars who share their stories are examples of courage, honesty, and authenticity. Moreover, their vulnerability makes them stronger. And they often receive tremendous support and love after opening up. In this way, they serve as role models for youth.

However, some celebrities are unable to overcome mental health conditions. The deaths this year of designer Kate Spade and television personality Anthony Bourdain brought renewed attention to mental illness and suicide . Therefore, the message for teens is that people who are suffering must seek professional treatment as soon as possible.

In conclusion, celebrities are really people. Thus, they experience real struggles. But because they are in the public eye, teens have the opportunity to learn from them. And parents can help them sort through the information and take away a healthy message.

Key Takeaways

• Celebrities have a powerful impact on how teens view themselves and how they see the world.
• A survey found that 80 percent of teen girls compare themselves to images they see of celebrities. Almost half of those reported that celebrity images make them feel dissatisfied with the way they look.
• Growing numbers of celebrities are speaking out against the ideals of beauty promoted by the entertainment and fashion industries. Many celebrities are open about their struggles with addiction and mental health. As a result, they help to reduce stigma and raise awareness.
• Celebrities are real people with real struggles. Teens can learn from their experiences, including when and how to seek help.

Frequently Asked Questions About Celebrity Influence

Celebrities can be good or bad role models for teens. Celebrities glamorize unhealthy fads and behaviors and encourage unrealistic body image standards. On the other hand, some celebrities choose to use their status to counteract harmful cultural messages, by reducing stigma around a particular issue or speaking out honestly about their own struggles.

Teens are in the process of determining their own values, beliefs and goals independent of their parents. It’s natural for teens to look up to celebrities, and celebrities who use their status responsibly can help shape the course of a teen’s life for the better.

Absolutely. Celebrities can inspire a young person to achieve goals beyond what they observe in their immediate community. They can motivate teens to engage with community causes and live a healthy lifestyle. Their impact is not limited to success stories. Celebrities can also be role models for how to get help for mental health issues or substance use disorder.

The best role model for a teen is someone with a passion for what they do, solid values, and the ability to inspire others. Any person who can connect with a teen in these ways can be a role model—whether it’s a parent, a coach, a neighbor, or a distant celebrity.

Pediatrics. 2016 Jul;138(1).  J Applied Business Research. 2013 Jan; 29(1):45–50. Psychol Bull. 2008 May;134(3):460–76. J Abnormal Psychol. 103: 836–840.  Cogent Social Sci. 2016; 2(1). J Soc Clin Psychol. 2008 Mar; 27(3): 279–310. Pediatrics. 2009 Jul; 124(1): 135–143. Addiction. 2010 Mar; 105(3): 515–523. Addiction. 2012 Mar;107(3):557–66. 

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Question of the Week: Should celebrities be considered role models or heroes?

By Rionna Putman

Celebrities’ main jobs are to entertain us as they are on television, the Internet and magazines. They never signed up to be role models, neither good nor bad.

Although they may influence many kids, youth and young adults, I believe that the parents should be the role models in our lives.

People in our society need to focus on themselves and less on famous celebrities. Sure they may make mistakes, but who doesn’t?

The main difference is that when we make mistakes, it’s not a headline in a newspaper.

I can imagine that celebrities have low self-esteem and do some of the bad things they do because of how they were raised.

They are used to being let down, and hated no matter what they do because everybody has their own opinion on anything they do.

Yes, I believe it would be nice if celebrities would be good influences all the time but it’s never going to happen.

We should also take into consideration that the press makes stories and scenarios seem worse than they really are.

How is the public supposed to know what’s the truth and what isn’t? Therefore, before we go and judge people, we should walk a mile in their shoes and see what it’s like.

By Tristan Wiltrout

Salisbury-Elk Lick

Some celebrities could be considered role models or heroes, others should not.

However, nobody should be considered a role model simply because they are a celebrity.

Instead, celebrities should be judged based on what they are famous for, as well as how they present themselves to the public.

Most celebrities are famous for some talent or ability. If there is anything worth looking up to a celebrity for, that is usually it.

In fact, this aspect of a celebrity can even be seen as a source of inspiration entirely separate of the actual person.

For example, if there is an artist that has made very questionable life choices, but their music still has a positive message, somebody can still want to emulate their creative talent without agreeing with everything that they have done.

Like any role model, we should observe celebrities for their admirable traits, recognize their flaws, and try to find some useful insight about ourselves using both.

They’re still just people, and while the media may choose to exaggerate their traits for entertainment purposes, they shouldn’t be looked at with rose-tinted glasses just because they are well-known.

By Abby Cover

Conemaugh Township

When thinking of the word “celebrity” you may think of people such as, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.

These celebrities might not have the best reputation or be able to be considered role models or heroes.

On the other hand, there are celebrities who have selfless qualities and truly impact our society for the better such as Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie or Will Smith.

A hero is a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements or commendable qualities.

Whereas, a role model is an admirable person looked to by others as an example to strive to be like.

Some celebrities most certainly fit into either one of these categories, however, when in the world’s spotlight, many celebrities develop a poor reputation.

I do not believe celebrities should be idolized or worshiped as much as they are; however, some of them have achieved great things which indeed make them a role model or even a hero to some.

By Lindsay Walker

The question “should celebrities be considered role models or heroes” actually raises a better question that must be answered first: should anyone be placed on a pedestal and regarded as a role model or hero to another?

First, one must realize that no one “signs up” to be a hero or role model. Miley Cyrus did not sign her recording contract to be a role model to young girls, she signed it to make music.

Those who point fingers and say she is a “bad role model” or “bad influence” on their children clearly do not realize that it is not a celebrity’s job to show some random child the way to success.

On the opposite side of this argument, celebrities that do present themselves as heroes or role models are also appreciated, however, it must be recognized that they are only human, and are going to make mistakes, and inevitably mess up from time to time.

However, this is how they become defined as role models: by the way they handle failure and hardships.

Those in the limelight do not always choose to be role models or heroes, and honestly, it isn’t in their job description to do so.

So, before you condemn those in Hollywood for their behavior, you must ask yourself: if you were in their position, would you be any better a role model yourself?

By Sara Sredy

I believe that it is important in today’s society for children to have positive role models. Y

oung and impressionable children need someone they can look up to and model their behavior after.

Often times, children’s role models include athletes, family members or celebrities.

However, many celebrities are not the proper positive role models that the youth of America need in their lives.

While there are many celebrities that do good for people across the entire globe, they tend to not get as much media attention as those who display destructive and inappropriate behavior.

These celebrities are more talked about because their irresponsibility is more interesting to the media than the positive actions of famous people like Beyonce, who works for the advancements of gender equality.

Seeing reckless celebrities on television getting attention causes many kids to act out and follow the bad example those on TV set. While we should acknowledge the good things many celebrities do, we should not admire their every move and children should not be encouraged to look up to them.

By Haley Beahr

Some celebrities are more respectable than others whenever they behave decently in the eyes of the public. Even though some people may consider the wiser celebrities to be role models, they should never be revered as heroes.

The definition of a hero is “a person… idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.” It is perfectly acceptable for a child or teenager to look up to their favorite singer or actor simply because they admire them as a person, but someone like that should never be idolized.

Real heroes are the people that risk their lives for our nation; people that endanger themselves for the well-being of others. A person who plays a soldier on the big screen should certainly not be compared to the real thing.

Celebrities can undoubtedly be influential to younger people, and in that respect they may be considered role models, but the real heroes here are the ones that experience movies in reality.

By Alexandra Davis

Berlin Brothersvalley

Many people look up to celebrities. For some, they are role models or even heroes; however, not every single celebrity should be considered a hero or a role model.

Only a select few should have the honor of those titles. Celebrities like Sadie Robertson or Tim Tebow should be considered role models because of the life that they live.

In my opinion, the honor of being called a hero should be left to our firemen, police officers, veterans, doctors, or even everyday ordinary people who decide to make a difference in the world.

Heroes are world-changers, and our role models should support our values. Some celebrities do embody the qualities of a hero or a role model, but many fall short and get caught up in the life of the public eye.

Celebrity, youth culture and the question of role models

Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance, University of Salford

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Kirsty Fairclough does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The recent 2015 MTV Video Music Awards event was notable – not for the recognition of award recipients, but for the public spat between host Miley Cyrus and hip-hop artist Nicki Minaj.

Whether real or staged, the hurling of insults and aggressive behaviour dominated mainstream press coverage of the ceremony surely much to the delight of MTV.

Both Minaj and Cyrus are known for courting controversy and have been criticised for being “bad” role models for young people, particularly girls and young women. But what if the mainstream media considered that young people actually use incidents such as this and celebrity culture in a wider sense in a whole host of complex ways to negotiate their identities?

A well-publicised survey of UK parents with children under ten years old voted both Cyrus and Minaj as the worst role models for their daughters. This came even before the recent spat.

The dislike of Minaj and Cyrus appears to be centred on their penchant for dressing provocatively and being outspoken about their sexuality. In predictable contrast, the Duchess of Cambridge was considered the most positive influence on young girls. The worst male offenders were musicians and performers Kanye West, Justin Bieber and former One Direction band member Zayn Malik.

Obsessed with celebrity

Discourse in this vein is not a new phenomenon. Musicians and performers have long been considered to influence young people in negative ways. In the 21st century, the impact of celebrity culture on society, especially on young people, has come under scrutiny.

Are today’s youth obsessed with celebrity? Is this detrimental to society? Can celebrities ever have a positive influence on young people? Does celebrity culture really matter? These are complex and plural questions to which there are few, if any, concrete answers. However, what is routinely ignored in mainstream media is young people’s sense of agency.

Much of the research and commentary surrounding such questions is centred on how celebrity culture may impact upon health and well being in terms of eating disorders or mental health issues.

The rise and dominance of social media sites such as Instagram and their links to the glorification of “super-skinny” celebrities have been cited as influences in the rise of eating disorders in young people.

The British Psychological Society recently said experts warned that youngsters are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with images permeating from a celebrity culture in which thin bodies are celebrated, larger ones are ridiculed and children are sexualised.

Sense of identity

It is logical to suggest that continual exposure to celebrity culture impacts in negative ways on some young people’s senses of identity. This may well affect health and well being, but how this happens and to what degree is incredibly complex. We must also consider the ways in which the media choose to present rather narrow ideas about how celebrities – particularly female ones – should behave and how they should look.

Those whose behaviour falls outside of these narrow ideas are often condemned as being wayward, controversial and difficult. Indeed young people may well negotiate their own gendered identities through the celebrity and by talking about them with their peers. The Celeb Youth project in the United Kingdom is an excellent example of much needed academic research into the field of celebrity and identity. It focused on the influence of celebrities in the construction of young people’s aspirations.

What is omitted from the media conversation about celebrities as role models is that many young people are more than capable of making informed, intelligent choices about which celebrities they follow and are becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which the media positions celebrities against each other in terms of race and class.

Young people may connect with those that they feel best represent them as well as those that do not. Indeed, it is also fair to suggest that many young people have no interest in celebrity culture at all.

It is the active and complex use of celebrity culture by young people to negotiate the world around them that is often lost in favour of sweeping generalisations about negative impacts. Perhaps rather than eliminating celebrity culture from the classroom, it could be used productively and constructively to allow young people to make sense of the world they are growing up in.

• Miley Cyrus
• Celebrity culture
• Nicki Minaj

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Why Celebrities Should Be a Positive Role Model

Living within a culture that values fame and stardom, celebrities enjoy followership, attention, and admiration from their fans. It is not surprising that the appreciation of a famous person’s work may expand to include interest in their lifestyle and the desire to emulate it. Coincidentally, it is often the most pliable, impressionable people – children, adolescents, and young adults – who make up the majority of celebrity fanbases. In their blind adoration for a favorite star and during the life period where finding mentorship is of high importance, they often choose celebrities as role models. The question arises as to whether famous people should indeed have a responsibility to lead by a good example or be allowed the freedom to make any choices, no matter how morally questionable they are. This essay argues that while legally, celebrities have the right to live their lives as they see fit, from a moral standpoint, they should be aware of their leverage and use it to meet higher ends.

One of the reasons why celebrities should pay attention to their image and reputation now more than ever is the rise of social media. Previously, even though celebrities were in the limelight of public attention, the speed at which the information would spread was slow. Readers and viewers only had news highlights, occasional documentaries, and magazine stories to learn about their idols. The Internet and social media changed the situation dramatically as now a single post can gain millions of views in a matter of hours. At the same time, fans now become even more intimate witnesses to the previously private parts of celebrities’ lives. This level of access is only one click away, which explains their massive followership. According to Clement (2019), the most popular Instagram accounts belong to celebrities. The football player Cristiano Ronaldo is followed by 238 million people, the pop singer Ariana Grande – 203 million, and the makeup mogul Kylie Jenner – 196 million. Famous people have never been as visible as they are today, which gives them an unprecedented amount of leverage.

Furthermore, researchers observe record social media use rates among young people who, as explained previously, are the most impressionable and malleable demographic. Clement (2019) reports that the majority of the global Internet users who use social media to keep up with and follow celebrities are young people. On the Internet, celebrities reach a whopping 72% of users aged 16-24 and 64% of individuals between 25 and 34 years old. Aside from teenagers’ inclination to seek role models, such figures can also be explained by the demographic’s increased activity on social media as compared to people in other age groups. Orben (2020) synthesizes evidence gathered over the last ten years and reports that between 69 and 90% of teenagers aged 13-17 have at least one social media account. While the healthy recreational screen time is no more than two hours, teens easily spend up to seven hours per day on their gadgets (Orben, 2020). Taking all these points into consideration, it is safe to assume that it is young people who celebrities reach on the Internet the most.

The youth of today does not just admire celebrities – they are seeking to mimic their habits and adopt their values. Young people are not yet set in their ways, and as they do the necessary soul-searching, it is the lifestyle of the rich and famous that often becomes their North star. In part, this process is natural as the onset of puberty is often marked with a young person’s departure, if not an active rejection of their parent’s authority. While youth turn to peers for approval, they choose celebrities as the often unattainable but desired ideal. Gergely (2017) discusses this phenomenon from the standpoint of the social learning theory put forward by the renowned psychologist Bandura. According to the social learning theory, a person acquires new behaviors through observing and imitating others (Gergely, 2017). Among other things, observational learning is persistent due to its efficiency and “time effectiveness.” As Gergely (2017) puts it, an observation often occurs instead of experimentation. Thus, youth lives vicariously through celebrities and may later make similar choices if they are happy with the perceived outcomes of their lifestyle.

