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Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 40: Elders Need Care, Not 'AI' Surveillance (feat. Clara Berridge), August 19 2024
13 september 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Dr. Clara Berridge joins Alex and Emily to talk about the many 'uses' for generative AI in elder care -- from "companionship," to "coaching" like medication reminders and other encouragements toward healthier (and, for insurers, cost-saving) behavior. But these technologies also come with questionable data practices and privacy violations. And as populations grow older on average globally, technology such as chatbots is often used to sidestep real solutions to providing meaningful care, while also playing on ageist and ableist tropes. Lees meer
Dr. Clara Berridge is an associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. Her research focuses explicitly on the policy and ethical implications of digital technology in elder care, and considers things like privacy and surveillance, power, and decision-making about technology use.
References:
Care.Coach's 'Avatar' chat program*
For Older People Who Are Lonely, Is the Solution a Robot Friend?
Care Providers’ Perspectives on the Design of Assistive Persuasive Behaviors for Socially Assistive Robots
Socio-Digital Vulnerability
***Care.Coach's 'Fara' and 'Auger' products, also discussed in this episode, are no longer listed on their site.
Fresh AI Hell:
Apple Intelligence hidden prompts include the command "don't hallucinate"
The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age
Family poisoned after following fake mushroom book
It is a beautiful evening in the neighborhood, and you are a horrible Waymo robotaxi
Dynamic pricing + surveillance hell at the grocery store
Chinese social media's newest trend: imitating AI-generated videos
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.…
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Episode 39: Newsrooms Pivot to Bullshit (feat. Sam Cole), Aug 5 2024
29 augustus 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
The Washington Post is going all in on AI -- surely this won't be a repeat of any past, disastrous newsroom pivots! 404 Media journalist Samantha Cole joins to talk journalism, LLMs, and why synthetic text is the antithesis of good reporting. Lees meer
References:
The Washington Post Tells Staff It’s Pivoting to AI: "AI everywhere in our newsroom."
Response: Defector Media Promotes Devin The Dugong To Chief AI Officer, Unveils First AI-Generated BlogThe Washington Post's First AI Strategy Editor Talks LLMs in the Newsroom
Also: New Washington Post CTO comes from Uber
The Washington Post debuts AI chatbot, will summarize climate articles.
Media companies are making a huge mistake with AI
When ChatGPT summarizes, it does nothing of the kind
404 Media: 404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feed
404 Media: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
Fresh AI Hell:
"AI" Alan Turning
Our Opinions Are Correct: The Turing Test is Bullshit (w/Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender)
Google advertises Gemini for writing synthetic fan letters
Dutch Judge uses ChatGPT's answers to factual questions in ruling
Is GenAI coming to your home appliances?
AcademicGPT (Galactica redux)
"AI" generated images in medical science, again (now retracted)
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 38: Deflating Zoom's 'Digital Twin,' July 29 2024
14 augustus 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
Could this meeting have been an e-mail that you didn't even have to read? Emily and Alex are tearing into the lofty ambitions of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, who claims the future is a LLM-powered 'digital twin' that can attend meetings in your stead, make decisions for you, and even be tuned to different parameters with just the click of a button. Lees meer
References:
The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetingsAll-knowing machines are a fantasy
A reminder of some things chatbots are not good for
Medical science shouldn't platform automating end-of-life care
The grimy residue of the AI bubble
On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: a work rant
Fresh AI Hell:
LA schools' ed tech chatbot misusing student dataAI "teaching assistants" at Morehouse
"Diet-monitoring AI tracks your each and every spoonful"
A teacher's perspective on dealing with students who "asked ChatGPT"
Are Swiss researchers affiliated with Israeli military industrial complex? Swiss institution asks ChatGPT
Using a chatbot to negotiate lower prices
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 37: Chatbots Aren't Nurses (feat. Michelle Mahon), July 22 2024
2 augustus 2024 · 1 uur
We regret to report that companies are still trying to make generative AI that can 'transform' healthcare -- but without investing in the wellbeing of healthcare workers or other aspects of actual patient care. Registered nurse and nursing care advocate Michelle Mahon joins Emily and Alex to explain why generative AI falls far, far short of the work nurses do. Lees meer
Michelle Mahon is the Director of Nursing Practice with National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the country. Michelle has over 25 years of experience as a registered nurse in various settings. In her role with NNU, Michelle works with nurses across the United States to protect the vital role that RNs play in health care as direct caregivers and patient advocates.
References:
NVIDIA's AI Bot Outperforms Nurses: Here's What It Means
Hippocratic AI's roster of 'genAI healthcare agents'
Related: Nuance's DAX Copilot
Fresh AI Hell:
"AI-powered health coach" will urge you to drink water with lemon
50% of 2024 Q2 VC investments went to "AI"
Thanks to AI, Google no longer claiming to be carbon-neutral
Click work "jobs" soliciting photos of babies through teens
Screening of film "written by AI" canceled after backlash
Putting the AI in IPA
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 36: About That 'Dangerous Capabilities' Fanfiction (feat. Ali Alkhatib), June 24 2024
19 juli 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
When is a research paper not a research paper? When a big tech company uses a preprint server as a means to dodge peer review -- in this case, of their wild speculations on the 'dangerous capabilities' of large language models. Ali Alkhatib joins Emily to explain why a recent Google DeepMind document about the hunt for evidence that LLMs might intentionally deceive us was bad science, and yet is still influencing the public conversation about AI. Lees meer
Ali Alkhatib is a computer scientist and former director of the University of San Francisco’s Center for Applied Data Ethics. His research focuses on human-computer interaction, and why our technological problems are really social – and why we should apply social science lenses to data work, algorithmic justice, and even the errors and reality distortions inherent in AI models.
