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CNN This Morning
Jamila Norman is Interviewed about her Show "Homegrown"; Wholesale Inflation Cooldown in March; Sinead Bovell is Interviewed about AI. Aired 8:30-9a ET
Aired April 13, 2023 - 08:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[08:30:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Division is the most cost-effective way to multiply your garden.
JAMILA NORMAN, HOST, MAGNOLIA NETWORK'S "HOMEGROWN": And it's also really healthy for the plants, right?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Absolutely. Absolutely.
NORMAN: Because as the mother plant gets too big, you want to like revive that plant.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
NORMAN: And one way to do that is to kind of dig it up, separated it, give it a little bit more space.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
NORMAN: And then that new plant that you've divided off, you can plant somewhere else or you an give it away.
OK, so which one are we going to dig up first?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Very nice. This show is now in its third season, by the way. And you can catch it on the Magnolia Network, a part of our parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, or streaming on HBO Max, or Max now.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Max.
LEMON: So with us to talk about all things food, farming and sustainability is Jamila Norman .
You like to be called farmer -
JAMILA NORMAN, HOST, MAGNOLIA NETWORK'S "HOMEGROWN": Farmer J.
LEMON: Good morning, Farmer J. How are you?
NORMAN: Good morning. Good morning. I'm good.
LEMON: It's so great that. I love the - I love what you're doing there. You -- the driving force for you is sustainability. So, give us some -- some choices, big and small, that we can do to make our lives more sustainable.
NORMAN: Yes, absolutely.
LEMON: From furniture, to food, everything, right?
NORMAN: Furniture to food. I mean, you know, I just try to pick natural materials, food, you know, trying to just buy organic as much as possible. And, you know, the least processed food as possible in terms of what you're eating, what you're consuming, what you're feeding your families. So, you know, that's -- that's what we're going for.
LEMON: (INAUDIBLE).
HARLOW: One of the -
NORMAN: Keeping it simple.
HARLOW: One of the things that I love about your story is sort of your family and what you learned from your parents and their storytelling that informed what you do every day.
NORMAN: Yes.
HARLOW: You have a Caribbean family from Jamaica and Trinidad. Just talk about that legacy and how that informs what you've shown us on the show.
NORMAN: Yes, definitely. I mean my parents, both mom and dad, both grew up in the Caribbeans, in very small, essentially rural communities in their respective countries. Moved here to New York, you know, like all people coming to New York following dreams, And I was born and raised in New York, but my mom always talked about growing up in Jamaica and, you know, how they lived off the land and all of that. And I had an opportunity to live in Trinidad for a couple of years. So just like food was everywhere and everything was so fresh. And so that kind of stayed with me as I lived my life, raised my family. And when I moved to Atlanta, it just presented an opportunity to farm and I just wanted to do it.
LEMON: Not a lot of green space here. You mentioned New York, right? Not a lot of green space here.
NORMAN: Not a lot of green space.
LEMON: People have tiny balconies. If you do have an outdoor space at all.
HARLOW: If you have it. NORMAN: If you have an outdoor space.
LEMON: So then what can - what can you do? Where do you begin if you live in a place like New York City or an urban sprawl, as they call it?
NORMAN: Yes. Yes, I mean, a place like New York City, I mean, you know, you can definitely, like, if you have a balcony or something like that, you can grow on your balcony. Also, you know, there are like small community gardens, you know, in New York. So, I would -- I would encourage you to kind of like find those and join those gardens.
But in Atlanta, there's just lots of green space, right? And that's what presented the opportunity to have farms. There are over 30 urban farms in the city of Atlanta proper. So -- and they range in size from like a house lot up to like seven acres. So, we're - we got - we got a little illusion (ph) down there.
HARLOW: You've inspired me. We don't have outdoor space, but we have a little community garden down the block from us in Brooklyn.
NORMAN: Yes.
HARLOW: So, I think you found my Saturday morning activity.
NORMAN: Yes. I know, that -
HARLOW: Jamila, Farmer J, thank you. Appreciate it.
LEMON: So good to see you. We can't wait to watch.
NORMAN: good to see you. Thank you so much.
HARLOW: Congrats.
NORMAN: Absolutely.
LEMON: Yes. You can see it on HBO - or on Max.
HARLOW: On Max.
NORMAN: On Max.
LEMON: Max. On Max now.
NORMAN: On Max.
LEMON: Thank you.
So, an essay written by a high school student flagged by AI as being plagiarized. Only problem, it wasn't. We're going to explain.