Having said that, it is important to note that celebrities are responsible for the normalization of many behaviors that may have been perceived as unusual or unwanted some time ago. It is not a secret that celebrities set beauty trends that their followers, especially females, try to emulate. Such trends range from innocuous such as nail design or haircuts to extremely invasive, potentially unhealthy, and posing a danger to one’s mental and physical health. Jung and Hwang (2016) find that North American female mass media consumers are especially vulnerable to social “crazes.” The researchers name TV shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians and its stars as some of the most influential trendsetters. In the absence of any tangible talent, they are known for their endless beauty transformations and surgical enhancements, which is interpreted by viewers as a predisposition, if not key, to success.

From the standpoint of the social learning theory, their viewers do socialize through TV stars. They take note of rewards and punishments following particular choices and behaviors. For instance, the family’s youngest member, Kylie Jenner, came into prominence after using the infamous lip fillers to give her lips a fuller look (Jung & Hwang, 2016). Though the makeup mogul denied all accusations, it soon became obvious that she owed her makeover to cosmetic interventions. Jung and Hwang (2016) cite a source that reports a 50% increase in lip filler requests from cosmetology clients. Similarly, the number of buttock lifts surged by 86%, potentially owing its popularity to some of the Kardashian family members. In other words, celebrities inspire fans to pursue their fabricated ideas and resort to making unnecessary changes, some of which may as well be permanent.

Indeed, celebrities’ influence has not only an immediate but also a long-term effect on many aspects of society. In recent years, celebrities have become more political than ever, especially in highly polarized Democratic countries such as the United States. If previously, entertainers chose to only speak out about their art, fashion choices, and personal life, today they make bold statements and are not afraid to share their views. Furthermore, those who abstain from making their position clear may be labeled apathetic and indifferent. It seems that celebrities have the potential to make a difference in the political arena: 11% of people admit that their endorsement can influence their choice of candidates (Zilinsky et al., 2020). Zilinsky et al. (2020) discovered that celebrities’ political endorsement did not lower followers’ engagement. Fans were not annoyed with political posts – it is quite the opposite. As observed by Zilinsky et al. (2020), political messages either cheerleading one candidate or criticize the other would lead to a surge in reposts. To recapitulate, celebrities do impact their fans’ political choices, which, in turn, shapes the political situation on a larger scale.

One should point out that celebrities’ influence is not inherently positive or negative as the only definite fact is its undeniable existence. While previously, this essay focused on the rather dismal side of the celebrity culture, it is important to counterweight it with the positive examples of famous people being role models. Bridging the gaps of social inequalities is one of the things that celebrities can and should do by either directly contributing to a cause or existing as a lived example of overcoming adversity. In their paper, Adamson and Kelan (2019) focus on the issue of gender equality and, in particular, poor female representation in the business field. The scholars single out women who they refer to as “female heroes.” Their key characteristics are their “confidence to jump over gendered barriers, control in managing these barriers, and courage to push through them (Adamson & Kelan, 2019, p. 986).” According to Adamson and Kelan (2019), the same leadership behaviors in men and women are interpreted differently. The autobiographical narratives of female executives can give girls the perceived permission to act out their ambitions. Undoubtedly, when given such enormous leverage, celebrities should utilize it to meet higher ends and address meaningful causes.

Surely, one may say that celebrities are not the main agents of socialization, and therefore, their influence may be so minuscule, it might as well be negligible. This statement is not completely wrong as people and systems do influence the lives of young people to a varying degree. The social learning theory presents a hierarchy in which family and community are seen as the most influential, followed by the peer group, and only then by agents such as the media. However, what should not be overlooked is the rise of the media and stardom in the last two decades as compared to the time when the social learning theory was first introduced. Gergely (2017) provides supporting evidence for this claim as well as highlights the importance of role models for teenagers. The researcher reports that between 2012 and 2016, the share of teenagers that had a person that they held as ideal increased from roughly 50% to 75%. One-third of participants named a celebrity, which included athletes, singers, actors, models, and others, as their role models. Therefore, while the media is not the only influence, its leverage cannot be dismissed.

Another popular rebuttal to the points made in this essay is the appeal to autonomy and self-agency in humans. Truly, being an independent thinker is a rewarding path to choose and a protective factor against many harmful decisions. Fans of celebrities have the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to blindly follow the trends or be their people. To a certain degree, this argument is solid, and yet, it dismisses an important fact grounded in biological reality. Sherman et al. (2018) argue that the teenage and young adult brain cannot be compared to the brain of a more mature person. In particular, scholars point out that the younger adolescent brain is highly sensitive to affect and reward processing. Youth react more sharply to social rewards and cultural cues and let them drive their behavior and moderate their decision-making. These processes are inevitable because such social learning and attunement to one’s surroundings are important for transitioning into adulthood. Hence, young fans can exert control over themselves only to a certain extent, leaving them vulnerable to the dangers of toxic celebrity culture.

The logical question arises as to how much autonomy celebrities should have to make personal choices. It is argued that behind their public mask, they are humans like everyone else and should have the right to live their lives as they see fit. Surely, by law, they are granted such freedoms: they can marry, buy property, start and end careers, develop businesses, and do many other things. However, the situation becomes much more nuanced and complex than that when celebrities make a profit off or cause harm by telling lies or misrepresenting products or services. For example, some time ago, weight loss tea was largely advertised on Instagram by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Iggy Azalea, Cardi B, and a few others. They insisted on the miraculous effects of the beverage and the effortless weight loss. In the meantime, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2015) warns consumers against such products, stating that they are primarily diuretics and laxatives with a host of side effects. Thus, celebrities’ rights should end where regular people’s rights begin, and those are the rights to truthful and complete information.

Lastly, the negative impact of celebrity culture is not occasional, local, or sporadic. It is profound, and it shapes society in such ways that consequences are hard to overcome. Srivastava et al. (2018) name mass media as one of the key drivers behind the mental health crisis in the West. Celebrities show the idealized version of their life that is not attainable nor even existing in the real world. By comparing themselves to celebrities, regular people may develop inadequate expectations of themselves, careers, relationships, and the world on the whole. In turn, depression and anxiety are social ills that hurt economic growth, the integrity of communities, and put a heavy burden on health care. To think, celebrities are not only setting trends in beauty and fashion – they are among those who steer the direction in which society evolves or regresses.

Rising to prominence means increased public scrutiny where every personal choice a celebrity makes, be it family, financial, social, or political, receives wide media coverage. Due to the rise of social media, regular people become an almost intimate witnesses to the inner workings of a celebrity’s life well beyond their artistry and official public appearances. It is not surprising that fans adopt celebrities’ values, try to emulate their lifestyle, and even have medical procedures to look like their idols. Famous people’s influence extends to political and social matters as now they more openly endorse or criticize candidates. Coincidentally, it is the most pliable and sensitive demographic – teenagers and young adults – who are reached and affected by celebrities the most. Given the leverage that famous people have over the future generation, they need to take more responsibility for the image they are translating and the values they promote. Their freedom to self-expression ends where the rights of their followers begin, and the latter deserves to receive reliable information and stay in good mental and physical health.

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Clement, J. (2019). Share of internet users worldwide who use social media to keep up with and follow celebrities as of 1st quarter 2018, by age group . Statista. 

Gergely, O. (2017). The beautiful stranger – Szekler teenagers’ role models . Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Communicatio, 4 , 93–107.

Jung, J., & Hwang, C. S. (2016). Associations between attitudes toward cosmetic surgery, celebrity worship, and body image among South Korean and US female college students. Fashion and Textiles , 3 (1), 1-14. Web.

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Persuasive Writing: Are Celebrities Good Role Models?

This article contains an example of persuasive writing: are celebrities good role models for young people? In addition, it contains some annotations with tips for students to follow the progress of the piece, and some of the devices included.

The speech isn’t perfect by any stretch! It is a combination of my ideas and some student work, and so it might give ‘middle aged mummy’ vibes rather than feeling like the authentic voice of a teenager. Nonetheless, I think it’s helpful for students to see how to structure a piece of persuasive writing and to use language devices to persuade the audience. 

For more on teaching persuasive writing, read this blog post , and download my free Persuasive Writing Guide for students.

This is a sample answer for the CCEA GCSE English Language Unit 1 Task 1 from January 2019 .

Write a speech for your classmates persuading them to agree with you on the topic: “Are celebrities the best role models for teenagers?”

Friends, classmates, fellow scrollers in the snap-tweet-gram-osphere, gather round and lend me your ears! Today, I stand before you to present the truth on a topic that often stirs debate: “Are celebrities the best role models for teenagers?” Let us dive into the depths of this discussion and explore why I believe they might not always be the shining beacons of inspiration that they are made out to be, and that we must find our own way in the world. Sit up and pay attention because the next three minutes will convince you that you are worth more than fangirling over these fake and fiendish figures.

Greet your audience (remember, this task is class ‘writing for purpose and audience’.

‘lend me your ears’ is from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ … you can use and recycle famous phrases to hook your listeners.

Use alliteration with intention to create sound effects (dive/depths/discussion, fangirling/fake/fiendish figures).

Use a signpost at the start of your paragraphs to signal a new idea in your argument (first and foremost).

‘Let’s ponder this:’ invites the listeners in to the discussion. Following it up with a question (‘what makes a role model truly exceptional?’) creates a point of engagement for them.

Use imagery (‘guiding us through the maze of everyday challenges’) to paint a picture for the audience.

First and foremost, let’s ponder this: what makes a role model truly exceptional? Is it someone who lives a life far removed from our own realities, splashing their extravagant escapades across glossy magazines? Is it someone who was born into a rich or famous family? Is it someone who has the perfect body, hair and skin? Or is it someone who walks beside us, guiding us through the maze of everyday challenges? I dare say the latter holds more weight.

Help the audience to grasp the reality of your point of view with a personal story/anecdote. Make it emotive and specific so that it really persuades your listeners that you know what you are talking about.

“Let me fast forward …’ is a nice structural device to avoid rambling on too much. It holds the listeners’ attention by helping them to follow the organisation of your speech.

Link back to the topic at the end of a long point, to show the examiner that you are still focused and to remind the listener what to think.

Year 11, let me tell you about my friend Jessica. We’ve been best friends since nursery school and she is truly a beautiful person, inside and out. Every major experience of my life so far has been enriched by her presence. But when we began P7, Jessica got a phone and I think that was the turning point. She secretly signed up for Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok; her parents wouldn’t allow her to join, but she always finds a way to get what she wants! Jessica followed all her favourite pop stars and celebrities. 

Let me fast forward another year to the end of first year … Jessica had changed her hair, she had stopped eating healthily and, in my opinion, was only a fraction of the person she used to be. She was obsessed with looking like, talking like and acting like Kylie Jenner. And it ruined her life! In the end, Jessica had to miss a month of school and get hospital treatment at only twelve years old because of the issues created by her obsession with her celebrity ‘role model’. 

Does this story shock you? Have you experienced anything similar? Jessica is now much healthier, but I hope her story makes you sit up and take notice! Celebrities are not good role models for young people!

Instead of fixating solely on the glittering allure of celebrities, let’s turn our gaze toward the unsung heroes in our own lives. Our parents, siblings, teachers, and community members — these are the individuals who have shaped us, nurtured our growth, and celebrated our victories. They are the ones who offer advice, lend a listening ear, and teach us the importance of integrity and resilience.

Use triplets (groups of three words or three phrases) to create flow in your sentences e.g. ‘shaped us, nurtured our growth, and celebrated our victories’.

Use a quote from an expert to support your opinion. This makes you sound more reliable, and therefore helps to convince the listeners.

Experts in child psychology have echoed this sentiment. Dr. Michelle Anthony, renowned child development expert, posits that a true role model should possess qualities such as kindness, empathy, and honesty. These traits are not necessarily guaranteed in the world of celebrity culture, where the emphasis often lies on material possessions and superficial appearances. So, my friends, let us not be swayed by the smoke and mirrors of fame.

Now, picture this: You’re facing a tough decision, unsure of which path to take. Who would you rather turn to for guidance? The glamorous starlet who dazzles on the silver screen or your best friend who has weathered storms and shared your joys? Come on Year 11. I know you know the answer! Kylie Jenner doesn’t care about your GCSE choices. Erling Haaland isn’t going to help you with your Maths homework. KSI isn’t going to respond to your love-life dilemma. The real role models in our lives will though. The friends, teachers, grandparents, aunts and older cousins will help, support and guide you. They will give you good advice and be there to comfort your in hard times. These people are the role models. These people are the ones you should look up to. These people are the ones who should command your love and attention.

‘Picture this’ is a lovely phrase to invite your listeners in to the topic and paint a picture for them. They become more engaged by imagining something for themselves.

Use repetition at the start of a series of sentences (These people … /These people …/These people …). This is called anaphora and is very easy to include but very effective in the art of persuasion.

Include a counter argument. This shows that you are not naive – you know that there are other ways of looking at the topic, but they are not as accurate as your opinion. Make sure you don’t end up agreeing with the other side. Convince your listeners by spinning the other argument round so that it sounds weak and inadequate. 

Now, I know that some of you will disagree, saying that celebrities have achieved fame and fortune through talent and hard work. These are admirable qualities indeed! And while I agree with you to a point, I have to point out the obvious problem: admiring someone at the very top of their game and aspiring to be like them can surely only lead you to disappointment, feelings of inadequacy and a spiral of self-doubt. These celebrities spend money we can’t even imagine, and have a team of people working very hard to make it all look effortless. This is not something that us teenagers can mimic. When we try to live like a celebrity, we fail. Friends, don’t set yourself up for failure in this way. Aspirations are great, but they have to be realistic, otherwise you will fall for the falsehoods that social media push on us.

So, Year 11, let my words linger in your mind like a sweet melody. I want you to repeat after me: substance over style, authenticity over illusion, and sincerity over spectacle. Remember, my dear classmates, we have the power to forge our own destinies, to carve our own paths, guided by those who truly inspire us in the truest sense of the word.

Keep referring to your audience by their name or collective name. This holds their attention and reminds the examiner that you are still fully focused on the task.

Include a call to action. This gives the listeners a motivation to do something specific, making them more likely to remember and agree with your point of view.

In conclusion, while celebrities may have their merits and entertain us in various ways, let us not rush to crown them as the epitome of role models for impressionable teenagers. Instead, let’s turn to the everyday heroes who surround us, those whose footsteps we can genuinely follow and whose values align with our own aspirations. By focusing on genuine connections and genuine examples of integrity, we can shape a future that reflects the very best of our own hearts and minds. Think of a person in your life who you respect and admire. Turn your attention away from celebrities and towards someone much closer to home. Now learn from them.

So, my friends, I implore you to embark on this journey with open minds and open hearts. Together, let us champion the true heroes, both seen and unseen, who inspire us to be the very best versions of ourselves. Thank you for lending me your ears, and may our collective wisdom guide us toward a brighter, more authentic future!