References:
Google DeepMind paper-like object: Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities
Fresh AI Hell:
Hacker tool extracts all the data collected by Windows' 'Recall' AI
In NYC, ShotSpotter calls are 87 percent false alarms
"AI" system to make callers sound less angry to call center workers
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 evaluated for "graduate level reasoning"
OpenAI's Mira Murati says "AI" will have 'PhD-level' intelligence
OpenAI's Mira Murati also says AI will take some creative jobs, maybe they shouldn't have been there to start out with
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 35: AI Overviews and Google's AdTech Empire (feat. Safiya Noble), June 10 2024
3 juli 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
You've already heard about the rock-prescribing, glue pizza-suggesting hazards of Google's AI overviews. But the problems with the internet's most-used search engine go way back. UCLA scholar and "Algorithms of Oppression" author Safiya Noble joins Alex and Emily in a conversation about how Google has long been breaking our information ecosystem in the name of shareholders and ad sales. Lees meer
References:
Blog post, May 14: Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you
Blog post, May 30: AI Overviews: About last weekAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Noble
Fresh AI Hell:
AI Catholic priest demoted after saying it's OK to baptize babies with Gatorade
National Archives bans use of ChatGPT
ChatGPT better than humans at "Moral Turing Test"
Taco Bell as an "AI first" company
AGI by 2027, in one hilarious graph
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 34: Senate Dot Roadmap Dot Final Dot No Really Dot Docx, June 3 2024
20 juni 2024 · 1 uur 4 min
The politicians are at it again: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's series of industry-centric forums last year have birthed a "roadmap" for future legislation. Emily and Alex take a deep dive on this report, and conclude that the time spent writing it could have instead been spent...making useful laws. Lees meer
References:
Driving US Innovation in Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States
Tech Policy Press: US Senate AI Insight Forum Tracker
Put the Public in the Driver's Seat: Shadow Report to the US Senate AI Policy Roadmap
Emily's opening remarks on “AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge” virtual roundtable
Fresh AI Hell:
Homophobia in Spotify's chatbot
StackOverflow in bed with OpenAI, pushing back against resistance
See also: https://scholar.social/@dingemansemark/112411041956275543
OpenAI making copyright claim against ChatGPT subreddit
Introducing synthetic text for police reports
ChatGPT-like "AI" assistant ... as a car feature?
Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 33: Much Ado About 'AI' 'Deception', May 20 2024
5 juni 2024 · 1 uur
Will the LLMs somehow become so advanced that they learn to lie to us in order to achieve their own ends? It's the stuff of science fiction, and in science fiction these claims should remain. Emily and guest host Margaret Mitchell, machine learning researcher and chief ethics scientist at HuggingFace, break down why 'AI deception' is firmly a feature of human hype. Lees meer
Reference:
Patterns: "AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions"
Fresh AI Hell:
Adobe's 'ethical' image generator is still pulling from copyrighted material
Apple advertising hell: vivid depiction of tech crushing creativity, as if it were good
"AI is more creative than 99% of people"
AI generated employee handbooks causing chaos
Bumble CEO: Let AI 'concierge' do your dating for you.
Some critique
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 32: A Flood of AI Hell, April 29 2024
23 mei 2024 · 58 min
AI Hell froze over this winter and now a flood of meltwater threatens to drown Alex and Emily. Armed with raincoats and a hastily-written sea shanty*, they tour the realms, from spills of synthetic information, to the special corner reserved for ShotSpotter. Lees meer
**Lyrics & video on Peertube.
*Surveillance:*
Public kiosks slurp phone data
Workplace surveillance
Surveillance by bathroom mirror
Stalking-as-a-service
Cops tap everyone else's videos
Facial recognition at the doctor's office
*Synthetic information spills:*
Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request”
AI-generated obituaries
X's Grok treats Twitter trends as news
Touch the button. Touch it.
Meta’s chatbot enters private discussions
WHO chatbot makes up medical info
*Toxic wish fulfillment:*
Fake photos of real memories
*ShotSpotter:*
ShotSpotter adds surveillance to the over-policed
Chicago ending ShotSpotter contract
But they're listening anyway
*Selling your data:*
Reddit sells user data
Meta sharing user DMs with Netflix
Scraping Discord
*AI is always people:*
Amazon Fresh
3D art
George Carlin impressions
The people behind image selection
*TESCREAL corporate capture:*
Biden worried about AI because of "Mission: Impossible"
Feds appoint AI doomer to run US AI safety institute
Altman & friends will serve on AI safety board
*Accountability:*
FTC denies facial recognition for age estimation
SEC goes after misleading claims
Uber Eats courier wins payout over ‘racist’ facial recognition app
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 31: Science Is a Human Endeavor (feat. Molly Crockett and Lisa Messeri), April 15 2024
7 mei 2024 · 1 uur 3 min
Will AI someday do all our scientific research for us? Not likely. Drs. Molly Crockett and Lisa Messeri join for a takedown of the hype of "self-driving labs" and why such misrepresentations also harm the humans who are vital to scientific research. Lees meer
Dr. Molly Crockett is an associate professor of psychology at Princeton University.
Dr. Lisa Messeri is an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, and author of the new book, In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles.References:
AI For Scientific Discovery - A Workshop
Nature: The Nobel Turing Challenge
Nobel Turing Challenge Website
Eric Schmidt: AI Will Transform Science
Molly Crockett & Lisa Messeri in Nature: Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
404 Media: Is Google's AI actually discovering 'millions of new materials?'Fresh Hell:
Yann LeCun realizes generative AI sucks, suggests shift to objective-driven AI
In contrast:
https://x.com/ylecun/status/1592619400024428544
https://x.com/ylecun/status/1594348928853483520
https://x.com/ylecun/status/1617910073870934019CBS News: Upselling “AI” mammograms
Ars Technica: Rhyming AI clock sometimes lies about the time
Ars Technica: Surveillance by M&M's vending machineCheck out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 30: Marc's Miserable Manifesto, April 1 2024
19 april 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Dr. Timnit Gebru guest-hosts with Alex in a deep dive into Marc Andreessen's 2023 manifesto, which argues, loftily, in favor of maximizing the use of 'AI' in all possible spheres of life. Lees meer
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team, in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.