HARLOW: Plus, out just moments ago, another key inflation report following yesterday's pretty much better inflation report. What it all means for this economy ahead.
LEMON: Can you just grow a little garden too on your kitchen, like, and it gets a little sunlight.
HARLOW: Oh, there's a thing.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[08:38:30]
LEMON: All right, welcome back, everyone.
This is just in to CNN THIS MORNING. Another key reporter on inflation. The Producer Price Index following yesterday's Consumer Price Index showing inflation falling to the lowest level in nearly two years. That's great.
CNN's business correspondent Christine Romans crunching the numbers.
What have you found?
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: I'm so relieved. This is a dramatic cool down in inflation. This is producer prices. This is the factory level. So, this is what, you know, at the factory floor, the prices they're paying, eventually that goes on to consumers, 2.7. That's a dramatic cool down. We were expecting more like 3 percent. It was 4.6 percent last month. So that is a big one month drop in prices that they are paying, inflation. And month to month the decline of 0.5 percent. Prices actually falling. Very good news there.
This is the slowest inflation for producers in more than two years. Almost back to where we were before this inflation crisis began. This is important progress. And it comes after yesterday when we also saw important progress on consumer prices. Still 5 percent. Still above what the Fed would like to see. But cooling down dramatically.
And yesterday we learned that grocery prices fell.
LEMON: Oh, that's good.
ROMANS: I'm going to say this again, grocery prices fell for the first time since 2020, since the beginning of this inflation crisis. So, all of that heavy machinery that the Fed was using and the price problem seems to be working.
HARLOW: That's great.
ROMANS: So, I'm hopeful that this means that consumers will finally start to feel a little bit of relief.
[08:40:00]
Still work to do. No question about that. The Fed could still decide to raise interest rates another little tiny bit just to make sure that they've - they've got proof here. But this is -- I think this is definitive evidence that a peak is in on inflation. We will not see what we saw in the 1970s. And the Fed, all that work is getting this under control. HARLOW: Amen.
ROMANS: I hope I'm right.
HARLOW: Yes, I think you are.
LEMON: (INAUDIBLE). Everybody watching is hoping you are correct as well.
HARLOW: I would - any day I would bet on you to be right.
Christine, thank you.
ROMANS: You're welcome. Thanks, guys.
LEMON: Thank you, Christine Romans.
HARLOW: Picture this, OK, you write an essay, completely on your own, right, for school, only someone later says, no, that wasn't you, that was AI, artificial intelligence. That is what happened to a high school senior in California.
LEMON: Her story is featured in "The Washington Post." The columnist who wrote the story says that he was testing AI software that helps teachers spot plagiarism in their students' work. The software, he says, incorrectly flagged the student's essay as having been aided by ChatGPT.
So, joining us now, our go to person when it comes to this AI stuff is Sinead Bovell. She's a futurist tech entrepreneur and the founder of Weekly Advice for Young Entrepreneurs.
Thank you very much.
Sinead, I saw this in "The Washington Post" and immediately I thought about you. I was having a conversation with someone in my family this weekend, who is a principal at an elementary school, and I said, how do you decide -- how do - how do teachers know if it's ChatGPT -
HARLOW: T.
LEMON: T. If it's AI, or if an actual student is writing it. There is this tool out there, but that tool can be wrong as well.
SINEAD BOVELL, FUTURIST TECH ENTREPRENEUR: Right. So those -- the AI detection tools, they're actually quite often more wrong than not. Of course the tool that was used in this case, Turn It in AI detector tool, it -- this company says it has about 98 percent accuracy in flagging AI generated content, but that number hasn't been evaluated by external researchers. So, I think in an era when AI is going to become a part of our common discourse, a part of our world, trying to play this cat and mouse game of detecting AI generated content is just going to become more and more challenging over time. These tools are going to get better. Since most of these AI detection tools have come to market, we've already seen a massive update in the AI system that's powering systems like ChatGPT. So, I think it's kind of a losing battle for teachers to try to consistently flag AI generated content.
HARLOW: I think -
BOVELL: There's a lot of variability and doubt there.
HARLOW: I think there's also a question about the -- sort of the role of the government in all of this and regulation. We've been so behind the ball in terms of regulating social media.