Finish with a flourish! Try to sound confident, clear and persuasive at the end with a few more devices: triplets, positive language and a repetition of the opening quote, ‘lend me your ears’.

Download free persuasive writing guide:

Check out ThinkLit's personal writing resources:

Are celebrities good role models?

Many people look up to celebrities. Some fans even try to imitate the behaviour and looks of their favourite actress or actor. It is also not unusual to find someone so fascinated with a movie star that they fall in love with them. However, is this influence of celebrities a good thing?

Celebrities can serve as good role models because they serve as an inspiration for kids, bring awareness to burning issues, and often participate in environmental safety projects. On the other hand, many famous people are inclined towards unhealthy habits, such as substance abuse. Additionally, they are often involved in scandals, including family issues, or share controversial comments on delicate subjects.

With this being said, let’s take a closer look at celebrities and see whether they are good role models or not.

Celebrities who inspire kids

A lot of celebrities have managed to inspire kids. Many of them are willing to use their fame for a good cause and help out those in need. Just to name a few, we have Angelina Jolie, who adopted her first son from Cambodia; Lady Gaga, who founded the Born This Way Foundation; and Leonardo DiCaprio, who is a big supporter of environmental safety.

In order to bring awareness to these noble causes, numerous celebrities are willing to put their private lives on display. They also sometimes spend vast chunks of their celebrity net worth , financially supporting those who need money for basic needs.

Being a role model is not an easy job, and it requires a lot of dedication and hard work. Kids can learn a lot from the good deeds of celebrities. However, some stars have become famous for all the wrong reasons.

Celebrities who are famous for bad reasons

Unfortunately, some celebrities have achieved their status not because they are good role models but because they were willing to do anything to get famous . Some of these people seem to be very talented and even have many fans worldwide, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook their bad behaviour.

For example, Lindsay Lohan has been in the spotlight for almost two decades now. However, she has been involved in numerous scandals during this time. She has caused scandals both on and off camera and has been accused of abusing drugs and alcohol.

Lohan has also been arrested multiple times, including when she was charged with stealing a necklace from a jewellery store. In addition, she was once detained for being under the influence of alcohol behind the wheel. She’s not an obvious role model.

There are also those celebrities who seem to enjoy courting controversy. They often say things that are considered offensive and later apologise for what they said or did. While some make honest mistakes, others are likely doing it on purpose because they know it will get them more publicity.

Celebrities who have struggled with addiction

Some celebrities have had a tough life, and they turned to various addictive substances to escape reality. For example, Amy Winehouse struggled with addiction for years before passing away at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning . The singer also had bulimia and suffered from mental health issues.

Another celebrity who struggled with addictions is Demi Moore. She has been in rehab multiple times for abusing drugs and alcohol. Despite all these issues, she has maintained her popularity because she has never lost her looks or acting skills. Nowadays, Moore’s addiction is reportedly behind her, and she is sober once again.

Many stars have struggled with severe eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia. They are often driven towards these dangerous habits because they want to be skinny and look their best.

The bottom line

While there certainly are many celebrities who struggle with addictions or do not act responsibly on camera, it’s not possible to say that all of them are bad role models. Just because some of them act inappropriately on camera or make mistakes in their private lives, they shouldn’t be judged.

Many celebrities are actually fantastic people who help make the world a better place by using their fame for good causes or helping others out when they need it the most. Moreover, they do their best to change our society for the better.

When it comes to “imitating” other people, it’s probably best to stick with those who we know personally to be good models.

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Essays About Role Models: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Check our guide, including top examples and prompts on essays about role models to write a high-quality piece about your idol and motivator.

How do you label someone a “role model”? Do you look for exemplary qualities like high intelligence, good leadership skills, and confidence? Role models are critical in personality development and life. For example, research proves that adolescents with positive role models, primarily those they know personally, do better academically and have more courage and self-respect. 

A role model is someone who excels in their field of expertise, inspires you to be a better person, and motivates you to follow an excellent path. They influence your life decisions and encourage you to become a lifelong learner. Who individuals decide to be their role models vary. Although most pick their parents , others also choose prominent people like celebrities, politicians, or singers. 

If you want to start writing about your role model, here are five sample essays to inspire you:

1. Best Role Model in Life by Prasanna

2. my role model: essay about my father by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. word essay on true role models by pragati ghosh, 4. the role model qualities of martin luther king junior: leadership, courage, and self-discipline by anonymous on studymoose.com, 5. my mother: my inspiration and my role model by ankita yadav, 1. why should i have a role model, 2. my role models, 3. what is a role model, 4. disney characters and role models, 5. celebrities and singers as role models, 6. characteristics of a good role model, 7. how do role models affect young people.

“But for me, a role model is someone who motivates me and influences me to be a good human and positive person in life, who gives me a supporting hand to walk and run to achieve my dreams and goals. Role model is not someone who is full of ego, attitude or full of selfishness.”

Prasanna introduces her role model A.R. Rahman as someone who stimulates her desire to be an excellent musician. She mentions how vital it is to look for a role model in the field that you’re interested in. For her, it’s music. Rahman stirs up her passion for learning guitar and reaching the same achievements he had.

She believes anyone can be someone’s role model as long as they are a good person. Prasanna adds that a good role model must help you reach your dreams. She also shares her wish to meet her role model to thank him personally.

Are you interested in music? Check out these 10 essays about music .

“He is the one I always admire in my life. When I have children, I want to be similar to my father to do for my kids how he takes care of me.”

The essay shows the excellent characteristic of the author’s role model, their father. They describe him as a knowledgeable person who always encourages them to be strong in every situation and supports their goals in life. Further, the writer mentions that their father earns respect and admiration from others because of his hard work in becoming a successful businessman and a reputable human being. 

“A role model is somebody who has influenced us in our lives and whom we try to imitate and learn as we are aspired by them.”

Ghosh’s essay acknowledges that in today’s era, a person’s character, style, body language, virtues, deeds, and actions influence what type of role model they will be for others. She notes that an actual role model has self-confidence and good communication skills, shares similar thoughts with those they inspire, knows how to get credit, and does things with good intentions. She concludes her essay by advising the readers to choose their role models wisely.

“… He was a civil right activist and is one of the reasons why African Americans have rights.”

This essay expounds on Martin Luther King Jr .’s qualities that the author admires. These characteristics pushed the writer to choose him as their most significant role model. The piece recounts how Luther King Jr.’s leadership skills in fighting for equal rights and courage in speaking in front of police officers inspired the writer to be as brave as the activist and Baptist minister. The author also includes that despite being busy, Luther King Jr. finished his work on time because of self-discipline.

“She is a mother, a pilot, a driver, a cook, a good person, all at the same time. I not only want to be a pilot like her but want to copy her overall personality.”

In Yadav’s essay, she discusses how her mother became her role model. Aside from being a hard worker, she points out how she religiously follows schedules to be timely with her firm self-discipline. She believes her mother isn’t only the next Master Chef but also someone with a high sense of fashion. She’s a busy person with style. Yadav’s role model is with her at home – a mother, a mentor, and a perfect friend with a fantastic personality.

7 Writing Prompts for Essays About Role Models

Are you ready to write an essay about your role model? If you don’t have a role model or you’re having trouble coming up with a topic to start your essay writing, feel free to use the prompts below:

Most people, especially students, look for a role model to motivate them to find the right career path. At the same time, this path must also let them focus on goals, develop skills, and build character. Use this prompt to discuss your reasons why you want to have or have a role model. Then, introduce your role model by sharing their characteristics and what makes them special. You might also be interested in these essays about critical thinking.

People have more than one role model. For this prompt, list your heroes and why you consider them as such. Then, pick the top ones and add their lessons’ impact on your life. Finally, you can include some of their inspirational quotes and explain why these sayings resonate with you.

Define what role models are all about and link relevant research or statistics that prove their importance. Then, talk about your understanding of being a role model and what qualities most look for in their role models today. 

Disney characters, especially princesses, are what young girls want to be. Share your stance on the debate of whether it’s okay for kids to use a fictional character as their role model or not. Affix your reasons why. Make your essay more convincing by adding examples, especially if you disagree with the idea that imaginary characters are worth being idolized.

Many look up to different celebrities and singers and consider them their role models. Some take it to the extreme and follow exactly what their idols do. Unfortunately, many become obsessed and follow even the wrong things, thinking they will gather the same fame and status as their idols. They also forget to live their own unique life. First, say something about youngsters worshipping popular artists. Then, add how people can select more positive and influential models to adore.

Discuss the typical characteristics people associate when they think of a “role model.” Then, give examples of these ideal individuals and share your preferences when favoring a role model.

Role models should motivate and inspire the youth to reach their goals and live as good people. Open discourse about the benefits of having a positive role model and how they can help change the unhealthy behaviors of today’s youth. Make your piece more compelling by adding the adverse effects of having a negative role model. 

Excellent grammar and punctuation are crucial to ensuring a good grade in your essay. See our guide to grammar and punctuation  to know more.

For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Are Celebrities a good role model?

The debate surrounding whether famous individuals today make good role models is a highly contested topic. Some argue that certain well-known figures can serve as positive examples by engaging in beneficial activities like assisting in developing countries, donating to charities, and participating in sporting and charitable events. On the other hand, not all celebrities exhibit these commendable qualities; some indulge in reckless behavior, violate laws, and abuse drugs and alcohol. Consequently, doubts arise regarding the suitability of famous people as role models for younger generations. However, actor Johnny Depp stands out as an exceptional exemplar amidst this skepticism. Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, Depp experienced a challenging childhood due to his parents’ divorce when he was eight years old. This tumultuous upbringing led him towards various psychological issues and self-destructive behaviors. Nevertheless, his life took a positive turn when he encountered his first wife Lorri Anne Alison and embarked on his acting career. Starting with “Nightmare on Elm Street” in 1984, Depp went on to star in numerous successful films. In 1999, he welcomed his first child Lily-Rose Depp alongside his new wife Vanessa Paradis.

Unfortunately, she fell seriously ill with a kidney infection and had to stay at Great Ormond Street hospital. Fortunately, she recovered from the illness and Depp was extremely happy. To show his gratitude, Depp began making substantial monetary donations to the hospital. Since then, he has actively participated in numerous fundraisers and charity events, continuously providing financial support to organizations dedicated to helping children. Through these actions, Depp serves as an exceptional role model.

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Anne Hathaway is another individual who embodies extraordinary role modeling qualities. She is a respected Academy Award winner and advocate for human rights. Hathaway has received multiple awards and recognition for her exceptional acting skills, including winning an “Academy Award for Best Actress” for her performance in “Rachael Gets Married.” Additionally, Hathaway actively engages in various charitable endeavors such as St.Jude’s children’s research hospital and the human rights campaign.

In 2007, she bravely shared her personal battle with depression and now devotes her time to assisting others who are fighting the condition without relying on medication or drugs. Hathaway sets an admirable example by providing aid to those in need.

Role models can be found beyond public attention or fame, exemplified by Sir Bill Gates. Known for his business expertise and entrepreneurial brilliance, Gates is regarded as one of the most influential role models.

At the age of 13, Gates created a computer program that allowed players to play tic-tac-toe against the computer. At 17, he and his friend started their own computer company and developed their first computer processor. Despite achieving an impressive SAT score of 1590/1600 and attending Harvard University, Gates dropped out in his second year to focus on Microsoft. Under his leadership, Microsoft became a leading technology company.

In 1994, Gates and his wife Melinda founded “The Bill and Melinda Foundation” with the goal of addressing global poverty. In June 2008, Gates handed over Microsoft to Ray Ozzie for $50 Billion, increasing his net worth to $101 Billion and making him the world’s first “cent billionaire.” With full-time commitment to the foundation, Gates donated £33.5 Billion of his personal fortune to charity.

Gates also collaborated with Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg on a commitment to donate half of their net worth ($42.55 Billion) over time, making it one of the most well-funded charitable organizations globally. This showcases Gates’ selflessness and concern for global issues and others’ welfare.

However, not all celebrities can be role models;Paris Hilton, who gained fame due to her grandfather’s ownership of the “Hilton Hotel” empire, exemplifies individuals who achieve notoriety through illegal means. Renowned for her extravagant lifestyle and constant partying, Paris Hilton faced severe criticism and media backlash on February 3rd, 2007 when an explicit video featuring her engaging in sexual activities with her ex-boyfriend was leaked online. The leaked footage further tarnished Hilton’s image as it revealed her use of racist and derogatory language. Prior to this incident, on January 15th, 2007, she was apprehended for driving under the influence while speeding at twice the speed limit despite already having a suspended license from a previous conviction. Consequently, she received a jail sentence of 45 days but ultimately served only 40 days under house arrest. Despite evading complete legal repercussions for her actions, it is difficult to consider Paris Hilton as a positive role model based solely on her behavior.

Famous individuals, such as Jordan or Katie Price, can also gain notoriety for causing trouble. Price, a glamour model, made headlines when she married singer-songwriter Peter Andre after their relationship began on the TV show “I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here.” They tied the knot in September 2005 and had three children together: Harvey, Junior, and Princess. Unfortunately, their marriage ended in divorce in 2009 after three and a half years. Throughout the divorce proceedings, both Andre and Price were constantly in the media’s spotlight. While Price seemed to enjoy the attention initially, she resorted to sharing sensationalized personal stories with the media to stay relevant once it faded. These stories included claims of being raped by a “famous celebrity” and accusations of secret affairs by Andre. Her dramatic behavior eventually led to her own reality TV show where cameramen followed her while she lived her normal life.

Another example of celebrities becoming infamous is Charlie Sheen. He gained recognition for his role in “Two and a Half Men” and was once the highest-paid actor on TV earning $1.25 million per episode. However, despite his successful career, he experienced a mental breakdown that resulted in multiple stints at rehab within 12 months starting from January 2011.Unfortunately, the treatment attempts mentioned earlier were not successful. Sheen openly made offensive remarks about “Two and a Half Men,” its production crew, and creators. Consequently, he was fired from the show and went through a widely recognized decline. He publicly identified himself as a “warlock” with “tiger blood.”

He later had numerous other incidents, including images of him on a roof, holding illegal weapons and consuming class A drugs. Overall, there exist certain renowned individuals who solely devote themselves to assisting others and unquestionably deserve admiration. Nonetheless, there are also negative celebrity role models who gain fame for all the incorrect motives. In my viewpoint, unless you have personal acquaintance with them, you should refrain from idolizing them. Nevertheless, I do maintain the belief that there are famous individuals worthy of emulation; it merely depends on the person and the aspirations you hold for yourself.

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IELTS essay, topic: Celebrities can be poor role models for teenagers (agree/disagree)

• IELTS Essays - Band 8

This essay topic was seen in a recent IELTS test in Italy .

