Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Latest Episodes:

Episode 19: The Murky Climate and Environmental Impact of Large Language Models, November 6 2023 Nov 08, 2023

Show notes

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.

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 Care

Is 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.

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 18: Rumors of Artificial General Intelligence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, October 23 2023 Oct 31, 2023

Show notes

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.

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.

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 17: Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp), September 22 2023 Oct 04, 2023

Show notes

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.

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.

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 16: Med-PaLM or Facepalm? A Second Opinion On LLMs In Healthcare (feat. Roxana Daneshjou), August 28, 2023 Sep 28, 2023

Show notes

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.

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/3k4wouet3pg2u

School 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 Italy

AI 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.

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 15: The White House And Big Tech Dance The Self-Regulation Tango, August 11 2023 Sep 20, 2023

Show notes

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.

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 regulation
AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype
“AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers — and Isn’t Intelligent
Fresh 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.

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 14: Henry Kissinger, Machines of War, and the Age of Military AI Hype (feat. Lucy Suchman), July 21 2023 Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

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.

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-chatgpt

Spam reviews & children’s books:
https://twitter.com/millbot/status/1671008061173952512?s=20

An analysis we like, comparing AI to the fossil fuel industry:
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/110528154854288688

AI 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 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 13: Beware The Robo-Therapist (feat. Hannah Zeavin), June 8 2023 Sep 07, 2023

Show notes

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.

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 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 12: It's All Hell, May 5 2023 Aug 29, 2023

Show notes

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.

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.

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 11: A GPT-4 Fanfiction Novella, April 7 2023 Aug 24, 2023

Show notes

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.

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.pdf

Radiolab'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/1640186536825061376

Generative “AI” is making “police sketches”:
https://twitter.com/Wolven/status/1624299508371804161?t=DXyucCPYPAKNn8TtAo0xeg&s=19

More mathy math in policing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/aurora-police-new-ai-system-bodycam-footage/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

User Research without the Users:
https://twitter.com/schock/status/1643392611560878086

DoNotPay is here to cancel your gym membership:
https://twitter.com/BrianBrackeen/status/1644193519496511488?s=20

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 10: Don't Be A Lawyer, ChatGPT. March 3, 2023 Aug 16, 2023

Show notes

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.
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 ChatGPT

Joe 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.

Emily