Realistic AI Interview

Setting: May 2025. A minimalist, glass-walled structure overlooking a Japanese maple in a hidden corner of Palo Alto. Steve Jobs sits on a wooden stool. He is wearing the signature black mock turtleneck, Levi’s 501s, and New Balance sneakers. He looks healthy, intense, and typically impatient.

Interviewer: Steve, thanks for agreeing to this... simulation. It’s 2025. The world has changed since 2011. Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence.

Steve Jobs: They’re talking about it, but they aren’t thinking about it.

Interviewer: How so?

Jobs: Look at the current landscape. You have these massive companies—Google, Microsoft, Meta—throwing billions of dollars at Large Language Models. And what is the product? A text box. You type in a prompt, and it spits out a paragraph that sounds like a C-minus student trying to pad an essay.

It’s the command line all over again. We spent forty years trying to get the computer to adapt to the human, and now, suddenly, we’re forcing humans to learn "prompt engineering" to talk to the computer? It’s backwards. It’s lazy design.

Interviewer: So you aren’t impressed by the capabilities? The generative art, the coding, the writing?

Jobs: I’m impressed by the engineering. The engineering is brilliant. But the experience is pedestrian.

Technology alone is not enough. That’s the DNA of Apple. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing. Right now, AI has no heart. It has data. It has probability. But it has no taste.

Interviewer: Taste?

Jobs: Yes, taste. You know, Picasso said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." But he meant stealing the spark, the essence, and making it your own. These models... they just regurgitate the average. They are the average of the entire internet. And the internet is mostly noise. If you ask an AI to design a phone, it gives you a generic slab. If you ask it to write a poem, it gives you a greeting card.

It lacks the ability to say "No." Great design is about saying no to a thousand things. AI says yes to everything. It’s a sycophant.

Interviewer: If you were running things today, what would the "Apple approach" to AI look like?

Jobs: It wouldn’t be a chatbot. I can tell you that. I don’t want to have a conversation with a machine. I want the machine to anticipate what I need before I know I need it.

The future isn't "Artificial Intelligence." It’s "Intelligent Amplification." It should be a bicycle for the mind, not a replacement for the rider.

Imagine an AI that lives entirely on your device—not in the cloud, not stealing your data to sell you ads—but right there in your pocket. It knows your calendar, your health, your taste in music, your emails. But it stays silent. It waits. And when you look at a complex contract, it highlights the one clause that’s going to screw you. When you’re composing a song, it suggests a chord change that breaks the rules in a beautiful way.

It should be invisible. The best technology is invisible. Current AI is loud. It’s screaming for attention.

Interviewer: Many people are afraid AI will replace human creativity. That it will replace the designers, the writers, the coders.

Jobs: It will replace the hacks.

Interviewer: That’s harsh.

Jobs: It’s the truth. If your work is derivative, if you are just assembling parts, then yes, the machine can do it faster. But the machine cannot suffer. The machine cannot feel heartbreak. And without suffering, without emotion, there is no true art.

The computer can generate a Beatles song, technically. It can get the harmonies right. It can mimic Paul’s bass line. But it can’t understand why "Yesterday" makes you cry. That requires a soul.

So, the creative people? The real ones? They will use AI as a lens. They will use it to clear away the drudgery so they can focus on the pure act of creation. It raises the floor, but it doesn’t lower the ceiling.

Interviewer: What about the hardware? We’ve seen the AI Pins, the glasses.

Jobs: [Visibly disgusted] Junk. Gadgets. They are trying to staple a computer to your face or your lapel. It’s intrusive.

The interface of the future isn't a screen, and it certainly isn't a laser projected onto your hand. The interface is context. If I walk into a room, the room should know I’m there. If I pick up a device, it should present me with exactly what I need for that moment.

We moved from the mouse, to the touch screen. The next step is intuition. The device feels what you want. That’s where the magic is.

Interviewer: One last question. In this 2025 landscape, are you optimistic?

Jobs: I’m always optimistic about humanity. We are tool builders. We built the hammer to extend our arm, the telescope to extend our eye. AI is just a tool to extend our brain.

But we have to be careful. We have to design it with values. If we let the engineers run it, we’ll get efficient chaos. If we let the marketers run it, we’ll get a surveillance nightmare.

We need the artists. We need the poets. We need the people who care about beauty to get their hands on this technology and shape it. Otherwise, we’re just building a faster way to be mediocre.

And we don’t do mediocre.