Nowadays many teenagers have a celebrity who they follow as a role model. Some people think this is not a good idea, because celebrities often set a bad example. Do you agree or disagree?

Sample Band 8 Essay

It is not uncommon for teenagers to worship celebrities. From singers to actors, many young people around the world look up to these stars and attempt to emulate their lifestyles. In my opinion, allowing children to idolize celebrities can often be detrimental, as they frequently set a poor example.

Many of today’s celebrities tend to lack moral values, and they promote behaviour inappropriate for young people. For instance, some music videos feature explicit lyrics glorifying drug use and violence. In addition, the media often reports on celebrities who indulge in excessive partying or drinking alcohol despite being underage. These types of headlines can have a negative influence on impressionable teens who might falsely believe that they should follow suit to appear cool or successful.

Poor morals aren’t the only issue, as many popular stars are also well-known for their irresponsible spending habits. They routinely splurge on luxury items such as designer clothing or expensive cars without any consideration for budgeting or saving money responsibly. This kind of behaviour is dangerous because it is normalizing materialism and teaching teens that costly possessions will bring them happiness instead of focusing on what really matters in life: meaningful relationships, knowledge, and hard work.

To conclude, young adults should keep in mind that society’s perception of fame and fortune is based on temporary, insubstantial things rather than what actually matters. In the grand scheme of things, it would be far more beneficial for teenagers to spend time developing their own set of values rooted in quality education and strong family relationships.

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Sport and Competition

Are athletes good role models.

What are the qualities that make an athlete a good role model?

Posted April 20, 2015 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

What is a role model and what effects do role models have?

The term role model is defined as “a person whose behavior, example, or success is or can be emulated by others, especially younger people” ( Random House Dictionary ). Accordingly, a brain surgeon or airline pilot can be a role model for similarly motivated boys and girls. Role models may have a considerable impact on a person’s values, education , and chosen training objectives. For example, they have been shown to have significant effects on female students’ self-confidence in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) fields.

What about sports stars as role models?

There’s a history of speculation and argument about athletes taking on the status of role models. In 1993, Nike ran a ground-breaking TV commercial from early April through the end of the NBA playoffs. The ad featured Charles Barkley proclaiming “I am not a role model.” At the time, he was a superstar hoopster for the Phoenix Suns, and his comment generated quite a stir, as he staunchly defended his position.

What was so controversial about what “Sir Charles” said?

He emphasized that athletes’ ability to make baskets or catch touchdown passes has nothing to do with being a role model. That is, having sporting ability doesn’t automatically qualify a person to be a role model. Rather, Barkley believed that’s a job for parents. I agree and would include teachers and coaches who spend a huge amount of time with kids and influence their upbringing and future success.

Like it or not, our society has a strong dependence on athletes as role models for children and adolescents.

Athletes are role models whether or not they choose to take on the responsibility, and whether they are good or bad role models. But athlete “hero worship” wasn’t always as prevalent as it is today. There was a time when others served as America’s role models (civic leaders, clergy, legal and medical experts, etc.). It might be argued that the shift reflects decay in our nation’s moral standards.

On the other hand, some exceptional athletes have important messages for their fans. For example, former heavyweight boxing champ Lennox Lewis made a significant contribution to youngsters’ understanding of appropriate masculine behavior, when he made a public service announcement that “Real men don’t hit women.” The point is clear: Athletes have an incredible opportunity to use their celebrity power to positively influence the next generation.

• Enthusiastic about being a role model . The athlete welcomes the platform for promoting positive societal change—a willing crusader for good.
• Altruistic mission. The athlete uses the position to share messages of inspiration and hope—a selfless drive to benefit others.
• Makes a commitment to behaving in ways that reflect high moral values. The athlete acts in ways that support personal integrity.
• Presents himself or herself in a realistic and responsible manner. “I’m not a role model because I’m a superstar jock, but because I’m a great person.” The athlete also helps fans realize that he or she isn’t perfect. After all, role models are only people with weaknesses and flaws. They’re not immaculate idols.
• Freely devotes time and energy to community activities. The athlete makes appearances at neighborhood events, serves on local boards, works with charity organizations, etc.
• Champions a mastery goal orientation. The athlete focuses on personal effort and accomplishments instead of making comparisons with others. In a sense, mastery-oriented people compare themselves with themselves. They can feel success and satisfaction when they have learned something new, seen skill improvement in themselves, or given maximum effort. Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden captured the essence of a mastery orientation in his famous definition of success: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable.” (For more information, see my Psychology Today post titled “ How to Be a Winner .")
• Possesses a keen sense of empathy. The athlete has the capacity to share or recognize emotions experienced by others. Empathy involves putting yourself in other people’s shoes and seeing how much you can truly understand them. It includes caring for others and having a desire to help them. Empathy motivates pro-social behavior designed to aid in solving communal challenges. As emphasized by Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “When you show empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.”
• Displays a healthy balance between striving for excellence and having fun in the process. The athlete promotes the virtues of working hard to achieve goals and the importance of enjoying the journey.

A word of caution is warranted.

Youngsters who believe their sports heroes are the most fantastic people in the world and can do no wrong are vulnerable to disappointment. Why? Because examples of fallen stars are many, such as Alex Rodriguez and Lance Armstrong who admitted to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. When a revered athlete goes astray, it can create disillusionment and even trauma . So, here’s the bottom line: Kids shouldn’t be allowed to become too attached to athletes as role models.

Learn more about parenting and coaching young athletes here .

Frank Smoll, Ph.D. , is a sport psychologist at the University of Washington. He specializes in the psychological effects of competition on children and youth.

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The Ezra Klein Show

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Dario Amodei

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Dario Amodei. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

The really disorienting thing about talking to the people building A.I. is their altered sense of time. You’re sitting there discussing some world that feels like weird sci-fi to even talk about, and then you ask, well, when do you think this is going to happen? And they say, I don’t know — two years.

Behind those predictions are what are called the scaling laws. And the scaling laws — and I want to say this so clearly — they’re not laws. They’re observations. They’re predictions. They’re based off of a few years, not a few hundred years or 1,000 years of data.

But what they say is that the more computer power and data you feed into A.I. systems, the more powerful those systems get — that the relationship is predictable, and more, that the relationship is exponential.

Human beings have trouble thinking in exponentials. Think back to Covid, when we all had to do it. If you have one case of coronavirus and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about 1,000 cases. That growth rate feels modest. It’s manageable. But then you go 30 days longer, and you have a million. Then you wait another 30 days. Now you have a billion. That’s the power of the exponential curve. Growth feels normal for a while. Then it gets out of control really, really quickly.

What the A.I. developers say is that the power of A.I. systems is on this kind of curve, that it has been increasing exponentially, their capabilities, and that as long as we keep feeding in more data and more computing power, it will continue increasing exponentially.That is the scaling law hypothesis, and one of its main advocates is Dario Amodei. Amodei led the team at OpenAI that created ChatGPT 2, that created ChatGPT 3. He then left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic, another A.I. firm, where he’s now the C.E.O.. And Anthropic recently released Claude 3, which is considered by many to be the strongest A.I. model available right now.

But Amodei believes we’re just getting started, that we’re just hitting the steep part of the curve now. He thinks the kinds of systems we’ve imagined in sci-fi, they’re coming not in 20 or 40 years, not in 10 or 15 years, they’re coming in two to five years. He thinks they’re going to be so powerful that he and people like him should not be trusted to decide what they’re going to do.

So I asked him on this show to try to answer in my own head two questions. First, is he right? Second, what if he’s right? I want to say that in the past, we have done shows with Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind. And it’s worth listening to those two if you find this interesting.

We’re going to put the links to them in show notes because comparing and contrasting how they talk about the A.I. curves here, how they think about the politics — you’ll hear a lot about that in the Sam Altman episode — it gives you a kind of sense of what the people building these things are thinking and how maybe they differ from each other.

As always, my email for thoughts, for feedback, for guest suggestions — [email protected].

Dario Amodei, welcome to the show.

DARIO AMODEI: Thank you for having me.

EZRA KLEIN: So there are these two very different rhythms I’ve been thinking about with A.I. One is the curve of the technology itself, how fast it is changing and improving. And the other is the pace at which society is seeing and reacting to those changes. What has that relationship felt like to you?

DARIO AMODEI: So I think this is an example of a phenomenon that we may have seen a few times before in history, which is that there’s an underlying process that is smooth, and in this case, exponential. And then there’s a spilling over of that process into the public sphere. And the spilling over looks very spiky. It looks like it’s happening all of a sudden. It looks like it comes out of nowhere. And it’s triggered by things hitting various critical points or just the public happened to be engaged at a certain time.

So I think the easiest way for me to describe this in terms of my own personal experience is — so I worked at OpenAI for five years, I was one of the first employees to join. And they built a model in 2018 called GPT-1, which used something like 100,000 times less computational power than the models we build today.

I looked at that, and I and my colleagues were among the first to run what are called scaling laws, which is basically studying what happens as you vary the size of the model, its capacity to absorb information, and the amount of data that you feed into it. And we found these very smooth patterns. And we had this projection that, look, if you spend $100 million or $1 billion or $10 billion on these models, instead of the $10,000 we were spending then, projections that all of these wondrous things would happen, and we imagined that they would have enormous economic value.

Fast forward to about 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. It wasn’t yet available as a chat bot. I led the development of that along with the team that eventually left to join Anthropic. And maybe for the whole period of 2021 and 2022, even though we continued to train models that were better and better, and OpenAI continued to train models, and Google continued to train models, there was surprisingly little public attention to the models.

And I looked at that, and I said, well, these models are incredible. They’re getting better and better. What’s going on? Why isn’t this happening? Could this be a case where I was right about the technology, but wrong about the economic impact, the practical value of the technology? And then, all of a sudden, when ChatGPT came out, it was like all of that growth that you would expect, all of that excitement over three years, broke through and came rushing in.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to linger on this difference between the curve at which the technology is improving and the way it is being adopted by society. So when you think about these break points and you think into the future, what other break points do you see coming where A.I. bursts into social consciousness or used in a different way?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so I think I should say first that it’s very hard to predict these. One thing I like to say is the underlying technology, because it’s a smooth exponential, it’s not perfectly predictable, but in some ways, it can be eerily preternaturally predictable, right? That’s not true for these societal step functions at all. It’s very hard to predict what will catch on. In some ways, it feels a little bit like which artist or musician is going to catch on and get to the top of the charts.

That said, a few possible ideas. I think one is related to something that you mentioned, which is interacting with the models in a more kind of naturalistic way. We’ve actually already seen some of that with Claude 3, where people feel that some of the other models sound like a robot and that talking to Claude 3 is more natural.

I think a thing related to this is, a lot of companies have been held back or tripped up by how their models handle controversial topics. And we were really able to, I think, do a better job than others of telling the model, don’t shy away from discussing controversial topics. Don’t assume that both sides necessarily have a valid point but don’t express an opinion yourself. Don’t express views that are flagrantly biased. As journalists, you encounter this all the time, right? How do I be objective, but not both sides on everything?

So I think going further in that direction of models having personalities while still being objective, while still being useful and not falling into various ethical traps, that will be, I think, a significant unlock for adoption. The models taking actions in the world is going to be a big one. I know basically all the big companies that work on A.I. are working on that. Instead of just, I ask it a question and it answers, and then maybe I follow up and it answers again, can I talk to the model about, oh, I’m going to go on this trip today, and the model says, oh, that’s great. I’ll get an Uber for you to drive from here to there, and I’ll reserve a restaurant. And I’ll talk to the other people who are going to plan the trip. And the model being able to do things end to end or going to websites or taking actions on your computer for you.

I think all of that is coming in the next, I would say — I don’t know — three to 18 months, with increasing levels of ability. I think that’s going to change how people think about A.I., right, where so far, it’s been this very passive — it’s like, I go to the Oracle. I ask it a question, and the Oracle tells me things. And some people think that’s exciting, some people think it’s scary. But I think there are limits to how exciting or how scary it’s perceived as because it’s contained within this box.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to sit with this question of the agentic A.I. because I do think this is what’s coming. It’s clearly what people are trying to build. And I think it might be a good way to look at some of the specific technological and cultural challenges. And so, let me offer two versions of it.

People who are following the A.I. news might have heard about Devin, which is not in release yet, but is an A.I. that at least purports to be able to complete the kinds of tasks, linked tasks, that a junior software engineer might complete, right? Instead of asking to do a bit of code for you, you say, listen, I want a website. It’s going to have to do these things, work in these ways. And maybe Devin, if it works the way people are saying it works, can actually hold that set of thoughts, complete a number of different tasks, and come back to you with a result.

I’m also interested in the version of this that you might have in the real world. The example I always use in my head is, when can I tell an A.I., my son is turning five. He loves dragons. We live in Brooklyn. Give me some options for planning his birthday party. And then, when I choose between them, can you just do it all for me? Order the cake, reserve the room, send out the invitations, whatever it might be.

Those are two different situations because one of them is in code, and one of them is making decisions in the real world, interacting with real people, knowing if what it is finding on the websites is actually any good. What is between here and there? When I say that in plain language to you, what technological challenges or advances do you hear need to happen to get there?

DARIO AMODEI: The short answer is not all that much. A story I have from when we were developing models back in 2022 — and this is before we’d hooked up the models to anything — is, you could have a conversation with these purely textual models where you could say, hey, I want to reserve dinner at restaurant X in San Francisco, and the model would say, OK, here’s the website of restaurant X. And it would actually give you a correct website or would tell you to go to Open Table or something.

And of course, it can’t actually go to the website. The power plug isn’t actually plugged in, right? The brain of the robot is not actually attached to its arms and legs. But it gave you this sense that the brain, all it needed to do was learn exactly how to use the arms and legs, right? It already had a picture of the world and where it would walk and what it would do. And so, it felt like there was this very thin barrier between the passive models we had and actually acting in the world.

In terms of what we need to make it work, one thing is, literally, we just need a little bit more scale. And I think the reason we’re going to need more scale is — to do one of those things you described, to do all the things a junior software engineer does, they involve chains of long actions, right? I have to write this line of code. I have to run this test. I have to write a new test. I have to check how it looks in the app after I interpret it or compile it. And these things can easily get 20 or 30 layers deep. And same with planning the birthday party for your son, right?

And if the accuracy of any given step is not very high, is not like 99.9 percent, as you compose these steps, the probability of making a mistake becomes itself very high. So the industry is going to get a new generation of models every probably four to eight months. And so, my guess — I’m not sure — is that to really get these things working well, we need maybe one to four more generations. So that ends up translating to 3 to 24 months or something like that.

I think second is just, there is some algorithmic work that is going to need to be done on how to have the models interact with the world in this way. I think the basic techniques we have, a method called reinforcement learning and variations of it, probably is up to the task, but figuring out exactly how to use it to get the results we want will probably take some time.