References:
Marc Andreessen: "The Techno-Optimism Manifesto"
First Monday: The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence (Timnit Gebru & Émile Torres)
Business Insider: Explaining 'Pronatalism' in Silicon ValleyFresh AI Hell:
CBS New York: NYC subway testing out weapons detection technology, Mayor Adams says.
The Markup: NYC's AI chatbot tells businesses to break the lawRead Emily's Twitter / Mastodon thread about this chatbot.
The Guardian: DrugGPT: New AI tool could help doctors prescribe medicine in England
The Guardian: Wearable AI: Will it put our smartphones out of fashion?
TheCurricula.comCheck out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 29: How LLMs Are Breaking the News (feat. Karen Hao), March 25 2024
3 april 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
Award-winning AI journalist Karen Hao joins Alex and Emily to talk about why LLMs can't possibly replace the work of reporters -- and why the hype is damaging to already-struggling and necessary publications. Lees meer
References:
Adweek: Google Is Paying Publishers to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform
The Quint: AI Invents Quote From Real Person in Article by Bihar News Site: A Wake-Up Call?
Fresh AI Hell:
Alliance for the Future
VentureBeat: Google researchers unveil ‘VLOGGER’, an AI that can bring still photos to life
Business Insider: A car dealership added an AI chatbot to its site. Then all hell broke loose.
More pranks on chatbots
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 28: LLMs Are Not Human Subjects, March 4 2024
13 maart 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Alex and Emily put on their social scientist hats and take on the churn of research papers suggesting that LLMs could be used to replace human labor in social science research -- or even human subjects. Why these writings are essentially calls to fabricate data. Lees meer
References:
PNAS: ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks
Beware the Hype: ChatGPT Didn't Replace Human Data Annotators
ChatGPT Can Replace the Underpaid Workers Who Train AI, Researchers Say
Political Analysis: Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples
Behavioral Research Methods: Can large language models help augment English psycholinguistic datasets?
Information Systems Journal: Editorial: The ethics of using generative AI for qualitative data analysis
Fresh AI Hell:
Advertising vs. reality, synthetic Willy Wonka edition
https://x.com/AlsikkanTV/status/1762235022851948668?s=20
https://twitter.com/CultureCrave/status/1762739767471714379
https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1762891492476006491?t=bNQ1AQlju36tQYxnm8BPVQ&s=19
A news outlet used an LLM to generate a story...and it falsely quoted Emily
AI Invents Quote From Real Person in Article by Bihar News Site: A Wake-Up Call?
Trump supporters target Black voters with faked AI images
Seeking Reliable Election Information? Don’t Trust AI
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 27: Asimov's Laws vs. 'AI' Death-Making (w/ Annalee Newitz & Charlie Jane Anders), February 19 2024
29 februari 2024 · 1 uur 5 min
Science fiction authors and all-around tech thinkers Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders join this week to talk about Isaac Asimov's oft-cited and equally often misunderstood laws of robotics, as debuted in his short story collection, 'I, Robot.' Meanwhile, both global and US military institutions are declaring interest in 'ethical' frameworks for autonomous weaponry. Lees meer
Plus, in AI Hell, a ballsy scientific diagram heard 'round the world -- and a proposal for the end of books as we know it, from someone who clearly hates reading.
Charlie Jane Anders is a science fiction author. Her recent and forthcoming books include Promises Stronger Than Darkness in the ‘Unstoppable’ trilogy, the graphic novel New Mutants: Lethal Legion, and the forthcoming adult novel Prodigal Mother.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. Their most recent novel is The Terraformers, and in June you can look forward to their nonfiction book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
They both co-host the podcast, 'Our Opinions Are Correct', which explores how science fiction is relevant to real life and our present society.
Also, some fun news: Emily and Alex are writing a book! Look forward (in spring 2025) to The AI Con, a narrative takedown of the AI bubble and its megaphone-wielding boosters that exposes how tech’s greedy prophets aim to reap windfall profits from the promise of replacing workers with machines.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
International declaration on "Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy" provides "a normative framework addressing the use of these capabilities in the military domain."
DARPA's 'ASIMOV' program to "objectively and quantitatively measure the ethical difficulty of future autonomy use-cases...within the context of military operational values."
Short version
Long version (pdf download)Fresh AI Hell:
"I think we will stop publishing books,…
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Episode 26: Universities Anxiously Buy in to the Hype (feat. Chris Gilliard), February 5 2024
15 februari 2024 · 1 uur
Just Tech Fellow Dr. Chris Gilliard aka "Hypervisible" joins Emily and Alex to talk about the wave of universities adopting AI-driven educational technologies, and the lack of protections they offer students in terms of data privacy or even emotional safety. Lees meer
References:
Inside Higher Ed: Arizona State Joins ChatGPT in First Higher Ed Partnership
ASU press release version: New Collaboration with OpenAI Charts theFuture of AI in Higher Education
MLive: Your Classmate Could Be an AI Student at this Michigan University
Chris Gilliard: How Ed Tech Is Exploiting Students
Fresh AI Hell:
Various: “AI learns just like a kid”
Infants' gaze teaches AI the nuances of language acquisition
Similar from NeuroscienceNewsPolitico: Psychologist apparently happy with fake version of himself
WSJ: Employers Are Offering a New Worker Benefit: Wellness Chatbots
NPR: Artificial intelligence can find your location in photos, worrying privacy expert
Palette cleanser: Goodbye to NYC's useless robocop.
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 25: An LLM Says LLMs Can Do Your Job, January 22 2024
1 februari 2024 · 56 min
Is ChatGPT really going to take your job? Emily and Alex unpack two hype-tastic papers that make implausible claims about the number of workforce tasks LLMs might make cheaper, faster or easier. And why bad methodology may still trick companies into trying to replace human workers with mathy-math. Lees meer
Visit us on PeerTube for the video of this conversation.
References:
OpenAI: GPTs are GPTs
Goldman Sachs: The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic GrowthFYI: Over the last 60 years, automation has totally eliminated just one US occupation.
