Something You Should Know
The Real and False Promises of AI & What They Really Ate at the First Thanksgiving
Thu, 21 Nov 2024
How many photographs have been taken worldwide in the history of photography? And how many just this year? These are a few of the fascinating facts that begin this episode that I know you’ll end up repeating at upcoming holiday parties that will make you sound so interesting! Source: John Mitchinson author of 1227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (https://amzn.to/4fP4vaX). To hear it said, artificial intelligence is the greatest thing in the world or the beginning of the end of civilization. So, what’s the truth about AI? What can it do and what will it never do? That is what Arvind Narayanan is going to tell you, and he is someone to listen to. Arvind is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy. He was named one of Time magazine 100 most influential people in AI and he is co-author of the book k AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (https://amzn.to/3Z9RBiv). What did they eat at the first Thanksgiving? No doubt you’ve heard stories about the first Thanksgiving but a lot of what we were told just isn’t true. In fact, many of the foods and traditions of Thanksgiving came much later. Here to set the record straight on that famous dinner held by the Pilgrims and native Americans is Leslie Landrigan. She has been writing about New England history for over 10 years – and she is author of the book the book Historic Thanksgiving Foods: And the People who Cooked Them, 1607 to 1955 (https://amzn.to/40NW23s) Anyone who owns a printer has wondered why the ink cartridges cost so much to replace. The answer is a bit complicated and kind of interesting. Listen as I explain https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/printers/why-is-printer-ink-so-expensive-a2101590645/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: Dell Technologies’ Early Holiday Savings event is live and if you’ve been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it’s all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Shop Now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What fascinating facts can I learn about photography?
Today on Something You Should Know, some fascinating facts you never knew, including one weird one about Wild Bill Hickok, then a top AI expert on the amazing things AI can do, and the false promises, the things AI cannot do.
These ideas about AI developing an agency of its own and deciding to do stuff, these are pure sci-fi scenarios. Based on the way that AI is currently built today, those speculative scenarios really have no basis in reality.
Also, the real reason printer ink is so expensive and a look back at what they really ate at the first Thanksgiving.
One of the things that they always ate and ate to excess is pumpkin. Pumpkin was hugely important. New England was the pumpkin dominion. And the first American folk song was written in 1620, and it was about how they ate too much pumpkin all the time.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
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Chapter 2: What are the false promises of AI?
But we should be careful about, I think, the snake oil salesmen in the AI world who like to just slap the AI label on whatever tech product they're selling to try to get us to think that it is some remarkable technology that's going to solve all our problems for us.
So you mentioned some different kinds of artificial intelligence just now. Can you go through and just explain what each one of them does? Or is that just too complicated to do?
Oh, not at all. And I would say to listeners that if someone tells you it's too complicated, you should be skeptical. They're probably trying to hide something. But in broad strokes, so let's take a couple of different types of AI. So what's happening in ChatGPT is that it's simply a machine, and some of you may have heard this, a machine for predicting the next word in a sequence of words.
What is the most likely next word? And it turns out, and this was largely a surprise to AI researchers as well, that the way for AI to be really good at predicting the next word in a sequence of words is to have some quote unquote understanding of language, of grammatical rules and patterns, and understanding of facts about the world.
Because if you have a sentence like the capital of France is blank, It helps to know what the capital of France is so that you can complete that sentence with a high probability word instead of a low probability word. So it turns out that's really the secret behind it. And it might seem a little bit disappointing to hear that that's all it is. And in a sense, that's all it is.
But I think it is truly remarkable that developers are able to create something useful with this really brute force approach.
And so when it's predicting the next word in a sequence, where is it pulling from to come up with that word?
Chatbots have been trained on essentially all of the text on the internet, approximately speaking, and a lot of books and so on. So that's what it's pulling from, right?
So what training means is that it has learned the statistical patterns that allow it to say, for example, something you should, the bot would know that no is a likely next word because there are many discussions of this podcast online. And so it has learned that statistical pattern. So that's primarily what it's learning from.
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Chapter 3: What did people really eat at the first Thanksgiving?
But all it's doing is it's predicting based on the past, right? I mean, that's pretty much it.
Exactly. It's making decisions about the future based on the past. So no matter how accurately it works... I think, you know, kind of on a fundamental philosophical level, we should think about, is this a just way to treat people, right? Should you deny someone their freedom in the criminal justice system because of the behavior of people like them in the past?
So that's, yeah, something that's deeply questionable as well.
What about this whole idea, though? We hear about AI and people throw that term around so much that AI can, you know, fake things and it can create images of people that aren't real. It can replace, you know, actors in a movie. I don't get all that.
Yeah, image generation AI has been advancing very quickly. And over the last year or so, companies have been working on video generation AI. So yes, I think to some extent, the hype around this is real. I think deepfakes are already a problem. Specifically, the thing I'm most concerned about is deepfake nudes.
And this has affected, from what I can tell, hundreds of thousands of people, primarily women, as you can imagine, around the world. And I think we desperately need regulation to curb some of the damage here. Now, in the political sphere, there's also concern that deepfakes can be used to trick voters and that sort of thing. I'm less convinced of that. There has been a lot of alarmism about that.
But I think something we should think about is that In a world where we're online and we have no easy way to tell what's real and what's not, what does that mean for the erosion of trust in the online environment? And how easy that makes it for powerful people, politicians and others to evade accountability by claiming that even real videos are actually deepfakes.
So we see that happening over and over. And that is something I'm worried about.
There have been very prominent people who have sounded the alarm that AI is dangerous. And we've heard things about how, you know, what if it develops a mind of its own? There's all this stuff that's very scary sounding. And I just don't know, is that real? What is the big concern that people like Elon Musk and others have? What are they worried about? What's the problem?
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