Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Latest Episodes:

Episode 39: Newsrooms Pivot to Bullshit (feat. Sam Cole), Aug 5 2024 Aug 29, 2024

Show notes

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.

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 Blog

The 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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Episode 38: Deflating Zoom's 'Digital Twin,' July 29 2024 Aug 14, 2024

Show notes

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.

References:
The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings

All-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 data

AI "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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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 Aug 02, 2024

Show notes

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.

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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 Jul 19, 2024

Show notes

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.

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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 Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

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.

References:

Blog post, May 14: Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you
Blog post, May 30: AI Overviews: About last week

Algorithms 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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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 Jun 20, 2024

Show notes

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.

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Episode 33: Much Ado About 'AI' 'Deception', May 20 2024 Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

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.

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Episode 32: A Flood of AI Hell, April 29 2024 May 23, 2024

Show notes

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.
**Lyrics & video on Peertube.
*Surveillance:*

*Synthetic information spills:*

*Toxic wish fulfillment:*

Fake photos of real memories

*ShotSpotter:*

*Selling your data:*

*AI is always people:*

*TESCREAL corporate capture:*

*Accountability:*

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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 May 07, 2024

Show notes

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.

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/1617910073870934019

CBS News: Upselling “AI” mammograms
Ars Technica: Rhyming AI clock sometimes lies about the time
Ars Technica: Surveillance by M&M's vending machine

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.

Emily

Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Episode 30: Marc's Miserable Manifesto, April 1 2024 Apr 19, 2024

Show notes

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