Fresh AI Hell:
Microsoft adding a dedicated "AI" key to PC keyboards.
Dr. Damien P Williams: "Yikes."
The AI-led enshittification at Duolingo
Shot: https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380
Chaser: https://twitter.com/Maccadaynu/status/1744342930150560056
University of Washington Provost highlighting “AI”
“Using ChatGPT, My AI eBook Creation Pro helps you write an entire e-book with just three clicks -- no writing or technical experience required.”
"Can you add artificial intelligence to the hydraulics?"Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 24: AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024
17 januari 2024 · 1 uur
New year, same Bullshit Mountain. Alex and Emily are joined by feminist technosolutionism critics Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney to tear down the ways AI is proposed as a solution to structural inequality, including racism, ableism, and sexism -- and why this hype can occlude the need for more meaningful changes in institutions. Lees meer
Dr. Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr. Kerry McInerney is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute. Together they host The Good Robot, a podcast about gender, feminism, and whether technology can be "good" in either outcomes or processes.
Watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
HireVue promo: How Innovative Hiring Technology Nurtures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Algorithm Watch: The [German Federal Asylum Agency]'s controversial dialect recognition software: new languages and an EU pilot project
Want to see how AI might be processing video of your face during a job interview? Play with React App, a tool that Eleanor helped develop to critique AI-powered video interview tools and the 'personality insights' they offer.
Philosophy & Technology: Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference” (Drage & McInerney, 2022)
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: Copies without an original: the performativity of biometric bordering technologies (Drage & Frabetti, 2023)
Fresh AI Hell
Internet of Shit 2.0: a "smart" bidet
Fake AI “students” enrolled at Michigan University
Synthetic images destroy online crochet groups
“AI” for teacher performance feedback
Palette cleanser: “Stochastic parrot” is the American Dialect Society’s AI-related word of the year for 2023!
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Episode 23: AI Hell Freezes Over, December 22 2023
10 januari 2024 · 1 uur 5 min
AI Hell has frozen over for a single hour. Alex and Emily visit all seven circles in a tour of the worst in bite-sized BS. Lees meer
References:
Pentagon moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously kill humans
NYC Mayor uses AI to make robocalls in languages he doesn’t speak
University of Michigan investing in OpenAI
Tesla: claims of “full self-driving” are free speech
LLMs may not "understand" output
'Maths-ticated' data
LLMs can’t analyze an SEC filing
How GPT-4 can be used to create fake datasets
Paper thanking GPT-4 concludes LLMs are good for science
Will AI Improve Healthcare? Consumers Think So
US struggling to regulate AI in healthcare
Andrew Ng's low p(doom)
Presenting the “Off-Grid AGI Safety Facility”
Chess is in the training data
DropBox files now shared with OpenAI
Underline.io and ‘commercial exploitation’
Axel Springer, OpenAI strike "real-time news" deal
Adobe Stock selling AI-generated images of Israel-Hamas conflict
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by AI Writers
Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every 4-5 miles
Underage workers training AI, exposed to traumatic content
Prisoners training AI in Finland
ChatGPT gives better output in response to emotional language
- An explanation for bad AI journalismUK judges now permitted to use ChatGPT in legal rulings.
Michael Cohen's attorney apparently used generative AI in court petition
Brazilian city enacts ordinance secretly written by ChatGPT
The lawyers getting fired for using ChatGPT
Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives
Your palette-cleanser: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alex…
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Episode 22: Congressional 'AI' Hearings Say More about Lawmakers (feat. Justin Hendrix), December 18 2023
3 januari 2024 · 58 min
Congress spent 2023 busy with hearings to investigate the capabilities, risks and potential uses of large language models and other 'artificial intelligence' systems. Alex and Emily, plus journalist Justin Hendrix, talk about the limitations of these hearings, the alarmist fixation on so-called 'p(doom)' and overdue laws on data privacy. Lees meer
Justin Hendrix is editor of the Tech Policy Press.
References:
TPP tracker for the US Senate 'AI Insight Forum' hearings
Balancing Knowledge and Governance: Foundations for Effective Risk Management of AI (featuring Emily)
Hearing charter
Emily's opening remarks at virtual roundtable on AI
Senate hearing addressing national security implications of AI
Video: Rep. Nancy Mace opens hearing with ChatGPT-generated statement.
Brennan Center report on Department of Homeland Security: Overdue Scrutiny for Watch Listing and Risk Prediction
TPP: Senate Homeland Security Committee Considers Philosophy of AI
Alex & Emily's appearance on the Tech Policy Press PodcastFresh AI Hell:
Asylum seekers vs AI-powered translation apps
UK officials use AI to decide on issues from benefits to marriage licenses
Prior guest Dr. Sarah Myers West testifying on AI concentration
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 21: The True Meaning of 'Open Source' (feat. Sarah West and Andreas Liesenfeld), November 20 2023
30 november 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
Researchers Sarah West and Andreas Liesenfeld join Alex and Emily to examine what software companies really mean when they say their work is 'open source,' and call for greater transparency. Lees meer
This episode was recorded on November 20, 2023.
Dr. Sarah West is the managing director of the AI Now Institute. Her award-winning research and writing blends social science, policy, and historical methods to address the intersection of technology, labor, antitrust, and platform accountability. And she’s the author of the forthcoming book, "Tracing Code."
Dr. Andreas Liesenfeld is assistant professor in both the Centre for Language Studies and department of language and communication at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He’s a co-author on research from this summer critically examining the true “open source” nature of models like LLaMA and ChatGPT – concluding.
