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

10/31/23 • 60 min

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 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.

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

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,

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

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 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 18: Rumors of Artificial General Intelligence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, October 23 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 discover there's worse to come. I'm Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington.

ALEX HANNA: And I'm Alex Hanna, d