I sat down yesterday in Washington, D.C., with the president's top economists, Lael Brainard, and asked her, you know, just because we can do all this with AI, does that mean we should? Here's what she said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LAEL BRAINARD, DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: I do think that there are some important risks here. And, yes, absolutely, we need to make sure that there are important safeguards that we all agree and put those in place so that some of those risks that are really quite sobering are addressed at the outset.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: That's a hope, but what should the government do in your opinion?
BOVELL: Well, when it comes to education in particular, I think banning these systems or trying to catch students using these types of systems isn't the right step forward. The purpose of education is to prepare students for the economy and the world of tomorrow.
HARLOW: Yes.
BOVELL: That world is going to include AI. So if we want students to be able to participate in that world, to be able to use these tools safely, they need to be working with them now.
And then when it comes to a government level, what role does government have here? We've seen a lot of leading voices in -- call for an office of strategic foresight. So we don't always feel like we're caught off guard slamming the panic button to try to keep up with the latest iterations in artificial intelligence. And instead, a year or two ago, when research into these systems was starting to become a lot more prevalent, we could start to measure the potential disruption, the guardrails that should be applied, give institutions like academia, which tends to move a little bit slower, the chance to catch up and reformulate curriculums. And then, of course, for things like safety, our watermarks on AI generated content a possibility. What AI detection tools could be helpful? Do we have those in newsrooms? So those are all of the different standards and pathways we can take, but it starts with having a lot more foresight and not kind of always being caught off guard with the latest iteration in technology.
LEMON: Yes. Yes. HARLOW: You were talking about - Don was talking about watermarks and asked me --
LEMON: I asked about watermarks, yes.
HARLOW: Yes.
LEMON: Because -- I mean you have to be able to identify who is -- what is real and what is not.
HARLOW: Yes.
LEMON: And actually the who is the original owner of the content.
HARLOW: Although I could sleep another hour if AI would just, you know, ChatGPT writing all - writing it all.
LEMON: Well, I would not put that out there in front of everyone, the bosses who are watching as well.
HARLOW: Sinead, thank you very much.
LEMON: I don't agree with that at all (INAUDIBLE).
Thank you, Sinead, good to see you. We'll see you soon.
BOVELL: Thanks, guys. See you soon.
LEMON: New rules have baseball games -- see you soon.
[08:45:01]
New rules have baseball games ending quicker. An unintended consequence? Hmm. Well, it's less time for beer. Oh my gosh, sorter games impacting beer sales, alcohol sales at the park. I don't know if that's good or bad. Harry Enten is here with this morning's number. What is - oh my gosh.
HARLOW: You're safe. A strike?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEMON: Tampa Bay Rays one game shy of making history. They beat the Red Sox 9-7 last night to push their season starting winning streak to 12. Twelve is the biggest winning streak the team has ever had at any point in their history. They are now just one win shy of tying the Major League record to start a season, which was set by the Brewers and the Braves in the 1980s.
With the new pitch clock, the time of last night's game, two hours 44 minutes. That's quick.
HARLOW: Shorter games means a little less time to chug that beer.
[08:50:03]
So, what's that doing to alcohol sales at the ballpark?
Senior data reporter Harry Enten is here with that.
OK, my un -- not fun take, but is -- wasn't this in place so people didn't drink as long, so less drunk driving?
HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: That's -- basically it was that they would not leave the ballpark with as much booze in their system, right? So --
HARLOW: Yes. So, why would you change that?
ENTEN: Well, we're going to get to that. Perhaps it has to do a little bit with this.
So, this morning's number is -- I just want to use one ballpark as an example, right? So, the Major League Baseball Houston Astros home park, Minute Maid Park, the alcohol sales for last year were $28.4 million. Now that was across about 95 major events in 2022. But the vast majority of those were, in fact, baseball games. There were a few concerts in there as well. But 28.4 million gives you an idea that booze is a big sale point for baseball teams, right?
So, the traditional rules was that you only sell through the end of the seventh inning. But the MLB's new pitch clock has made seven innings end about 24 minutes shorter, quicker, on average, right?
So, what are some teams doing? Well, they're now going to sell alcohol until the eighth inning. That gets back about 75 percent of the time of lost sales, right, because of the faster games. And -- but by my estimate, that might make teams at most about a few extra million dollars. But, you know, obviously, that perhaps could lead to more people out on the roads, right, Poppy?
HARLOW: Yes. I mean, you know how -- my position on this. I think it's not as safe.
ENTEN: Yes.
HARLOW: So, this could also have ill-advised effects, right? What else.
