Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

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.

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 StoriesThe Sokal Hoax
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of OppressionLatanya 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 Dick

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Alex

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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

"[A

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Alex

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

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:*

• 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

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Alex

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

Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”

Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.

Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!

References:

Sakana.AI keeps trying to make 'AI Scientist' happen

• The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers

How should the advent of large language models affect the practice of science?

Relevant research ethics policies:

ACL Policy on Publication Ethics

Committee On Public Ethics (COPE)

The Vancouver Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work

Fresh AI Hell:

Should journals allow LLMs as co-authors?

Business Insider "asks ChatGPT"

Otter.ai sends transcript of private after-meeting discussion to everyone

"Could AI End Grief?"

AI generated crime scene footage

"The first college of nursing to offer an MSN in AI"

FTC cracks down on "AI" claims

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

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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.