Episode 6: Stochastic Parrot Galactica, November 23, 2022

Explicit content warning

07/17/23 • 63 min

1 Listener

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 Dickson, Tec

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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Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
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Alex

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

Ben Dickson's coverage of Grover:
Why we must rethink AI benchmarks, Ben Dickson, Tec

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 5: Sam Bankman-Fried's Future Fund, November 9 2022

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

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 7: There Are Now 15 Competing Evaluation Metrics (ft. Dr. Jeremy Kahn). December 12, 2022

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

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 6: Stochastic Parrot Galactica, November 23, 2022

Transcript

ALEX: 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: 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, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington.

ALEX: And I’m Alex Hanna,