References:
Yann LeCun testifies on 'open source' work at Meta
Meta launches LLaMA 2
Stanford Human-Centered AI's new transparency index
Coverage in The Atlantic
Eleuther critique
Margaret Mitchell critique
Opening up ChatGPT (Andreas Liesenfeld's work)
Webinar
Fresh AI Hell:
Sam Altman out at OpenAI
The Verge: Meta disbands their Responsible AI team
Ars Technica: Lawsuit claims AI with 90 percent error rate forces elderly out of rehab, nursing homes
Call-out of Stability and others' use of “fair use” in AI-generated art
A fawning profile of OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 20: Let's Do the Time Warp! (to the "Founding" of "Artificial Intelligence"), November 6 2023
21 november 2023 · 1 uur 5 min
Emily and Alex time travel back to a conference of men who gathered at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956 to examine problems relating to computation and "thinking machines," an event commonly mythologized as the founding of the field of artificial intelligence. But our crack team of AI hype detectives is on the case with a close reading of the grant proposal that started it all. Lees meer
This episode was recorder on November 6, 2023. Watch the video version on PeerTube.
References:
"A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence" (1955)
Re: methodological individualism, "The Role of General Theory in Comparative-historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology, 1991
Fresh AI Hell:
Silly made-up graph about “intelligence” of AI vs. “intelligence” of AI criticism
How AI is perpetuating racism and other bias against Palestinians:
The UN hired an AI company with "realistic virtual simulations" of Israel and Palestine
WhatsApp's AI sticker generator is feeding users images of Palestinian children holding guns
The Guardian on the same issue
Instagram 'Sincerely Apologizes' For Inserting 'Terrorist' Into Palestinian Bio TranslationsPalette cleanser: An AI-powered smoothie shop shut down almost immediately after opening.
OpenAI chief scientist: Humans could become 'part AI' in the future
A Brief History of Intelligence: Why the evolution of the brain holds the key to the future of AI.
AI-centered 'monastic academy':“MAPLE is a community of practitioners exploring the intersection of AI and wisdom.”
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Produc… -
Episode 19: The Murky Climate and Environmental Impact of Large Language Models, November 6 2023
8 november 2023 · 1 uur 1 min
Drs. Emma Strubell and Sasha Luccioni join Emily and Alex for an environment-focused hour of AI hype. How much carbon does a single use of ChatGPT emit? What about the water or energy consumption of manufacturing the graphics processing units that train various large language models? Why even catastrophic estimates from well-meaning researchers may not tell the full story. Lees meer
This episode was recorded on November 6, 2023.
References:
"The Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training Will Plateau, Then Shrink"
"The Carbon Emissions of Writing and Illustrating Are Lower for AI than for Humans"
The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence
- New York Times coverage: "AI Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country""Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP."
"The 'invisible' materiality of information technology."
"Counting Carbon: A Survey of Factors Influencing the Emissions of Machine Learning"
"AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think."Fresh AI Hell:
Not the software to blame for deadly Tesla autopilot crash, but the company selling the software.
4chan Uses Bing to Flood the Internet With Racist Images
Followup from Vice: Generative AI Is a Disaster, and Companies Don’t Seem to Really CareIs this evidence for LLMs having an internal "world model"?
“Approaching a universal Turing machine”
Americans Are Asking AI: ‘Should I Get Back With My Ex?’
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 18: Rumors of Artificial General Intelligence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, October 23 2023
31 oktober 2023 · 1 uur
Emily and Alex read through Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas' recent proclamation that "artificial general intelligence is already here." Why this claim is a maze of hype and moving goalposts. Lees meer
References:
Noema Magazine: "Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here."
"AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark"
"Targeting the Benchmark: On Methodology and Current Natural Language Processing Research"
"Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing"
"The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise"
"Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm"
"The logic of domains"
"Reckoning and Judgment"
Fresh AI Hell:
Using AI to meet "diversity goals" in modeling
AI ushering in a "post-plagiarism" era in writing"Wildly effective and dirt cheap AI therapy."
Applying AI to "improve diagnosis for patients with rare diseases."
Using LLMs in scientific research
Health insurance company Cigna using AI to deny medical claims.
AI for your wearable-based workout
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 17: Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp), September 22 2023
4 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
Emily and Alex are joined by Stanford PhD student Haley Lepp to examine the increasing hype around LLMs in education spaces - whether they're pitched as ways to reduce teacher workloads, increase accessibility, or simply "democratize learning and knowing" in the Global South. Plus a double dose of devaluating educator expertise and fatalism about the 'inevitability' of LLMs in the classroom. Lees meer
Haley Lepp is a Ph.D. student in the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. She draws on critical data studies, computational social science, and qualitative methods to understand the rise of language technologies and their use for educational purposes. Haley has worked in many roles in the education technology sector, including curriculum design and NLP engineering. She holds an M.S. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington and B.S. in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from Georgetown University.
References:
University of Michigan debuts 'customized AI services'
Al Jazeera: An AI classroom revolution is coming
California Teachers Association: The Future of Education?Politico: AI is not just for cheating
Extra credit: "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" by Audrey Watters
Fresh AI Hell:
AI generated travel article for Ottawa -- visit the food bank!
Microsoft Copilot is “usefully wrong”
* Response from Jeff Doctor“Ethical” production of “AI girlfriends”
Withdrawn AI-written preprint on millipedes resurfaces, causing alarm among myriapodological community
New York Times: How to Tell if Your A.I. Is Conscious
* Response from VentureBeat: Today's AI is alchemy.EU on the doomerism train, warns about "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI."
More AI in the legal system: 'jolly useful' ChatGPT gives judge legal summary
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follo…
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Episode 16: Med-PaLM or Facepalm? A Second Opinion On LLMs In Healthcare (feat. Roxana Daneshjou), August 28, 2023
28 september 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
Alex and Emily are taking another stab at Google and other companies' aspirations to be part of the healthcare system - this time with the expertise of Stanford incoming assistant professor of dermatology and biomedical data science Roxana Daneshjou. A look at the gap between medical licensing examination questions and real life, and the inherently two-tiered system that might emerge if LLMs are brought into the diagnostic process. Lees meer
References:
Google blog post describing Med-PaLM
Nature: Large language models encode clinical knowledge
Politico: Microsoft teaming up with Epic Systems to integrate generative AI into electronic medical records software
MedRXiv: Beyond the hype: large language models propagate race-based medicine (Omiye, Daneshjou, et al)
Fresh AI hell:
Fake summaries of fake reviews
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3k4wouet3pg2uSchool administrators asking ChatGPT which books they have to remove from school libraries, given Iowa’s book ban
Mason City Globe Gazette: “Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity.”