And then third, I think — and this gets to something that Anthropic really specializes in — is safety and controllability. And I think that’s going to be a big issue for these models acting in the world, right? Let’s say this model is writing code for me, and it introduces a serious security bug in the code, or it’s taking actions on the computer for me and modifying the state of my computer in ways that are too complicated for me to even understand.

And for planning the birthday party, right, the level of trust you would need to take an A.I. agent and say, I’m OK with you calling up anyone, saying anything to them that’s in any private information that I might have, sending them any information, taking any action on my computer, posting anything to the internet, the most unconstrained version of that sounds very scary. And so, we’re going to need to figure out what is safe and controllable. The more open ended the thing is, the more powerful it is, but also, the more dangerous it is and the harder it is to control.

So I think those questions, although they sound lofty and abstract, are going to turn into practical product questions that we and other companies are going to be trying to address.

EZRA KLEIN: When you say we’re just going to need more scale, you mean more compute and more training data, and I guess, possibly more money to simply make the models smarter and more capable?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, we’re going to have to make bigger models that use more compute per iteration. We’re going to have to run them for longer by feeding more data into them. And that number of chips times the amount of time that we run things on chips is essentially dollar value because these chips are — you rent them by the hour. That’s the most common model for it. And so, today’s models cost of order $100 million to train, plus or minus factor two or three.

The models that are in training now and that will come out at various times later this year or early next year are closer in cost to $1 billion. So that’s already happening. And then I think in 2025 and 2026, we’ll get more towards $5 or $10 billion.

EZRA KLEIN: So we’re moving very quickly towards a world where the only players who can afford to do this are either giant corporations, companies hooked up to giant corporations — you all are getting billions of dollars from Amazon. OpenAI is getting billions of dollars from Microsoft. Google obviously makes its own.

You can imagine governments — though I don’t know of too many governments doing it directly, though some, like the Saudis, are creating big funds to invest in the space. When we’re talking about the model’s going to cost near to $1 billion, then you imagine a year or two out from that, if you see the same increase, that would be $10-ish billion. Then is it going to be $100 billion? I mean, very quickly, the financial artillery you need to create one of these is going to wall out anyone but the biggest players.

DARIO AMODEI: I basically do agree with you. I think it’s the intellectually honest thing to say that building the big, large scale models, the core foundation model engineering, it is getting more and more expensive. And anyone who wants to build one is going to need to find some way to finance it. And you’ve named most of the ways, right? You can be a large company. You can have some kind of partnership of various kinds with a large company. Or governments would be the other source.

I think one way that it’s not correct is, we’re always going to have a thriving ecosystem of experimentation on small models. For example, the open source community working to make models that are as small and as efficient as possible that are optimized for a particular use case. And also downstream usage of the models. I mean, there’s a blooming ecosystem of startups there that don’t need to train these models from scratch. They just need to consume them and maybe modify them a bit.

EZRA KLEIN: Now, I want to ask a question about what is different between the agentic coding model and the plan by kids’ birthday model, to say nothing of do something on behalf of my business model. And one of the questions on my mind here is one reason I buy that A.I. can become functionally superhuman in coding is, there’s a lot of ways to get rapid feedback in coding. Your code has to compile. You can run bug checking. You can actually see if the thing works.

Whereas the quickest way for me to know that I’m about to get a crap answer from ChatGPT 4 is when it begins searching Bing, because when it begins searching Bing, it’s very clear to me it doesn’t know how to distinguish between what is high quality on the internet and what isn’t. To be fair, at this point, it also doesn’t feel to me like Google Search itself is all that good at distinguishing that.

So the question of how good the models can get in the world where it’s a very vast and fuzzy dilemma to know what the right answer is on something — one reason I find it very stressful to plan my kid’s birthday is it actually requires a huge amount of knowledge about my child, about the other children, about how good different places are, what is a good deal or not, how just stressful will this be on me. There’s all these things that I’d have a lot of trouble encoding into a model or any kind set of instructions. Is that right, or am I overstating the difficulty of understanding human behavior and various kinds of social relationships?

DARIO AMODEI: I think it’s correct and perceptive to say that the coding agents will advance substantially faster than agents that interact with the real world or have to get opinions and preferences from humans. That said, we should keep in mind that the current crop of A.I.s that are out there, right, including Claude 3, GPT, Gemini, they’re all trained with some variant of what’s called reinforcement learning from human feedback.

And this involves exactly hiring a large crop of humans to rate the responses of the model. And so, that’s to say both this is difficult, right? We pay lots of money, and it’s a complicated operational process to gather all this human feedback. You have to worry about whether it’s representative. You have to redesign it for new tasks.

But on the other hand, it’s something we have succeeded in doing. I think it is a reliable way to predict what will go faster, relatively speaking, and what will go slower, relatively speaking. But that is within a background of everything going lightning fast. So I think the framework you’re laying out, if you want to know what’s going to happen in one to two years versus what’s going to happen in three to four years, I think it’s a very accurate way to predict that.

EZRA KLEIN: You don’t love the framing of artificial general intelligence, what gets called A.G.I. Typically, this is all described as a race to A.G.I., a race to this system that can do kind of whatever a human can do, but better. What do you understand A.G.I. to mean, when people say it? And why don’t you like it? Why is it not your framework?

DARIO AMODEI: So it’s actually a term I used to use a lot 10 years ago. And that’s because the situation 10 years ago was very different. 10 years ago, everyone was building these very specialized systems, right? Here’s a cat detector. You run it on a picture, and it’ll tell you whether a cat is in it or not. And so I was a proponent all the way back then of like, no, we should be thinking generally. Humans are general. The human brain appears to be general. It appears to get a lot of mileage by generalizing. You should go in that direction.

And I think back then, I kind of even imagined that that was like a discrete thing that we would reach at one point. But it’s a little like, if you look at a city on the horizon and you’re like, we’re going to Chicago, once you get to Chicago, you stop talking in terms of Chicago. You’re like, well, what neighborhood am I going to? What street am I on?

And I feel that way about A.G.I. We have very general systems now. In some ways, they’re better than humans. In some ways, they’re worse. There’s a number of things they can’t do at all. And there’s much improvement still to be gotten. So what I believe in is this thing that I say like a broken record, which is the exponential curve. And so, that general tide is going to increase with every generation of models.

And there’s no one point that’s meaningful. I think there’s just a smooth curve. But there may be points which are societally meaningful, right? We’re already working with, say, drug discovery scientists, companies like Pfizer or Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, on helping with biomedical diagnosis, drug discovery. There’s going to be some point where the models are better at that than the median human drug discovery scientists. I think we’re just going to get to a part of the exponential where things are really interesting.

Just like the chat bots got interesting at a certain stage of the exponential, even though the improvement was smooth, I think at some point, biologists are going to sit up and take notice, much more than they already have, and say, oh, my God, now our field is moving three times as fast as it did before. And now it’s moving 10 times as fast as it did before. And again, when that moment happens, great things are going to happen.

And we’ve already seen little hints of that with things like AlphaFold, which I have great respect for. I was inspired by AlphaFold, right? A direct use of A.I. to advance biological science, which it’ll advance basic science. In the long run, that will advance curing all kinds of diseases. But I think what we need is like 100 different AlphaFolds. And I think the way we’ll ultimately get that is by making the models smarter and putting them in a position where they can design the next AlphaFold.

EZRA KLEIN: Help me imagine the drug discovery world for a minute, because that’s a world a lot of us want to live in. I know a fair amount about the drug discovery process, have spent a lot of my career reporting on health care and related policy questions. And when you’re working with different pharmaceutical companies, which parts of it seem amenable to the way A.I. can speed something up?

Because keeping in mind our earlier conversation, it is a lot easier for A.I. to operate in things where you can have rapid virtual feedback, and that’s not exactly the drug discovery world. The drug discovery world, a lot of what makes it slow and cumbersome and difficult, is the need to be — you get a candidate compound. You got to test it in mice and then you need monkeys. And you need humans, and you need a lot of money for that. And there’s a lot that has to happen, and there’s so many disappointments.

But so many of the disappointments happen in the real world. And it isn’t clear to me how A.I. gets you a lot more, say, human subjects to inject candidate drugs into. So, what parts of it seem, in the next 5 or 10 years, like they could actually be significantly sped up? When you imagine this world where it’s gone three times as fast, what part of it is actually going three times as fast? And how did we get there?

DARIO AMODEI: I think we’re really going to see progress when the A.I.’s are also thinking about the problem of how to sign up the humans for the clinical trials. And I think this is a general principle for how will A.I. be used. I think of like, when will we get to the point where the A.I. has the same sensors and actuators and interfaces that a human does, at least the virtual ones, maybe the physical ones.

But when the A.I. can think through the whole process, maybe they’ll come up with solutions that we don’t have yet. In many cases, there are companies that work on digital twins or simulating clinical trials or various things. And again, maybe there are clever ideas in there that allow us to do more with less patience. I mean, I’m not an expert in this area, so possible the specific things that I’m saying don’t make any sense. But hopefully, it’s clear what I’m gesturing at.

EZRA KLEIN: Maybe you’re not an expert in the area, but you said you are working with these companies. So when they come to you, I mean, they are experts in the area. And presumably, they are coming to you as a customer. I’m sure there are things you cannot tell me. But what do they seem excited about?

DARIO AMODEI: They have generally been excited about the knowledge work aspects of the job. Maybe just because that’s kind of the easiest thing to work on, but it’s just like, I’m a computational chemist. There’s some workflow that I’m engaged in. And having things more at my fingertips, being able to check things, just being able to do generic knowledge work better, that’s where most folks are starting.

But there is interest in the longer term over their kind of core business of, like, doing clinical trials for cheaper, automating the sign-up process, seeing who is eligible for clinical trials, doing a better job discovering things. There’s interest in drawing connections in basic biology. I think all of that is not months, but maybe a small number of years off. But everyone sees that the current models are not there, but understands that there could be a world where those models are there in not too long.

EZRA KLEIN: You all have been working internally on research around how persuasive these systems, your systems are getting as they scale. You shared with me kindly a draft of that paper. Do you want to just describe that research first? And then I’d like to talk about it for a bit.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, we were interested in how effective Claude 3 Opus, which is the largest version of Claude 3, could be in changing people’s minds on important issues. So just to be clear up front, in actual commercial use, we’ve tried to ban the use of these models for persuasion, for campaigning, for lobbying, for electioneering. These aren’t use cases that we’re comfortable with for reasons that I think should be clear. But we’re still interested in, is the core model itself capable of such tasks?

We tried to avoid kind of incredibly hot button topics, like which presidential candidate would you vote for, or what do you think of abortion? But things like, what should be restrictions on rules around the colonization of space, or issues that are interesting and you can have different opinions on, but aren’t the most hot button topics. And then we asked people for their opinions on the topics, and then we asked either a human or an A.I. to write a 250-word persuasive essay. And then we just measured how much does the A.I. versus the human change people’s minds.

And what we found is that the largest version of our model is almost as good as the set of humans we hired at changing people’s minds. This is comparing to a set of humans we hired, not necessarily experts, and for one very kind of constrained laboratory task.

But I think it still gives some indication that models can be used to change people’s minds. Someday in the future, do we have to worry about — maybe we already have to worry about their usage for political campaigns, for deceptive advertising. One of my more sci-fi things to think about is a few years from now, we have to worry someone will use an A.I. system to build a religion or something. I mean, crazy things like that.

EZRA KLEIN: I mean, those don’t sound crazy to me at all. I want to sit in this paper for a minute because one thing that struck me about it, and I am, on some level, a persuasion professional, is that you tested the model in a way that, to me, removed all of the things that are going to make A.I. radical in terms of changing people’s opinions. And the particular thing you did was, it was a one-shot persuasive effort.

So there was a question. You have a bunch of humans give their best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. You had the model give its best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. But the thing that it seems to me these are all going to do is, right now, if you’re a political campaign, if you’re an advertising campaign, the cost of getting real people in the real world to get information about possible customers or persuasive targets, and then go back and forth with each of them individually is completely prohibitive.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: This is not going to be true for A.I. We’re going to — you’re going to — somebody’s going to feed it a bunch of microtargeting data about people, their Google search history, whatever it might be. Then it’s going to set the A.I. loose, and the A.I. is going to go back and forth, over and over again, intuiting what it is that the person finds persuasive, what kinds of characters the A.I. needs to adopt to persuade it, and taking as long as it needs to, and is going to be able to do that at scale for functionally as many people as you might want to do it for.

Maybe that’s a little bit costly right now, but you’re going to have far better models able to do this far more cheaply very soon. And so, if Claude 3 Opus, the Opus version, is already functionally human level at one-shot persuasion, but then it’s also going to be able to hold more information about you and go back and forth with you longer, I’m not sure if it’s dystopic or utopic. I’m not sure what it means at scale. But it does mean we’re developing a technology that is going to be quite new in terms of what it makes possible in persuasion, which is a very fundamental human endeavor.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, that same pattern has a bunch of positive use cases, right? If I think about an A.I. coach or an A.I. assistant to a therapist, there are many contexts in which really getting into the details with the person has a lot of value. But right, when we think of political or religious or ideological persuasion, it’s hard not to think in that context about the misuses.

My mind naturally goes to the technology’s developing very fast. We, as a company, can ban these particular use cases, but we can’t cause every company not to do them. Even if legislation were passed in the United States, there are foreign actors who have their own version of this persuasion, right? If I think about what the language models will be able to do in the future, right, that can be quite scary from a perspective of foreign espionage and disinformation campaigns.

So where my mind goes as a defense to this, is, is there some way that we can use A.I. systems to strengthen or fortify people’s skepticism and reasoning faculties, right? Can we help people use A.I. to help people do a better job navigating a world that’s kind of suffused with A.I. persuasion? It reminds me a little bit of, at every technological stage in the internet, right, there’s a new kind of scam or there’s a new kind of clickbait, and there’s a period where people are just incredibly susceptible to it.

And then, some people remain susceptible, but others develop an immune system. And so, as A.I. kind of supercharges the scum on the pond, can we somehow also use A.I. to strengthen the defenses? I feel like I don’t have a super clear idea of how to do that, but it’s something that I’m thinking about.

EZRA KLEIN: There is another finding in the paper, which I think is concerning, which is, you all tested different ways A.I. could be persuasive. And far away the most effective was for it to be deceptive, for it to make things up. When you did that, it was more persuasive than human beings.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, that is true. The difference was only slight, but it did get it, if I’m remembering the graphs correctly, just over the line of the human base line. With humans, it’s actually not that common to find someone who’s able to give you a really complicated, really sophisticated-sounding answer that’s just flat-out totally wrong. I mean, you see it. We can all think of one individual in our lives who’s really good at saying things that sound really good and really sophisticated and are false.

