Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

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.
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 Valley

Fresh 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 law
Read 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.com

You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.
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
You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.
References:
PNAS: ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks
Beware the Hype: ChatGPT Didn't Replace Human Data AnnotatorsChatGPT Can Replace the Underpaid Workers Who Train AI, Researchers SayPolitical 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=20https://twitter.com/CultureCrave/status/1762739767471714379https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1762891492476006491?t=bNQ1AQlju36tQYxnm8BPVQ&s=19A 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
You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.
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, but instead publish “thunks”, which are nuggets of thought that can interact with the “reader” in a dynamic and multimedia way."
AI generated illustrations in a scientific paper -- rat balls edition.
Per Retraction Watch: the paper with illustrations of a rat with enormous "testtomcels" has been retracted
You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.
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 NeuroscienceNews
Politico: 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.



You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 Growth
FYI: 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/1744234385891594380Chaser: https://twitter.com/Maccadaynu/status/1744342930150560056University 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?"

You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

Follow us!

Emily
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emilymbender.bsky.social Alex
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.