Loquacity and Visible Emotion: ChatGPT as a Policy Advisor
Written by authors at the Bank of ItalyAI generated school bus routes get students home at 10pm
Lethal AI generated mushroom-hunting books
How would RBG respond?
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Lli… -
Episode 15: The White House And Big Tech Dance The Self-Regulation Tango, August 11 2023
20 september 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
Emily and Alex tackle the White House hype about the 'voluntary commitments' of companies to limit the harms of their large language models: but only some large language models, and only some, over-hyped kinds of harms. Lees meer
Plus a full portion of Fresh Hell...and a little bit of good news.
References:
White House press release on voluntary commitments
Emily’s blog post critiquing the “voluntary commitments”
An “AI safety” infused take on regulationAI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype
“AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers — and Isn’t IntelligentFresh AI Hell:
Future of Life Institute hijacks SEO for EU's AI Act
LLMs for denying health insurance claims
NHS using “AI” as receptionist
Automated robots in reception
Can AI language models replace human research participants?
A recipe chatbot taught users how to make chlorine gas
Using a chatbot to pretend to interview Harriet Tubman
Worldcoin Orbs & iris scans
Martin Shkreli’s AI for health start up
Authors impersonated with fraudulent books on Amazon/Goodreads
Good News:
Zoom restores terms of service after backlash to AI training clause
Authors fight back on book-scanning model Prosecraft
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 14: Henry Kissinger, Machines of War, and the Age of Military AI Hype (feat. Lucy Suchman), July 21 2023
13 september 2023 · 1 uur 1 min
Emily and Alex are joined by technology scholar Dr. Lucy Suchman to scrutinize a new book from Henry Kissinger and coauthors Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher that declares a new 'Age of AI,' with abundant hype about the capacity of large language models for warmaking. Plus close scrutiny of Palantir's debut of an artificial intelligence platform for combat, and why the company is promising more than the mathy-maths can provide. Lees meer
Dr. Lucy Suchman is a professor emerita of sociology at Lancaster University in the UK. She works at the intersections of anthropology and the field of feminist science and technology studies, focused on cultural imaginaries and material practices of technology design. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism. She is concerned with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world.
This episode was recorded on July 21, 2023. Watch the video on PeerTube.
References:
Wall Street Journal: OpEd derived from 'The Age of AI' (Kissinger, Schmidt & Huttenlocher)
American Prospect: Meredith Whittaker & Lucy Suchman’s review of Kissinger et al’s book
VICE: Palantir Demos AI To Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical About It Don't Worry About It
Fresh AI Hell:
American Psychological Association: how to cite ChatGPT
https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgptSpam reviews & children’s books:
https://twitter.com/millbot/status/1671008061173952512?s=20An analysis we like, comparing AI to the fossil fuel industry:
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/110528154854288688AI Heaven from Dolly Parton:
https://consequence.net/2023/07/dolly-parton-ai-hologram-comments/Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k mer…
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Episode 13: Beware The Robo-Therapist (feat. Hannah Zeavin), June 8 2023
7 september 2023 · 1 uur 1 min
Emily and Alex talk to UC Berkeley scholar Hannah Zeavin about the case of the National Eating Disorders Association helpline, which tried to replace human volunteers with a chatbot--and why the datafication and automation of mental health services are an injustice that will disproportionately affect the already vulnerable. Lees meer
Content note: This is a conversation that touches on mental health, people in crisis, and exploitation.
This episode was originally recorded on June 8, 2023. Watch the video version on PeerTube.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology and media, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of, "The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy."
References:
VICE: Eating Disorder Helpline Fires Staff, Transitions to Chatbot After Unionization
… and then pulls the chatbot.
NPR: Can an AI chatbot help people with eating disorders as well as another human?
Psychiatrist.com: NEDA suspends AI chatbot for giving harmful eating disorder advice
Politico: Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions
Danah Boyd: Crisis Text Line from my perspective.
Tech Workers Coalition: Chatbots can't care like we do.
Slate: Who's listening when you call a crisis hotline? Helplines and the carceral system.
Hannah Zeavin: The Third Choice: Suicide Hotlines, Psychiatry, and the Police
New York Times hype: Using "AI" to diagnose mental disorders based on voice recordings, April 2022
Fresh AI Hell:
ChatGPT for city government work
ChatGPT as manuscript pre-screener for publishing companies
A lawyer tried to use ChatGPT for “research”
Legal scholar (and former MAIHT3K guest) Kendra Albert breaks
Check out future streams on Twitc…
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Episode 12: It's All Hell, May 5 2023
29 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 1 min
Take a deep breath and join Alex and Emily in AI Hell itself, as they take down a month's worth of hype in a mere 60 minutes. Lees meer
This episode aired on Friday, May 5, 2023.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Terrifying NEJM article on GPT-4 in medicine
“Healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT 79% of the time”
Good thoughts from various experts in response
ChatGPT supposedly reading dental x-rays
Chatbots “need” therapists
CEO proposes AI therapist, removes proposal upon realizing there’s regulation:
https://twitter.com/BEASTMODE/status/1650013819693944833 (deleted)ChatGPT is more carbon efficient than human writers
Asking disinformation machine for confirmation bias
GPT-4 glasses to tell you what to say on dates, "Charisma as a Service"
Context-aware fill for missing data
“Overemployed” with help from ChatGPT
Pakistani court uses GPT-4 in bail decision
ChatGPT in Peruvian and Mexican courts
Elon Musk’s deepfake defense
Elon Musk's TruthGPT
Fake interview in German publication revealed as “AI” at the end of the article
Stealing people’s voices, including those of voice actors
Hollywood writer’s strike & negotiating when & how “AI” can be used / AI as scabs
AI will replace teachers
Geoffrey Hinton’s "x-risk" media tour
Mind-reading machines
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 11: A GPT-4 Fanfiction Novella, April 7 2023
24 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
After a hype-y few weeks of AI happenings, Alex and Emily shovel the BS on GPT-4’s “system card,” its alleged “sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” and a criti-hype heavy "AI pause" letter. Hint: for a good time, check the citations. Lees meer
This episode originally aired on Friday, April 7, 2023.
