Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

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

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

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 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

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

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

"[Abramovic

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

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.

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

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/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?"

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Alex

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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!

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 journalism

UK 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?

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 Podcast

Fresh 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

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Alex

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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

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Emily

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Alex

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 Translations

Palette 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.”

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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?’

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Emily

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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,

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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?

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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 rest

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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/

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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:

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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

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Emily

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Alex

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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)

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Emily

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Alex

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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=19

Percy 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=SdWeINzUw92pbkTO8OAVqQ

Emily's reaction to the above:
https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1603766381807570944?s=20&t=SdWeINzUw92pbkTO8OAVqQ

ChatGPT gets 60 percent of questions right in US Medical Licensing Exam:
https://healthitanalytics.com/news/chatgpt-passes-us-medical-licensing-exam-without-clinician-input

An Apple Watch error is clogging up 911 lines:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/health/apple-watch-911-emergency-call.html

ChatGPT-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=09

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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/@professorcasey

Where are human subjects in Big Data research? The emerging ethics divide. (Metcalf & Crawford 2016) 

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 2020

Palestinian 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, Tec

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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!

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 Domains

Shoshana Zuboff - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Lee Vinsel on Criti-hype - Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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/@shengokai
Dr. Negar Rostamzadeh - twitter.com/negar_rz
Dr. Jennifer Lena - https://twitter.com/WITWhat // https://sciences.social/@jenniferclena

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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.

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 at on Twitch, Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.

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Alex

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

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.

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 at on Twitch, Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.

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Emily

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Alex

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.