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

Explicit content warning

09/20/23 • 64 min

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

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.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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

Alex

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

Plus a full portion of Fresh Hell...and a little bit of good news.

References:

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

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.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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

Alex

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

Previous Episode

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

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 at on Twitch, Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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

Alex

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

Next Episode

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

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 at on Twitch, Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.
Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.
Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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

Alex

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

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - Episode 15: The White House And Big Tech Dance The Self-Regulation Tango, August 11 2023

Transcript

ALEX HANNA: Welcome everyone to mystery AI hype Theater 3000 where we seek catharsis in this age of AI hype. We find the worst of it and pop it with the sharpest needles we can find.
EMILY M. BENDER: Along the way we learn to always read the footnotes. And each time we think we've reached peak AI hype, the summit of Bullshit Mountain, we discovered there's worse to come. I'm Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington.
ALEX HANNA: And I'm Alex Hanna, dir