You can also watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
GPT-4 system card: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf
“Sparks of AGI” hype: https://twitter.com/SebastienBubeck/status/1638704164770332674
And the preprint from Bubeck et al.: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712“Pause AI” letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
The “Sparks” paper points to this 1997 editorial in their definition of “intelligence”:
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdfRadiolab's miniseries, 'G': https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-g
Baria and Cross, "The brain is a computer is a brain.": https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14042
Senator Chris Murphy buys the hype:
https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1640186536825061376Generative “AI” is making “police sketches”:
https://twitter.com/Wolven/status/1624299508371804161?t=DXyucCPYPAKNn8TtAo0xeg&s=19More mathy math in policing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/aurora-police-new-ai-system-bodycam-footage/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitterUser Research without the Users:
https://twitter.com/schock/status/1643392611560878086DoNotPay is here to cancel your gym membership:
https://twitter.com/BrianBrackeen/status/1644193519496511488?s=20Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Na… -
Episode 10: Don't Be A Lawyer, ChatGPT. March 3, 2023
16 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 7 min
Alex and Emily are taking AI to court! Amid big claims about LLMs, a look at the facts about ChatGPT, legal expertise, and what the bar exam actually tells you about someone's ability to practice law--with help from Harvard legal and technology scholar Kendra Albert. Lees meer
This episode was first recorded on March 3, 2023.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Social Science Research Network paper “written” by ChatGPTJoe Wanzala, “ChatGPT is ideal for eDiscovery”
Legal applications for ChatGPT:
Shot: GPT-4 'could pass the. bar exam'
Chaser: ChatGPT had bigger dreams."AI for law"
“AI can legally run a company”
Wired: Generative AI Is Coming for the Lawyers
“This is a decision by a Colombian court in Cartagena (dated January, 30, 2023).
As far as we know, it is the first time that a judicial decision has been taken by explicitly resorting to #ChatGPT @sama @OpenAI. The Court poses a series of specific questions to #ChatGPT""Don't Be A Lawyer" song from "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"
Rep. Ted Lieu introduces legislation written by an LLM
DoNotPay offers money to anyone willing to use their AI to argue in court
Fresh AI Hell:
Vanderbilt University responds to MSU shooting with e-mail written using ChatGPT
Science fiction magazine closes submissions due to LLM spam
The 1st International Workshop on Implicit Author Characterization from Texts for Search and Retrieval (IACT’23)
Journalist Dave Lee's Signal number given out by ChatGPT
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 9: Call the AI Quack Doctor, February 17, 2023
8 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
Should the mathy-maths be telling doctors what might be wrong with you? And can they actually help train medical professionals to treat human patients? Alex and Emily discuss the not-so-real medical and healthcare applications of ChatGPT and other large language models. Lees meer
Plus another round of fresh AI hell, featuring "charisma as a service," and other assorted reasons to tear your hair out.
This episode was first recorded on February 17th of 2023.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Glass.ai makes “diagnosis machine”:
https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1620128621821317125?t=Q6tTAOcGAoFJ3Ko9m4EC9g&s=19Percy Liang claims 'PubMedGPT' can pass medical exams:
https://crfm.stanford.edu/2022/12/15/pubmedgpt.html
https://twitter.com/percyliang/status/1603469265583353856?s=20&t=SdWeINzUw92pbkTO8OAVqQEmily's reaction to the above:
https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1603766381807570944?s=20&t=SdWeINzUw92pbkTO8OAVqQChatGPT gets 60 percent of questions right in US Medical Licensing Exam:
https://healthitanalytics.com/news/chatgpt-passes-us-medical-licensing-exam-without-clinician-inputAn Apple Watch error is clogging up 911 lines:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/health/apple-watch-911-emergency-call.htmlChatGPT-assisted diagnosis: Is the future suddenly here?
https://www.statnews.com/2023/02/13/chatgpt-assisted-diagnosis/NVIDIA “eye contact” demo:
https://twitter.com/Jousefm2/status/1616878021280993284“Theory of the mind":
https://twitter.com/LChoshen/status/1623575423652139015?t=Ohc9tzB09pAEddAReLc6mA&s=09Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park… -
Episode 8: The ChatGPT Awakens, January 20, 2023
4 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
New year, new hype? As the world gets swept up in the fervor over ChatGPT of late 2022, Emily and Alex give a deep sigh and begin to unpack the wave of fresh enthusiasm over large language models and the "chat" format specifically. Lees meer
Plus, more fresh AI hell.
This episode was recorded on January 20, 2023.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Situating Search (Shah & Bender 2022)
Related op-ed: https://iai.tv/articles/all-knowing-machines-are-a-fantasy-auid-2334
Piantadosi's thread showing ChatGPT writing a program to classify white males as good scientists
Find Anna Lauren Hoffman's publications (though not yet the one we were referring to) here: https://www.annaeveryday.com/publications
Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen
Karen Hao's AI Colonialism series
Milagros Miceli: https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/spezialseiten/persons-details/p/milagros-miceli/
Julian Posada: https://posada.website/
“This Isn’t Your Data, Friend”: Black Twitter as a Case Study on Research Ethics for Public Data (Klassen & Fiesler 2022)
No Humans Here: Ethical Speculation on Public Data, Unintended Consequences, and the Limits of Institutional Review (Pater, Fiesler & Zimmer 2022)
Casey Fiesler's publications: https://caseyfiesler.com/publications/
And TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcaseyWhere are human subjects in Big Data research? The emerging ethics divide. (Metcalf & Crawford 2016)
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 7: There Are Now 15 Competing Evaluation Metrics (ft. Dr. Jeremy Kahn). December 12, 2022
26 juli 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
Emily and Alex are joined by Dr. Jeremy G. Kahn to discuss the distressingly large number of evaluation metrics for artificial intelligence, and some new AI hell. Lees meer
Jeremy G. Kahn has a PhD in computational linguistics, with a focus on information-theoretic and empirical engineering approaches to dealing with natural language (in text and speech). He’s gregarious, polyglot, a semi-auto-didact, and occasionally prolix. He also likes comic books, coffee, progressive politics, information theory, lateral thinking, science fiction, science fact, linear thinking, bicycles, beer, meditation, love, play, and inquiry. He lives in Seattle with his wife Dorothy and son Elliott.
