Episode 25: An LLM Says LLMs Can Do Your Job, January 22 2024

02/01/24 • 56 min

1 Listener

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

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?"

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:
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

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 24: AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024

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!

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 26: Universities Anxiously Buy in to the Hype (feat. Chris Gilliard), February 5 2024

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.

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 25: An LLM Says LLMs Can Do Your Job, January 22 2024

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