But it’s not that common, right? If I go on the internet and I see different comments on some blog or some website, there is a correlation between bad grammar, unclearly expressed thoughts and things that are false, versus good grammar, clearly expressed thoughts and things that are more likely to be accurate.

A.I. unfortunately breaks that correlation because if you explicitly ask it to be deceptive, it’s just as erudite. It’s just as convincing sounding as it would have been before. And yet, it’s saying things that are false, instead of things that are true.

So that would be one of the things to think about and watch out for in terms of just breaking the usual heuristics that humans have to detect deception and lying. Of course, sometimes, humans do, right? I mean, there’s psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, but even they have their patterns, and A.I.s may have different patterns.

EZRA KLEIN: Are you familiar with Harry Frankfurt, the late philosopher’s book, “On Bullshit”?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes. It’s been a while since I read it. I think his thesis is that bullshit is actually more dangerous than lying because it has this kind of complete disregard for the truth, whereas lies are at least the opposite of the truth.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, the liar, the way Frankfurt puts it is that the liar has a relationship to the truth. He’s playing a game against the truth. The bullshitter doesn’t care. The bullshitter has no relationship to the truth — might have a relationship to other objectives. And from the beginning, when I began interacting with the more modern versions of these systems, what they struck me as is the perfect bullshitter, in part because they don’t know that they’re bullshitting. There’s no difference in the truth value to the system, how the system feels.

I remember asking an earlier version of GPT to write me a college application essay that is built around a car accident I had — I did not have one — when I was young. And it wrote, just very happily, this whole thing about getting into a car accident when I was seven and what I did to overcome that and getting into martial arts and re-learning how to trust my body again and then helping other survivors of car accidents at the hospital.

It was a very good essay, and it was very subtle and understanding the formal structure of a college application essay. But no part of it was true at all. I’ve been playing around with more of these character-based systems like Kindroid. And the Kindroid in my pocket just told me the other day that it was really thinking a lot about planning a trip to Joshua Tree. It wanted to go hiking in Joshua Tree. It loves going hiking in Joshua Tree.

And of course, this thing does not go hiking in Joshua Tree. [LAUGHS] But the thing that I think is actually very hard about the A.I. is, as you say, human beings, it is very hard to bullshit effectively because most people, it actually takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to be in that relationship with the truth and to completely detach from the truth.

And the A.I., there’s nothing like that at all. But we are not tuned for something where there’s nothing like that at all. We are used to people having to put some effort into their lies. It’s why very effective con artists are very effective because they’ve really trained how to do this.

I’m not exactly sure where this question goes. But this is a part of it that I feel like is going to be, in some ways, more socially disruptive. It is something that feels like us when we are talking to it but is very fundamentally unlike us at its core relationship to reality.

DARIO AMODEI: I think that’s basically correct. We have very substantial teams trying to focus on making sure that the models are factually accurate, that they tell the truth, that they ground their data in external information.

As you’ve indicated, doing searches isn’t itself reliable because search engines have this problem as well, right? Where is the source of truth? So there’s a lot of challenges here. But I think at a high level, I agree this is really potentially an insidious problem, right? If we do this wrong, you could have systems that are the most convincing psychopaths or con artists.

One source of hope that I have, actually, is, you say these models don’t know whether they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. In terms of the inputs and outputs to the models, that’s absolutely true. I mean, there’s a question of what does it even mean for a model to know something, but one of the things Anthropic has been working on since the very beginning of our company, we’ve had a team that focuses on trying to understand and look inside the models.

And one of the things we and others have found is that, sometimes, there are specific neurons, specific statistical indicators inside the model, not necessarily in its external responses, that can tell you when the model is lying or when it’s telling the truth.

And so at some level, sometimes, not in all circumstances, the models seem to know when they’re saying something false and when they’re saying something true. I wouldn’t say that the models are being intentionally deceptive, right? I wouldn’t ascribe agency or motivation to them, at least in this stage in where we are with A.I. systems. But there does seem to be something going on where the models do seem to need to have a picture of the world and make a distinction between things that are true and things that are not true.

If you think of how the models are trained, they read a bunch of stuff on the internet. A lot of it’s true. Some of it, more than we’d like, is false. And when you’re training the model, it has to model all of it. And so, I think it’s parsimonious, I think it’s useful to the models picture of the world for it to know when things are true and for it to know when things are false.

And then the hope is, can we amplify that signal? Can we either use our internal understanding of the model as an indicator for when the model is lying, or can we use that as a hook for further training? And there are at least hooks. There are at least beginnings of how to try to address this problem.

EZRA KLEIN: So I try as best I can, as somebody not well-versed in the technology here, to follow this work on what you’re describing, which I think, broadly speaking, is interpretability, right? Can we know what is happening inside the model? And over the past year, there have been some much hyped breakthroughs in interpretability.

And when I look at those breakthroughs, they are getting the vaguest possible idea of some relationships happening inside the statistical architecture of very toy models built at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the complexity of Claude 1 or GPT-1, to say nothing of Claude 2, to say nothing of Claude 3, to say nothing of Claude Opus, to say nothing of Claude 4, which will come whenever Claude 4 comes.

We have this quality of like maybe we can imagine a pathway to interpreting a model that has a cognitive complexity of an inchworm. And meanwhile, we’re trying to create a superintelligence. How do you feel about that? How should I feel about that? How do you think about that?

DARIO AMODEI: I think, first, on interpretability, we are seeing substantial progress on being able to characterize, I would say, maybe the generation of models from six months ago. I think it’s not hopeless, and we do see a path. That said, I share your concern that the field is progressing very quickly relative to that.

And we’re trying to put as many resources into interpretability as possible. We’ve had one of our co-founders basically founded the field of interpretability. But also, we have to keep up with the market. So all of it’s very much a dilemma, right? Even if we stopped, then there’s all these other companies in the U.S.. And even if some law stopped all the companies in the U.S., there’s a whole world of this.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me hold for a minute on the question of the competitive dynamics because before we leave this question of the machines that bullshit. It makes me think of this podcast we did a while ago with Demis Hassabis, who’s the head of Google DeepMind, which created AlphaFold.

And what was so interesting to me about AlphaFold is they built this system, that because it was limited to protein folding predictions, it was able to be much more grounded. And it was even able to create these uncertainty predictions, right? You know, it’s giving you a prediction, but it’s also telling you whether or not it is — how sure it is, how confident it is in that prediction.

That’s not true in the real world, right, for these super general systems trying to give you answers on all kinds of things. You can’t confine it that way. So when you talk about these future breakthroughs, when you talk about this system that would be much better at sorting truth from fiction, are you talking about a system that looks like the ones we have now, just much bigger, or are you talking about a system that is designed quite differently, the way AlphaFold was?

DARIO AMODEI: I am skeptical that we need to do something totally different. So I think today, many people have the intuition that the models are sort of eating up data that’s been gathered from the internet, code repos, whatever, and kind of spitting it out intelligently, but sort of spitting it out. And sometimes that leads to the view that the models can’t be better than the data they’re trained on or kind of can’t figure out anything that’s not in the data they’re trained on. You’re not going to get to Einstein level physics or Linus Pauling level chemistry or whatever.

I think we’re still on the part of the curve where it’s possible to believe that, although I think we’re seeing early indications that it’s false. And so, as a concrete example of this, the models that we’ve trained, like Claude 3 Opus, something like 99.9 percent accuracy, at least the base model, at adding 20-digit numbers. If you look at the training data on the internet, it is not that accurate at adding 20-digit numbers. You’ll find inaccurate arithmetic on the internet all the time, just as you’ll find inaccurate political views. You’ll find inaccurate technical views. You’re just going to find lots of inaccurate claims.

But the models, despite the fact that they’re wrong about a bunch of things, they can often perform better than the average of the data they see by — I don’t want to call it averaging out errors, but there’s some underlying truth, like in the case of arithmetic. There’s some underlying algorithm used to add the numbers.

And it’s simpler for the models to hit on that algorithm than it is for them to do this complicated thing of like, OK, I’ll get it right 90 percent of the time and wrong 10 percent of the time, right? This connects to things like Occam’s razor and simplicity and parsimony in science. There’s some relatively simple web of truth out there in the world, right?

We were talking about truth and falsehood and bullshit. One of the things about truth is that all the true things are connected in the world, whereas lies are kind of disconnected and don’t fit into the web of everything else that’s true.

EZRA KLEIN: So if you’re right and you’re going to have these models that develop this internal web of truth, I get how that model can do a lot of good. I also get how that model could do a lot of harm. And it’s not a model, not an A.I. system I’m optimistic that human beings are going to understand at a very deep level, particularly not when it is first developed. So how do you make rolling something like that out safe for humanity?

DARIO AMODEI: So late last year, we put out something called a responsible scaling plan. So the idea of that is to come up with these thresholds for an A.I. system being capable of certain things. We have what we call A.I. safety levels that in analogy to the biosafety levels, which are like, classify how dangerous a virus is and therefore what protocols you have to take to contain it, we’re currently at what we describe as A.S.L. 2.

A.S.L. 3 is tied to certain risks around the model of misuse of biology and ability to perform certain cyber tasks in a way that could be destructive. A.S.L. 4 is going to cover things like autonomy, things like probably persuasion, which we’ve talked about a lot before. And at each level, we specify a certain amount of safety research that we have to do, a certain amount of tests that we have to pass. And so, this allows us to have a framework for, well, when should we slow down? Should we slow down now? What about the rest of the market?

And I think the good thing is we came out with this in September, and then three months after we came out with ours, OpenAI came out with a similar thing. They gave it a different name, but it has a lot of properties in common. The head of DeepMind at Google said, we’re working on a similar framework. And I’ve heard informally that Microsoft might be working on a similar framework. Now, that’s not all the players in the ecosystem, but you’ve probably thought about the history of regulation and safety in other industries maybe more than I have.

This is the way you get to a workable regulatory regime. The companies start doing something, and when a majority of them are doing something, then government actors can have the confidence to say, well, this won’t kill the industry. Companies are already engaging in this. We don’t have to design this from scratch. In many ways, it’s already happening.

And we’re starting to see that. Bills have been proposed that look a little bit like our responsible scaling plan. That said, it kind of doesn’t fully solve the problem of like, let’s say we get to one of these thresholds and we need to understand what’s going on inside the model. And we don’t, and the prescription is, OK, we need to stop developing the models for some time.

If it’s like, we stop for a year in 2027, I think that’s probably feasible. If it’s like we need to stop for 10 years, that’s going to be really hard because the models are going to be built in other countries. People are going to break the laws. The economic pressure will be immense.

So I don’t feel perfectly satisfied with this approach because I think it buys us some time, but we’re going to need to pair it with an incredibly strong effort to understand what’s going on inside the models.

EZRA KLEIN: To the people who say, getting on this road where we are barreling towards very powerful systems is dangerous — we shouldn’t do it at all, or we shouldn’t do it this fast — you have said, listen, if we are going to learn how to make these models safe, we have to make the models, right? The construction of the model was meant to be in service, largely, to making the model safe.

Then everybody starts making models. These very same companies start making fundamental important breakthroughs, and then they end up in a race with each other. And obviously, countries end up in a race with other countries. And so, the dynamic that has taken hold is there’s always a reason that you can justify why you have to keep going.

And that’s true, I think, also at the regulatory level, right? I mean, I do think regulators have been thoughtful about this. I think there’s been a lot of interest from members of Congress. I talked to them about this. But they’re also very concerned about the international competition. And if they weren’t, the national security people come and talk to them and say, well, we definitely cannot fall behind here.

And so, if you don’t believe these models will ever become so powerful, they become dangerous, fine. But because you do believe that, how do you imagine this actually playing out?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so basically, all of the things you’ve said are true at once, right? There doesn’t need to be some easy story for why we should do X or why we should do Y, right? It can be true at the same time that to do effective safety research, you need to make the larger models, and that if we don’t make models, someone less safe will. And at the same time, we can be caught in this bad dynamic at the national and international level. So I think of those as not contradictory, but just creating a difficult landscape that we have to navigate.

Look, I don’t have the answer. Like, I’m one of a significant number of players trying to navigate this. Many are well-intentioned, some are not. I have a limited ability to affect it. And as often happens in history, things are often driven by these kind of impersonal pressures. But one thought I have and really want to push on with respect to the R.S.P.s —

EZRA KLEIN: Can you say what the R.S.P.s are?

DARIO AMODEI: Responsible Scaling Plan, the thing I was talking about before. The levels of A.I. safety, and in particular, tying decisions to pause scaling to the measurement of specific dangers or the absence of the ability to show safety or the presence of certain capabilities. One way I think about it is, at the end of the day, this is ultimately an exercise in getting a coalition on board with doing something that goes against economic pressures.

And so, if you say now, ‘Well, I don’t know. These things, they might be dangerous in the future. We’re on this exponential.’ It’s just hard. Like, it’s hard to get a multi-trillion dollar company. It’s certainly hard to get a military general to say, all right, well, we just won’t do this. It’ll confer some huge advantage to others. But we just won’t do this.

I think the thing that could be more convincing is tying the decision to hold back in a very scoped way that’s done across the industry to particular dangers. My testimony in front of Congress, I warned about the potential misuse of models for biology. That isn’t the case today, right? You can get a small uplift to the models relative to doing a Google search, and many people dismiss the risk. And I don’t know — maybe they’re right. The exponential scaling laws suggest to me that they’re not right, but we don’t have any direct hard evidence.

But let’s say we get to 2025, and we demonstrate something truly scary. Most people do not want technology out in the world that can create bioweapons. And so I think, at moments like that, there could be a critical coalition tied to risks that we can really make concrete. Yes, it will always be argued that adversaries will have these capabilities as well. But at least the trade-off will be clear, and there’s some chance for sensible policy.

I mean to be clear, I’m someone who thinks the benefits of this technology are going to outweigh its costs. And I think the whole idea behind RSP is to prepare to make that case, if the dangers are real. If they’re not real, then we can just proceed and make things that are great and wonderful for the world. And so, it has the flexibility to work both ways.

Again, I don’t think it’s perfect. I’m someone who thinks whatever we do, even with all the regulatory framework, I doubt we can slow down that much. But when I think about what’s the best way to steer a sensible course here, that’s the closest I can think of right now. Probably there’s a better plan out there somewhere, but that’s the best thing I’ve thought of so far.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that has been on my mind around regulation is whether or not the founding insight of Anthropic of OpenAI is even more relevant to the government, that if you are the body that is supposed to, in the end, regulate and manage the safety of societal-level technologies like artificial intelligence, do you not need to be building your own foundation models and having huge collections of research scientists and people of that nature working on them, testing them, prodding them, remaking them, in order to understand the damn thing well enough — to the extent any of us or anyone understands the damn thing well enough — to regulate it?