This episode was recorded on December 12, 2022.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
XKCD: Standards
WikidataCon
Gish Gallop
The Bender Rule
DJ Khaled - You Played Yourself
Jeff Kao's interrogation of public comment periods.
Emily's blog post response to NYT piece
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 6: Stochastic Parrot Galactica, November 23, 2022
17 juli 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
Emily and Alex discuss MetaAI's bullshit science paper generator, Galactica, along with its defenders. Plus, where could AI actually help scientific research? And more Fresh AI Hell. Lees meer
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Imre Lakatos on research programs
Shah, Chirag and Emily M. Bender. 2022. Situating Search. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’22).
UW RAISE (Responsibility in AI Systems and Experiences)
Stochastic Parrots:
Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. In Proceedings of FAccT 2021, pp.610-623.The Octopus Paper:
Bender Emily M. and Alexander Koller. 2020. Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data. ACL 2020Palestinian man arrested because of bad machine translation.
Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
The Sokal Hoax
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
Latanya Sweeney, "Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery"
Mehtab Khan and Alex Hanna, The Subjects and Stages of AI Dataset Development: A Framework for Dataset Accountability
(What is 'sealioning'?)
http://wondermark.com/1k62/Grover:
Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, Emily M. Bender, Amandalynne Paullada, Emily Denton and Alex Hanna. 2021. AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark. Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Track on Datasets and Benchmarks.Ben Dickson's coverage of Grover:
Why we must rethink AI benchmarks, Ben Dickson, TechTalks, December 6, 2021.Sociology of science work by Roberta Sinatra
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
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Emily
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Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBend…
-
Episode 5: Sam Bankman-Fried's Future Fund, November 9 2022
11 juli 2023 · 59 min
Emily and Alex discuss Sam Bankman-Fried's Future Fund, its essay contest, and the problems with using AI for prediction and resource allocation--mere days before the collapse of FTX. Also, we introduce our "What in the Fresh AI Hell?" segment! Lees meer
This episode was recorded on November 9, 2022.
Watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
Super Forecasting And AI
Bill Howe - Applied AI in High-Expertise Settings or Curation as Programming
Samir Passi and Solon Barocos - "Problem Formulation in Fairness"
Vinod Prabharakan, William Isaac, Donald Martin Jr - Participatory Problem Formation for Fairer Machine Learning
David Ribes, Andrew S Hoffman, Steven C Slota and Geoffrey C Bowker -
The Logic of DomainsShoshana Zuboff - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Lee Vinsel on Criti-hype - Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 4: Is AI Art Actually 'Art'? October 26, 2022
2 juli 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
AI is increasingly being used to make visual art. But when is an algorithmically-generated image art...and when is it just an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of pixels? Technology researchers Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna talk to a panel of artists and researchers about the hype, the ethics, and even the definitions of art when a computer is involved. Lees meer
This episode was recorded in October of 2022. You can watch the video on PeerTube.
Dr. Johnathan Flowers is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His research interest is at the intersection of American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Race, Gender and Sexuality as they apply to socio-technical systems. Flowers also explores the impacts of cultural narratives on the perception and development of sociotechnical systems.
Dr. Jennifer Lena is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she runs the Arts Administration program. She’s published books on music genres, the legitimation of art, and the measurement of culture.
Dr. Negar Rostamzadeh is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Responsible AI team. Her recent research is at the intersection of computer vision and sociotechnical research. She studies creative computer vision technologies and the broader social impact of them.
Kevin Roose, "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy."
Jo Lawson-Tancred, "Robot Artist Ai-Da Just Addressed U.K. Parliament About the Future of A.I. and ‘Terrified’ the House of Lords"
Marco Donnarumma, "AI Art Is Soft Propaganda for the Global North"
Jane Recker, "U.S. Copyright Office Rules A.I. Art Can’t Be Copyrighted"
Richard Whiddington, "Shutterstock Inks Deal With DALL-E Creator to Offer A.I.-Generated Stock Images. Not All Artists Are Rejoicing."
Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal, "The Whiteness of AI"
Follow our guests:
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - https://twitter.com/shengokai // https://zirk.us/@shengoka… -
Episode 3: "Can Machines Learn To Behave?" Part 3, September 23, 2022
19 juni 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
Technology researchers Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna kick off the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series by reading through, "Can machines learn how to behave?" by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Google VP who works on artificial intelligence. Lees meer
This episode was recorded in September of 2022, and is the last of three about Aguera y Arcas' post.
You can watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
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Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 2: "Can Machines Learn To Behave?" Part 2, September 6, 2022
19 juni 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
Technology researchers Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna kick off the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series by reading through, "Can machines learn how to behave?" by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Google VP who works on artificial intelligence. Lees meer
This episode was recorded in September of 2022, and is the second of three about Aguera y Arcas' post.
You can also watch the video of this episode on PeerTube.
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. -
Episode 1: "Can Machines Learn To Behave?" Part 1, August 31, 2022
31 mei 2023 · 45 min
Technology researchers Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna kick off the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series by reading through, "Can machines learn how to behave?" by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Google VP who works on artificial intelligence. Lees meer
This episode was recorded in August of 2022, and is the first of three about Aguera y Arcas' post.
Watch the video stream on PeerTube.
Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.
Follow us!
Emily
Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender
Alex
Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
Twitter: @alexhanna
Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.