ENTEN: Yes, that's exactly right. So, OK, so here's an estimate of the time between the alcohol cut-off and the end of a nine inning MLB game. So last year with the seventh inning cut off and the 2022 game time it was about 42 minutes. Now, with the 2023 game timing and the eighth inning cut off, look at that, it's only about 18 minutes. So now 24 minutes less time elapses from people getting alcohol in their system and then going out on the roads. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that might lead to some more people who perhaps shouldn't be driving, driving.
And more than that, there's actually a study on this. OK, there was a study - there should be a one here. There we go. A study of 2006 to 2015 home Philly games. More time between the end of the game and the end of alcohol sales lead to less violent crime around the stadium. So, we know for a fact that when, in fact, you squeeze in the time and you're leaving less time for people to get the alcohol through their systems, we know that it does, in fact, lead to more crime, at least in Philadelphia, Phillies games. Hopefully, that doesn't happen this year, but we'll see.
HARLOW: I told you.
LEMON: Disparaging my old city.
HARLOW: Harry Enten.
ENTEN: I like Philadelphia.
HARLOW: Thank you.
LEMON: Philadelphia. Not phila - Philadelphia.
ENTEN: You got the accent down. I'm going to leave it to you. I do the New York accent.
LEMON: And water.
ENTEN: Water.
LEMON: Not water, water.
ENTEN: Water.
LEMON: Water.
HARLOW: Guys, water. It's water. Just water.
ENTEN: It's H2O.
LEMON: Well, according to Harry, it's beer.
HARLOW: Thank you, Harry.
Happening in just minutes, jury selection will begin today in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation trial against Fox News as a judge sanctions the network for withholding key evidence. Details ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[08:57:29]
HARLOW: This morning, as a huge fire at a recycling plant spews toxic smoke, this is in Richmond, Indiana, records show local leaders knew that building was riddled with fire hazards for years. In 2019, the owner admitted the plant didn't have sprinklers and ignored an order to repair the property. But it's unclear what steps the city took to enforce that order.
Meantime, officials are conducting around the clock air quality monitoring. They're nervous the debris may contain asbestos from burning plastics. However, no toxic compounds have yet been detected in the air. More than 2,000 people still can't go home, 2,000 people. And those living downwind of the fire are under a shelter in place order.
The cause of the fire, still unknown this morning, and it will likely be several days before it stops so investigations can begin.
CNN has reached out to the company for a response and we have not heard back.
LEMON: There's also this, this morning. Just minutes from now, jury selection begins in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox. Roughly 300 potential jurors will be whittled down to 12 jurors and 12 alternate. They will be asked about their news habits, including whether they watch Fox, but they will not be asked if they believe the 2020 election was legitimate or if they had any connection to the Capitol insurrection.
If a jury isn't seated today, the process will continue tomorrow. Opening statements set to begin Monday. The trial is expected to last about six weeks. In a pre-trial hearing yesterday, Dominion also played previously unaired audio of Fox host Maria Bartiromo's conversations with former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Now, the judge is sanctioning Fox for withholding evidence like this and only turning over the recordings to Dominion last week.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARIA BARTIROMO, FOX NEWS HOST: I'm gong to be asking you for as much evidence as you can tell us about these lawsuits. Whatever you can tell us in terms of evidence would be really helpful.
RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER TRUMP LAWYER: Sure.
BARTIROMO: OK, great. I just want to make sure that I get (INAUDIBLE).
GIULIANI: I can tell you - I can tell you exactly what we have.
BARTIROMO: Perfect. And what about this software, this Dominion software?
GIULIANI: That's - that's a little harder -
BARTIROMO: It seems troubling.
GIULIANI: To tell you right - it's being - it's analyzed - being analyzed right now. I mean there were a couple of races that have been reversed because the Democrat was triple-counted, two already Michigan.
BARTIROMO: Unbelievable.
GIULIANI: Now, whether that applies for the whole state or not, I can't tell you yet.
BARTIROMO: This Dominion software, does Nancy Pelosi have an interest in it? GIULIANI: I - yes, I've read that.
[09:00:00]
I don't - I can't prove that yet.
BARTIROMO: OK.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LEMON: Fascinating.
HARLOW: Yes, jury selection today.
LEMON: Fascinating, I know. To be -- you don't have to be a fly on the wall just to be in the courtroom to witnesses this, the reporters getting to cover it.
We thank you for watching us, everyone. We're so glad that you did. And you have yourself a great day.
But in the meantime, make sure you tune in to "CNN NEWS CENTRAL," which starts right now.