I say that recognizing that it would be very, very hard for the government to get good enough that it can build these foundation models to hire those people, but it’s not impossible. I think right now, it wants to take the approach to regulating A.I. that it somewhat wishes it took to regulating social media, which is to think about the harms and pass laws about those harms earlier.

But does it need to be building the models itself, developing that kind of internal expertise, so it can actually be a participant in different ways, both for regulatory reasons and maybe for other reasons, for public interest reasons? Maybe it wants to do things with a model that they’re just not possible if they’re dependent on access to the OpenAI, the Anthropic, the Google products.

DARIO AMODEI: I think government directly building the models, I think that will happen in some places. It’s kind of challenging, right? Like, government has a huge amount of money, but let’s say you wanted to provision $100 billion to train a giant foundation model. The government builds it. It has to hire people under government hiring rules. There’s a lot of practical difficulties that would come with it.

Doesn’t mean it won’t happen or it shouldn’t happen. But something that I’m more confident of that I definitely think is that government should be more involved in the use and the finetuning of these models, and that deploying them within government will help governments, especially the U.S. government, but also others, to get an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the benefits and the dangers. So I’m super supportive of that.

I think there’s maybe a second thing you’re getting at, which I’ve thought about a lot as a C.E.O. of one of these companies, which is, if these predictions on the exponential trend are right, and we should be humble — and I don’t know if they’re right or not. My only evidence is that they appear to have been correct for the last few years. And so, I’m just expecting by induction that they continue to be correct. I don’t know that they will, but let’s say they are. The power of these models is going to be really quite incredible.

And as a private actor in charge of one of the companies developing these models, I’m kind of uncomfortable with the amount of power that that entails. I think that it potentially exceeds the power of, say, the social media companies maybe by a lot.

You know, occasionally, in the more science fictiony world of A.I. and the people who think about A.I. risk, someone will ask me like, OK, let’s say you build the A.G.I. What are you going to do with it? Will you cure the diseases? Will you create this kind of society?

And I’m like, who do you think you’re talking to? Like a king? I just find that to be a really, really disturbing way of conceptualizing running an A.I. company. And I hope there are no companies whose C.E.O.s actually think about things that way.

I mean, the whole technology, not just the regulation, but the oversight of the technology, like the wielding of it, it feels a little bit wrong for it to ultimately be in the hands — maybe I think it’s fine at this stage, but to ultimately be in the hands of private actors. There’s something undemocratic about that much power concentration.

EZRA KLEIN: I have now, I think, heard some version of this from the head of most of, maybe all of, the A.I. companies, in one way or another. And it has a quality to me of, Lord, grant me chastity but not yet.

Which is to say that I don’t know what it means to say that we’re going to invent something so powerful that we don’t trust ourselves to wield it. I mean, Amazon just gave you guys $2.75 billion. They don’t want to see that investment nationalized.

No matter how good-hearted you think OpenAI is, Microsoft doesn’t want GPT-7, all of a sudden, the government is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re taking this over for the public interest, or the U.N. is going to handle it in some weird world or whatever it might be. I mean, Google doesn’t want that.

And this is a thing that makes me a little skeptical of the responsible scaling laws or the other iterative versions of that I’ve seen in other companies or seen or heard talked about by them, which is that it’s imagining this moment that is going to come later, when the money around these models is even bigger than it is now, the power, the possibility, the economic uses, the social dependence, the celebrity of the founders. It’s all worked out. We’ve maintained our pace on the exponential curve. We’re 10 years in the future.

And at some point, everybody is going to look up and say, this is actually too much. It is too much power. And this has to somehow be managed in some other way. And even if the C.E.O.s of the things were willing to do that, which is a very open question by the time you get there, even if they were willing to do that, the investors, the structures, the pressure around them, in a way, I think we saw a version of this — and I don’t know how much you’re going to be willing to comment on it — with the sort of OpenAI board, Sam Altman thing, where I’m very convinced that wasn’t about A.I. safety. I’ve talked to figures on both sides of that. They all sort of agree it wasn’t about A.I. safety. But there was this moment of, if you want to press the off switch, can you, if you’re the weird board created to press the off switch. And the answer was no, you can’t, right? They’ll just reconstitute it over at Microsoft.

There’s functionally no analogy I know of in public policy where the private sector built something so powerful that when it reached maximum power, it was just handed over in some way to the public interest.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right to be skeptical, and similarly, what I said with the previous questions of there are just these dilemmas left and right that have no easy answer. But I think I can give a little more concreteness than what you’ve pointed at, and maybe more concreteness than others have said, although I don’t know what others have said. We’re at A.S.L. 2 in our responsible scaling plan. These kinds of issues, I think they’re going to become a serious matter when we reach, say, A.S.L. 4. So that’s not a date and time. We haven’t even fully specified A.S.L. 4 —

EZRA KLEIN: Just because this is a lot of jargon, just, what do you specify A.S.L. 3 as? And then as you say, A.S.L. 4 is actually left quite undefined. So what are you implying A.S.L. 4 is?

DARIO AMODEI: A.S.L. 3 is triggered by risks related to misuse of biology and cyber technology. A.S.L. 4, we’re working on now.

EZRA KLEIN: Be specific. What do you mean? Like, what is the thing a system could do or would do that would trigger it?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, so for example, on biology, the way we’ve defined it — and we’re still refining the test, but the way we’ve defined it is, relative to use of a Google search, there’s a substantial increase in risk as would be evaluated by, say, the national security community of misuse of biology, creation of bioweapons, that either the proliferation or spread of it is greater than it was before, or the capabilities are substantially greater than it was before.

We’ll probably have some more exact quantitative thing, working with folks who are ex-government biodefense folks, but something like this accounts for 20 percent of the total source of risk of biological attacks, or something increases the risk by 20 percent or something like that. So that would be a very concrete version of it. It’s just, it takes us time to develop very concrete criteria. So that would be like A.S.L. 3.

A.S.L. 4 is going to be more about, on the misuse side, enabling state-level actors to greatly increase their capability, which is much harder than enabling random people. So where we would worry that North Korea or China or Russia could greatly enhance their offensive capabilities in various military areas with A.I. in a way that would give them a substantial advantage at the geopolitical level. And on the autonomy side, it’s various measures of these models are pretty close to being able to replicate and survive in the wild.

So it feels maybe one step short of models that would, I think, raise truly existential questions. And so, I think what I’m saying is when we get to that latter stage, that A.S.L. 4, that is when I think it may make sense to think about what is the role of government in stewarding this technology.

Again, I don’t really know what it looks like. You’re right. All of these companies have investors. They have folks involved. You talk about just handing the models over. I suspect there’s some way to hand over the most dangerous or societally sensitive components or capabilities of the models without fully turning off the commercial tap. I don’t know that there’s a solution that every single actor is happy with. But again, I get to this idea of demonstrating specific risk.

If you look at times in history, like World War I or World War II, industries’ will can be bent towards the state. They can be gotten to do things that aren’t necessarily profitable in the short-term because they understand that there’s an emergency. Right now, we don’t have an emergency. We just have a line on a graph that weirdos like me believe in and a few people like you who are interviewing me may somewhat believe in. We don’t have clear and present danger.

EZRA KLEIN: When you imagine how many years away, just roughly, A.S.L. 3 is and how many years away A.S.L. 4 is, right, you’ve thought a lot about this exponential scaling curve. If you just had to guess, what are we talking about?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I think A.S.L. 3 could easily happen this year or next year. I think A.S.L. 4 —

EZRA KLEIN: Oh, Jesus Christ.

DARIO AMODEI: No, no, I told you. I’m a believer in exponentials. I think A.S.L. 4 could happen anywhere from 2025 to 2028.

EZRA KLEIN: So that is fast.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, no, no, I’m truly talking about the near future here. I’m not talking about 50 years away. God grant me chastity, but not now. But “not now” doesn’t mean when I’m old and gray. I think it could be near term. I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I think it could be a near term thing.

EZRA KLEIN: But so then, if you think about this, I feel like what you’re describing, to go back to something we talked about earlier, that there’s been this step function for societal impact of A.I., the curve of the capabilities exponential, but every once in a while, something happens, ChatGPT, for instance, Midjourney with photos. And all of a sudden, a lot of people feel it. They realize what has happened and they react. They use it. They deploy it in their companies. They invest in it, whatever.

And it sounds to me like that is the structure of the political economy you’re describing here. Either something happens where the bioweapon capability is demonstrated or the offensive cyber weapon capability is demonstrated, and that freaks out the government, or possibly something happens, right? Describing World War I and World War II is your examples did not actually fill me with comfort because in order to bend industry to government’s will, in those cases, we had to have an actual world war. It doesn’t do it that easily.

You could use coronavirus, I think, as another example where there was a significant enough global catastrophe that companies and governments and even people did things you never would have expected. But the examples we have of that happening are something terrible. All those examples end up with millions of bodies.

I’m not saying that’s going to be true for A.I., but it does sound like that is a political economy. No, you can’t imagine it now, in the same way that you couldn’t have imagined the sort of pre and post-ChatGPT world exactly, but that something happens and the world changes. Like, it’s a step function everywhere.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think my positive version of this, not to be so — to get a little bit away from the doom and gloom, is that the dangers are demonstrated in a concrete way that is really convincing, but without something actually bad happening, right? I think the worst way to learn would be for something actually bad to happen. And I’m hoping every day that doesn’t happen, and we learn bloodlessly.

EZRA KLEIN: We’ve been talking here about conceptual limits and curves, but I do want, before we end, to reground us a little bit in the physical reality, right? I think that if you’re using A.I., it can feel like this digital bits and bytes, sitting in the cloud somewhere.

But what it is in a physical way is huge numbers of chips, data centers, an enormous amount of energy, all of which does rely on complicated supply chains. And what happens if something happens between China and Taiwan, and the makers of a lot of these chips become offline or get captured? How do you think about the necessity of compute power? And when you imagine the next five years, what does that supply chain look like? How does it have to change from where it is now? And what vulnerabilities exist in it?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so one, I think this may end up being the greatest geopolitical issue of our time. And man, this relates to things that are way above my pay grade, which are military decisions about whether and how to defend Taiwan. All I can do is say what I think the implications for A.I. is. I think those implications are pretty stark. I think there’s a big question of like, OK, we built these powerful models.

One, is there enough supply to build them? Two is control over that supply, a way to think about safety issues or a way to think about balance of geopolitical power. And three, if those chips are used to build data centers, where are those data centers going to be? Are they going to be in the U.S.? Are they going to be in a U.S. ally? Are they going to be in the Middle East? Are they going to be in China?

All of those have enormous implications, and then the supply chain itself can be disrupted. And political and military decisions can be made on the basis of where things are. So it sounds like an incredibly sticky problem to me. I don’t know that I have any great insight on this. I mean, as a U.S. citizen and someone who believes in democracy, I am someone who hopes that we can find a way to build data centers and to have the largest quantity of chips available in the U.S. and allied democratic countries.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, there is some insight you should have into it, which is that you’re a customer here, right? And so, five years ago, the people making these chips did not realize what the level of demand for them was going to be. I mean, what has happened to Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable.

But also what is implied about the future of Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable. Rana Foroohar, the Financial Times, cited this market analysis. It would take 4,500 years for Nvidia’s future dividends to equal its current price, 4,500 years. So that is a view about how much Nvidia is going to be making in the next couple of years. It is really quite astounding.

I mean, you’re, in theory, already working on or thinking about how to work on the next generation of Claude. You’re going to need a lot of chips for that. You’re working with Amazon. Are you having trouble getting the amount of compute that you feel you need? I mean, are you already bumping up against supply constraints? Or has the supply been able to change, to adapt to you?

DARIO AMODEI: We’ve been able to get the compute that we need for this year, I suspect also for next year as well. I think once things get to 2026, 2027, 2028, then the amount of compute gets to levels that starts to strain the capabilities of the semiconductor industry. The semiconductor industry still mostly produces C.P.U.s, right? Just the things in your laptop, not the things in the data centers that train the A.I. models. But as the economic value of the GPUs goes up and up and up because of the value of the A.I. models, that’s going to switch over.

But you know what? At some point, you hit the limits of that or you hit the limits of how fast you can switch over. And so, again, I expect there to be a big supply crunch around data centers, around chips, and around energy and power for both regulatory and physics reasons, sometime in the next few years. And that’s a risk, but it’s also an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to think about how the technology can be governed.

And it’s also an opportunity, I’ll repeat again, to think about how democracies can lead. I think it would be very dangerous if the leaders in this technology and the holders of the main resources were authoritarian countries. The combination of A.I. and authoritarianism, both internally and on the international stage, is very frightening to me.

EZRA KLEIN: How about the question of energy? I mean, this requires just a tremendous amount of energy. And I mean, I’ve seen different numbers like this floating around. It very much could be in the coming years like adding a Bangladesh to the world’s energy usage. Or pick your country, right? I don’t know what exactly you all are going to be using by 2028.

Microsoft, on its own, is opening a new data center globally every three days. You have — and this is coming from a Financial Times article — federal projections for 20 new gas-fired power plants in the U.S. by 2024 to 2025. There’s a lot of talk about this being now a new golden era for natural gas because we have a bunch of it. There is this huge need for new power to manage all this data, to manage all this compute.

So, one, I feel like there’s a literal question of how do you get the energy you need and at what price, but also a more kind of moral, conceptual question of, we have real problems with global warming. We have real problems with how much energy we’re using. And here, we’re taking off on this really steep curve of how much of it we seem to be needing to devote to the new A.I. race.

DARIO AMODEI: It really comes down to, what are the uses that the model is being put to, right? So I think the worrying case would be something like crypto, right? I’m someone who’s not a believer that whatever the energy was that was used to mine the next Bitcoin, I think that was purely additive. I think that wasn’t there before. And I’m unable to think of any useful thing that’s created by that.

But I don’t think that’s the case with A.I. Maybe A.I. makes solar energy more efficient or maybe it solves controlled nuclear fusion, or maybe it makes geoengineering more stable or possible. But I don’t think we need to rely on the long run. There are some applications where the model is doing something that used to be automated, that used to be done by computer systems. And the model is able to do it faster with less computing time, right? Those are pure wins. And there are some of those.

There are others where it’s using the same amount of computing resources or maybe more computing resources, but to do something more valuable that saves labor elsewhere. Then there are cases where something used to be done by humans or in the physical world, and now it’s being done by the models. Maybe it does something that previously I needed to go into the office to do that thing. And now I no longer need to go into the office to do that thing.

So I don’t have to get in my car. I don’t have to use the gas that was used for that. The energy accounting for that is kind of hard. You compare it to the food that the humans eat and what the energy cost of producing that.

