Come on, between a key demand of the Writer’s Strike being the regulation of AI in screenwriting and some of my other posts about AI this year, did you really think I wouldn’t share this half-hour comedy screed from Adam Conover? It may be foul-mouthed, but it is funny. However, if you’re looking for a TL;DR one might sum it up as such:
- Tech companies are using “artificial intelligence” to sound cutting edge the same way so many good companies jumped on “gluten-free” to sound healthier.
- They want consumers to think their “artificial intelligence” are budding sentient machines like we’ve seen in sci-fi stories –they’re Mr. Data’s ancestors!– but they’re really glorified autocorrect on a massive scale.
And did I mention it’s foul-mouthed? Beware around kindern and co-workers who won’t like such language.
Seriously, though, he delves into the corporate motivations, the myth-making, and the potential consequences if this current fad for gluten-free AI goes unchecked. And it’s not Skynet. It’s both more banal and more headache-inducing.
Now if that whets your appetite, dive into this this over-an-hour-long conversation Adam has with two experts about this exact type of large-scale machine learning, Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender. Both have a lot of insight on why this sort of “artificial intelligence” is not ready for prime time, at least not in the prime places it is. Again, this isn’t because it will trigger the Robot Uprising, but they do give good explanations for it’s not safe for many workplaces.