It’s up to you whether AI makes you sharper or slowly dulls your brain, says Demis Hassabis.
In a Thursday interview with entrepreneur Varun Mayya on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit, the Google DeepMind CEO said that AI is just like the internet. People can use it to learn all kinds of topics, or use it in ways that “degrade” their thinking.
“With AI, if you use it in a lazy way, it will make you worse at critical thinking and so on,” he said. “But that’s down to you as the individual. No one can help you do that.”
He added that people need to be smart and use these technologies in ways that enhance their thinking rather than dull it.
Hassabis cofounded DeepMind in 2010, which Google acquired in 2014. It merged with Google Brain in 2023 to form Google DeepMind, the lab behind tools such as Gemini and Nano Banana. The CEO and a DeepMind coworker, John Jumper, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.
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As AI gets incorporated into daily life, debates about its risks and rewards have intensified, with several tech leaders warning about the dangers of an overreliance on AI tools.
Earlier this week, tech billionaire Mark Cuban said that there are two types of people who use AI.
“There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything, and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything,” Cuban said of large language models in an X post on Tuesday.
Cuban has previously said that AI models can’t provide all the answers and are “stupid” but like “a savant that remembers everything.”
At a June conference, the CEO of French AI lab Mistral said that a risk of using AI for everything is that humans will stop trying.
“The biggest risk with AI is not that it will outsmart us or become uncontrollable, but that it will make us too comfortable, too dependent, and ultimately too lazy to think or act for ourselves,” Arthur Mensch said.
Critical Role’s chief creative officer, Matthew Mercer, had been spearheading his eight-member crew’s relentless push into the big leagues of nerdworld for 10 years.
That was until this July, when he announced that he’d be giving up control of one of the crew’s biggest priorities, their long-running “Dungeons & Dragons” Twitch livestream.
In an August appearance on the podcast “Crispy’s Tavern: Tales and Tea,” Mercer said he’d felt the threat of burnout and thought he needed a break. He said he’d started to feel a “continuous need to produce creatively,” which was “a very draining and very scary thing.”
To be sure, Mercer and his seven cofounders still have a full slate of projects to work on. That includes an ongoing sold-out arena tour, as well as two Amazon-backed animated series on Prime Video. Mercer also has a key role in the team’s game publishing arm, Darrington Press, home to “Daggerheart,” their flagship game and their answer to “D&D.”
Still, Mercer says, it’s important to be able to admit when you’re done, and to give yourself permission to step away from the work for as long as you need to.
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“My biggest advice for burnout is to acknowledge when you’re at the edge and take every opportunity you can to step away and replenish your cup,” Mercer told Business Insider.
Brennan Lee Mulligan of “Dimension 20” fame, Mercer’s longtime friend and collaborator, is the game master for Campaign Four, the team’s ongoing “D&D” stream. Mulligan taking over the main stream means Mercer is no longer solely in charge of captaining the team’s regular episodes, which often run to the four-hour mark.
“There’s this concept, the idea that just pushing through and sometimes necessity requires you to do that to a certain point,” Mercer said.
“But I find walking away and taking some time to enrich your creative input means that whatever time you lost beating your head against the wall will be more than made up for when you can return from a place of genuine inspiration and renewal,” Mercer added.
Campaign Four airs on Beacon, Critical Role’s in-house streaming platform, as well as on Twitch and YouTube.
Tasha Huo and I don’t make it a minute into our conversation before we start gushing about wizards — and that’s how I know I’m talking to a true Critical Role fan.
Huo is the showrunner of “The Mighty Nein,” Critical Role’s second animated series with Prime Video. “The Mighty Nein” follows the success of “The Legend of Vox Machina,” the series for which Critical Role raised over $11.3 million in Kickstarter seed funding in 2019. Now, Huo, a longtime viewer of the show, is the series’ creative writing powerhouse.
Nerding out over ‘D&D’
Huo, who’s based in Los Angeles, said she first started playing “Dungeons & Dragons” as a kid, but hadn’t touched the game for years. In her adult life, a friend wanted her to join his “D&D” campaign and recommended a Twitch stream that he said would help her understand how the game worked.
That turned out to be Critical Role. At the time, the company’s eight cofounders were in the midst of their second long-running campaign. And the stream that Huo watched, so many years ago now, has taken on an animated series form in “The Mighty Nein.”
“I was absolutely hooked. I was like, this is all I can watch now, and it’s all I can listen to in the car. And I binged it, which took years,” Huo said of the 141-episode campaign.
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Several industry contacts recommended Huo to Critical Role in 2021 when they were looking for a showrunner.
Huo started work on the show in November 2022 as part of the Prime Video team and oversaw its writing until its release this fall, working 9-to-5 daily with three other writers and a writer’s assistant. She has an MFA in screenwriting from Boston University and has written for other shows, including “The Witcher: Blood Origin,” released in 2022, and “Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft,” released in 2024.
“It started with me having a lot of conversations with Critical Role. I met with Sam Riegel first, and then Travis Willingham and Matt Mercer, and we all just nerded out,” Huo said. Riegel, a cofounder, oversees much of Critical Role’s animation business alongside the team’s CEO, Willingham. Mercer is the crew’s chief creative officer.
“It was kind of like coming home. It was just all these pieces coming together that started over a love of ‘D&D,'” Huo added
Inside the writer’s room
Huo and the eight cofounders of Critical Role.
Anna Webber/Getty Images for Prime Video
Huo said conversations in the Critical Role writer’s room involved many talks with the eight cofounders about their campaign characters. She wanted to find the best way to condense the hundreds of hours of campaign stream time into eight, 44-minute episodes.
“The conversations always started with all of us in a room talking about the characters, talking about why they felt the way they did or why they did the thing they did,” Huo said.
Huo says these character conversations helped her figure out what the first season’s arc would be.
“Every day we would come into the Critical Role offices. And we had a giant whiteboard up with magnets, and we’d come up with ideas of like, ‘Okay, if we know what the season arc is, now let’s start thinking about some turning points within the episode,'” Huo said.
Making tough choices
Having so many hours of source material also meant that Huo and the writing team had to make tough decisions about what to focus on in the first season. Huo said it quickly became clear to them that the plotline for cofounder Liam O’Brien’s character, the wizard Caleb Widogast, needed to be covered first for the rest of the show to make sense.
“A lot of his backstory is really linked to a larger story that we were telling,” Huo said.
The season’s final cut also included several tidbits of information that were not in the original Twitch stream.
Huo also got to live the Critical Role fan dream and suss out all the juicy details from Mercer that had never aired on stream — including the ins and outs of how the season’s key antagonists, the Volstrucker wizards, worked.
The cast of Critical Role in their studio in Los Angeles.
Critical Role
“We get to tell a side spy show within ‘The Mighty Nein,’ and that’s really gratifying because you sit Matt down and he has all the answers already, so you just mine from all of the great stuff that he has and fill the story up with all of those things,” Huo said.
How to get your dream writing gig
I asked Huo how one might go about landing a dream writing job, and she had two tips.
“I would say the first thing is to dedicate yourself to the craft. Always be writing, even when there’s negativity and there’s rejection, just keep going. I think the number one reason people don’t make it is because they give up before someone else,” Huo said.
As for her second piece of advice for writers: “Don’t be afraid of what you love.”
“I remember when I met with Sam Riegel, I was so embarrassed. I thought, ‘Oh no, I fangirled too much when I talked to him,'” Huo said. “And it turns out that’s exactly what they wanted to hear, from someone who really, really loved the show.”
Do you work on the Critical Role franchise and have a story to share? Get in touch with this reporter at cteh@businessinsider.com.