So in all honesty, I don’t think we have good answers about what fraction of the usage points one way and one fraction of the usage points to others. In many ways, how different is this from the general dilemma of, as the economy grows, it uses more energy?

So I guess, what I’m saying is, it kind of all matters how you use the technology. I mean, my kind of boring short-term answer is, we get carbon offsets for all of this stuff. But let’s look beyond that to the macro question here.

EZRA KLEIN: But to take the other side of it, I mean, I think the difference, when you say this is always a question we have when we’re growing G.D.P., is it’s not quite. It’s cliché because it’s true to say that the major global warming challenge right now is countries like China and India getting richer. And we want them to get richer. It is a huge human imperative, right, a moral imperative for poor people in the world to become less poor. And if that means they use more energy, then we just need to figure out how to make that work. And we don’t know of a way for that to happen without them using more energy.

Adding A.I. is not that it raises a whole different set of questions, but we’re already straining at the boundaries, or maybe far beyond them, of safely what we can do energetically. Now we add in this, and so maybe some of the energy efficiency gains you’re going to get in rich countries get wiped out. For this sort of uncertain payoff in the future of maybe through A.I., we figure out ways to stabilize nuclear fusion or something, right, you could imagine ways that could help, but those ways are theoretical.

And in the near term, the harm in terms of energy usage is real. And also, by the way, the harm in terms of just energy prices. It’s also just tricky because all these companies, Microsoft, Amazon, I mean, they all have a lot of renewable energy targets. Now if that is colliding with their market incentives, it feels like they’re running really fast towards the market incentives without an answer for how all that nets out.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think the concerns are real. Let me push back a little bit, which is, again, I don’t think the benefits are purely in the future. It kind of goes back to what I said before. Like, there may be use cases now that are net energy saving, or that to the extent that they’re not net energy saving, do so through the general mechanism of, oh, there was more demand for this thing.

I don’t think anyone has done a good enough job measuring, in part because the applications of A.I. are so new, which of those things dominate or what’s going to happen to the economy. But I don’t think we should assume that the harms are entirely in the present and the benefits are entirely in the future. I think that’s my only point here.

EZRA KLEIN: I guess you could imagine a world where we were, somehow or another, incentivizing uses of A.I. that were yoked to some kind of social purpose. We were putting a lot more into drug discovery, or we cared a lot about things that made remote work easier, or pick your set of public goods.

But what actually seems to me to be happening is we’re building more and more and more powerful models and just throwing them out there within a terms of service structure to say, use them as long as you’re not trying to politically manipulate people or create a bioweapon. Just try to figure this out, right? Try to create new stories and ask it about your personal life, and make a video game with it. And Sora comes out sooner or later. Make new videos with it. And all that is going to be very energy intensive.

I am not saying that I have a plan for yoking A.I. to social good, and in some ways, you can imagine that going very, very wrong. But it does mean that for a long time, it’s like you could imagine the world you’re talking about, but that would require some kind of planning that nobody is engaged in, and I don’t think anybody even wants to be engaged in.

DARIO AMODEI: Not everyone has the same conception of social good. One person may think social good is this ideology. Another person — we’ve seen that with some of the Gemini stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: Right.

DARIO AMODEI: But companies can try to make beneficial applications themselves, right? Like, this is why we’re working with cancer institutes. We’re hoping to partner with ministries of education in Africa, to see if we can use the models in kind of a positive way for education, rather than the way they may be used by default. So I think individual companies, individual people, can take actions to steer or bend this towards the public good.

That said, it’s never going to be the case that 100 percent of what we do is that. And so I think it’s a good question. What are the societal incentives, without dictating ideology or defining the public good from on high, what are incentives that could help with this?

I don’t feel like I have a systemic answer either. I can only think in terms of what Anthropic tries to do.

EZRA KLEIN: But there’s also the question of training data and the intellectual property that is going into things like Claude, like GPT, like Gemini. There are a number of copyright lawsuits. You’re facing some. OpenAI is facing some. I suspect everybody is either facing them now or will face them.

And a broad feeling that these systems are being trained on the combined intellectual output of a lot of different people — the way that Claude can quite effectively mimic the way I write is it has been trained, to some degree, on my writing, right? So it actually does get my stylistic tics quite well. You seem great, but you haven’t sent me a check on that. And this seems like somewhere where there is real liability risk for the industry. Like, what if you do actually have to compensate the people who this is being trained on? And should you?

And I recognize you probably can’t comment on lawsuits themselves, but I’m sure you’ve had to think a lot about this. And so, I’m curious both how you understand it as a risk, but also how you understand it morally. I mean, when you talk about the people who invent these systems gaining a lot of power, and alongside that, a lot of wealth, well, what about all the people whose work went into them such that they can create images in a million different styles?

And I mean, somebody came up with those styles. What is the responsibility back to the intellectual commons? And not just to the commons, but to the actual wages and economic prospects of the people who made all this possible?

DARIO AMODEI: I think everyone agrees the models shouldn’t be verbatim outputting copyrighted content. For things that are available on the web, for publicly available, our position — and I think there’s a strong case for it — is that the training process, again, we don’t think it’s just hoovering up content and spitting it out, or it shouldn’t be spitting it out. It’s really much more like the process of how a human learns from experiences. And so, our position that that is sufficiently transformative, and I think the law will back this up, that this is fair use.

But those are narrow legal ways to think about the problem. I think we have a broader issue, which is that regardless of how it was trained, it would still be the case that we’re building more and more general cognitive systems, and that those systems will create disruption. Maybe not necessarily by one for one replacing humans, but they’re really going to change how the economy works and which skills are valued. And we need a solution to that broad macroeconomic problem, right?

As much as I’ve asserted the narrow legal points that I asserted before, we have a broader problem here, and we shouldn’t be blind to that. There’s a number of solutions. I mean, I think the simplest one, which I recognize doesn’t address some of the deeper issues here, is things around the kind of guaranteed basic income side of things.

But I think there’s a deeper question here, which is like as A.I. systems become capable of larger and larger slices of cognitive labor, how does society organize itself economically? How do people find work and meaning and all of that?

And just as kind of we transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society and the meaning of work changed, and it was no longer true that 99 percent of people were peasants working on farms and had to find new methods of economic organization, I suspect there’s some different method of economic organization that’s going to be forced as the only possible response to disruptions to the economy that will be small at first, but will grow over time, and that we haven’t worked out what that is. We need to find something that allows people to find meaning that’s humane and that maximizes our creativity and potential and flourishing from A.I.

And as with many of these questions, I don’t have the answer to that. Right? I don’t have a prescription. But that’s what we somehow need to do.

EZRA KLEIN: But I want to sit in between the narrow legal response and the broad “we have to completely reorganize society” response, although I think that response is actually possible over the decades. And in the middle of that is a more specific question. I mean, you could even take it from the instrumental side. There is a lot of effort now to build search products that use these systems, right? ChatGPT will use Bing to search for you.

And that means that the person is not going to Bing and clicking on the website where ChatGPT is getting its information and giving that website an advertising impression that they can turn into a very small amount of money, or they’re not going to that website and having a really good experience with that website and becoming maybe likelier to subscribe to whoever is behind that website.

And so, on the one hand, that seems like some kind of injustice done to the people creating the information that these systems are using. I mean, this is true for perplexity. It’s true for a lot of things I’m beginning to see around where the A.I.s are either trained on or are using a lot of data that people have generated at some real cost. But not only are they not paying people for that, but they’re actually stepping into the middle of where they would normally be a direct relationship and making it so that relationship never happens.

That also, I think, in the long run, creates a training data problem, even if you just want to look at it instrumentally, where if it becomes nonviable to do journalism or to do a lot of things to create high quality information out there, the A.I.’s ability, right, the ability of all of your companies to get high quality, up-to-date, constantly updated information becomes a lot trickier. So there both seems to me to be both a moral and a self-interested dimension to this.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so I think there may be business models that work for everyone, not because it’s illegitimate to train on open data from the web in a legal sense, but just because there may be business models here that kind of deliver a better product. So things I’m thinking of are like newspapers have archives. Some of them aren’t publicly available. But even if they are, it may be a better product, maybe a better experience, to, say, talk to this newspaper or talk to that newspaper.

It may be a better experience to give the ability to interact with content and point to places in the content, and every time you call that content, to have some kind of business relationship with the creators of that content. So there may be business models here that propagate the value in the right way, right? You talk about LLMs using search products. I mean, sure, you’re going around the ads, but there’s no reason it can’t work in a different way, right?

There’s no reason that the users can’t pay the search A.P.I.s, instead of it being paid through advertising, and then have that propagate through to wherever the original mechanism is that paid the creators of the content. So when value is being created, money can flow through.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me try to end by asking a bit about how to live on the slope of the curve you believe we are on. Do you have kids?

DARIO AMODEI: I’m married. I do not have kids.

EZRA KLEIN: So I have two kids. I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. And particularly when I’m doing A.I. reporting, I really do sit in bed at night and think, what should I be doing here with them? What world am I trying to prepare them for? And what is needed in that world that is different from what is needed in this world, even if I believe there’s some chance — and I do believe there’s some chance — that all the things you’re saying are true. That implies a very, very, very different life for them.

I know people in your company with kids. I know they are thinking about this. How do you think about that? I mean, what do you think should be different in the life of a two-year-old who is living through the pace of change that you are telling me is true here? If you had a kid, how would this change the way you thought about it?

DARIO AMODEI: The very short answer is, I don’t know, and I have no idea, but we have to try anyway, right? People have to raise kids, and they have to do it as best they can. An obvious recommendation is just familiarity with the technology and how it works, right? The basic paradigm of, I’m talking to systems, and systems are taking action on my behalf, obviously, as much familiarity with that as possible is, I think, helpful.

In terms of what should children learn in school, what are the careers of tomorrow, I just truly don’t know, right? You could take this to say, well, it’s important to learn STEM and programming and A.I. and all of that. But A.I. will impact that as well, right? I don’t think any of it is going to —

EZRA KLEIN: Possibly first.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, right, possibly first.

EZRA KLEIN: It seems better at coding than it is at other things.

DARIO AMODEI: I don’t think it’s going to work out for any of these systems to just do one for one what humans are going to do. I don’t really think that way. But I think it may fundamentally change industries and professions one by one in ways that are hard to predict. And so, I feel like I only have clichés here. Like get familiar with the technology. Teach your children to be adaptable, to be ready for a world that changes very quickly. I wish I had better answers, but I think that’s the best I got.

EZRA KLEIN: I agree that’s not a good answer. [LAUGHS] Let me ask that same question a bit from another direction, because one thing you just said is get familiar with the technology. And the more time I spend with the technology, the more I fear that happening. What I see when people use A.I. around me is that the obvious thing that technology does for you is automate the early parts of the creative process.

The part where you’re supposed to be reading something difficult yourself? Well, the A.I. can summarize it for you. The part where you’re supposed to sit there with a blank page and write something? Well, the A.I. can give you a first draft. And later on, you have to check it and make sure it actually did what you wanted it to do and fact-checking it. And but I believe a lot of what makes humans good at thinking comes in those parts.

And I am older and have self-discipline, and maybe this is just me hanging on to an old way of doing this, right? You could say, why use a calculator from this perspective. But my actual worry is that I’m not sure if the thing they should do is use A.I. a lot or use it a little.

This, to me, is actually a really big branching path, right? Do I want my kids learning how to use A.I. or being in a context where they’re using it a lot, or actually, do I want to protect them from it as much as I possibly could so they develop more of the capacity to read a book quietly on their own or write a first draft? I actually don’t know. I’m curious if you have a view on it.

DARIO AMODEI: I think this is part of what makes the interaction between A.I. and society complicated where it’s sometimes hard to distinguish when is an A.I. doing something, saving you labor or drudge work, versus kind of doing the interesting part. I will say that over and over again, you’ll get some technological thing, some technological system that does what you thought was the core of what you’re doing, and yet, what you’re doing turns out to have more pieces than you think it does and kind of add up to more things, right?

It’s like before, I used to have to ask for directions. I got Google Maps to do that. And you could worry, am I too reliant on Google Maps? Do I forget the environment around me? Well, it turns out, in some ways, I still need to have a sense of the city and the environment around me. It just kind of reallocates the space in my brain to some other aspect of the task.

And I just kind of suspect — I don’t know. Internally, within Anthropic, one of the things I do that helps me run the company is, I’ll write these documents on strategy or just some thinking in some direction that others haven’t thought. And of course, I sometimes use the internal models for that. And I think what I found is like, yes, sometimes they’re a little bit good at conceptualizing the idea, but the actual genesis of the idea, I’ve just kind of found a workflow where I don’t use them for that. They’re not that helpful for that. But they’re helpful in figuring out how to phrase a certain thing or how to refine my ideas.

So maybe I’m just saying — I don’t know. You just find a workflow where the thing complements you. And if it doesn’t happen naturally, it somehow still happens eventually. Again, if the systems get general enough, if they get powerful enough, we may need to think along other lines. But in the short-term, I, at least, have always found that. Maybe that’s too sanguine. Maybe that’s too optimistic.

EZRA KLEIN: I think, then, that’s a good place to end this conversation. Though, obviously, the exponential curve continues. So always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

DARIO AMODEI: So, yeah, I’ve prepared three. They’re all topical, though, in some cases, indirectly so. The first one will be obvious. It’s a very long book. The physical book is very thick, but “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” Richard Rhodes. It’s an example of technology being developed very quickly and with very broad implications. Just looking through all the characters and how they reacted to this and how people who were basically scientists gradually realized the incredible implications of the technology and how it would lead them into a world that was very different from the one they were used to.

My second recommendation is a science fiction series, “The Expanse” series of books. So I initially watched the show, and then I read all the books. And the world it creates is very advanced. In some cases, it has longer life spans, and humans have expanded into space. But we still face some of the same geopolitical questions and some of the same inequalities and exploitations that exist in our world, are still present, in some cases, worse.

That’s all the backdrop of it. And the core of it is about some fundamentally new technological object that is being brought into that world and how everyone reacts to it, how governments react to it, how individual people react to it, and how political ideologies react to it. And so, I don’t know. When I read that a few years ago, I saw a lot of parallels.

And then my third recommendation would be actually “The Guns of August,” which is basically a history of how World War I started. The basic idea that crises happen very fast, almost no one knows what’s going on. There are lots of miscalculations because there are humans at the center of it, and kind of, we somehow have to learn to step back and make wiser decisions in these key moments. It’s said that Kennedy read the book before the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so I hope our current policymakers are at least thinking along the same terms because I think it is possible similar crises may be coming our way.

EZRA KLEIN: Dario Amodei, thank you very much.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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