"Sure, LLMs are bad at some things, but you can't deny that they're useful for programming!" Sound familiar? In this week's episode, Emily and Alex break down the key myths around AI-boosted productivity in tech. Plus, Alex previews her work with DAIR's newly launched Luddite Lab, where workers are organizing against automation.

References:

• Yale Budget Lab report: "What Might AI Adoption Mean for the Fiscal and Economic Outlook?"
  • Also referenced: Karger et al. paper funded by Open Philanthropy
• Garry Tan’s gstack
• "Karpathy-Inspired Claude Code Guidelines"

Previous MAIHT3k episodes referenced:

• Episode 60: Vibe Coding: Four Security Nightmares in a Trenchcoat (with Susanna Cox)
• Episode 53: Linguists Versus 'AI' Speech Analysis (with Nicole Holliday)

Fresh AI Hell:

• Emotional surveillance at work
• DARPA call for proposals on "Decentralized Artificial Intelligence"
• CircleCI claims "the promised AI productivity boom isn’t all hype"
• Andreessen is at it again
• "A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed"
• Retraction of pro-edtech paper
• Chaser: "Minnesota passes the nation’s first ban on ‘nudification’ apps"

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

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Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Senator Bernie Sanders recently hosted a panel on "The Existential Threat of AI," featuring Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark and other x-riskers. Dr. Nathalie Maréchal joins Emily and Alex to unpack this latest stop on Bernie's descent into doomerism. We return to the MST3k model with a rare video artifact!

Nathalie Maréchal is a writer, researcher and advocate fighting for democracy and human rights in the age of technofascism. Her latest article, "Tech Policy Is on the Front Line of Fascism vs. Democracy. Pick a Side," is available in Tech Policy Press. She is currently the managing policy director at Northeastern University’s Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy.

References:

• "LIVE: The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation"

Fresh AI Hell:

• "The AI Pledge for Humanity" petition
• Richard Dawkins force-femmes a chatbot
• Anthropic claims LLMs have "emotion concepts"
• Palantir wants us all to stop being mean to data centers
• "Optimizing LLM costs by inventing employees again"
• Luxury surveillance cat

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Last month, we recorded our very first in-person podcast, live from Brooklyn! Alex and Emily debunk an especially soulless hype artifact about Anthropic's absurd claims of "moral education" for chatbots. Tune in to hear our rendition of "There Was A Society That Swallowed AI," plus other fun surprises!

References:

• "Claude has an 80-page 'soul document'"

Fresh AI Hell:

• NYC schools "Guidance on Artificial Intelligence"
• "Therapy App Sessions Exposed in Court"
• Meta to track "employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data"
• News org uses real journalist names on synthetic text
• "New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations"
• "The first agentic cannabis device"
• TikTok auto–opts in users for "AI" remixes
• Oberlin students push back on "Year of AI Exploration"
• "This is just to say / I have turned off / the AI features"
  
  

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

The weather’s getting warmer, so what better time to take a trip to the hottest place in the universe — Fresh AI Hell! Emily and Alex take a spin through more than 30 hype artifacts, with topics including medicine, data centers, and fake people.

Fresh AI Hell regions visited:

• AI bubble + data centers
• Fake people
• Medicine
• This is your brain on ChatGPT
• Policy + privacy

See the show notes on Peertube for a full list of artifacts referenced.

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

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Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Why are some writers and publishers so excited to automate their work? Author Carmen Maria Machado joins Alex and Emily to unpack what writers are missing when they hand off their work to chatbots, and the underlying issues this reveals in the publishing industry. Plus, we resolve to keep fan fiction a human endeavor!

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere.

Find tickets to our April 30th live show here!

References:
- "I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence."
- AFT shares tips for "Harnessing the Best of AI"

Fresh AI Hell:
- "With Teens Comfortable Confiding in AI, Should Schools Embrace It for Mental Health Care?"
- Longread on the use of automation by the British government
- "OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters"
- UN brief on "AI Deception"
- Reader's Digest cover on "Making Friends with AI"
- The only good "AI acceptance" policy

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

The people who make automated translation possible are often low-paid gig workers. Usually, they don't even know who they're really working for — and it might be the US military. Reporter Niamh McIntyre joins Alex and Emily to dissect how one data labeling company presents its work, based her investigation into the experiences of East African employees.

Niamh McIntyre is a senior reporter at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in London, covering AI, labor, and surveillance tech. She was 2023 AI Accountability Fellow at the Pulitzer Center, and prior to joining TBIJ, spent four years as a data journalist at The Guardian.

Find tickets to our April 30th live show here!

References:

• Appen blog post on "Why AI Must be Ethical and Responsible"

Also referenced:

• "Gig workers in Africa have been helping the US military. They had no idea"
• DAIR's Data Workers' Inquiry

Fresh AI Hell:

• Marc Andreessen says "there is no inner self"
• Rest of World call for stories on labor and tech
• Detrans.AI wants you to talk to fake detransitioners
• Melania proposes catwalking robot as replacement for teachers
• Microsoft sidelines Mustafa Suleyman
• Andrej Karpathy cooked by LLM usage
• "Sorry AI, you can't call yourself a nurse"
• Volunteer fire department rejects $250,000 Google donation

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

We knew that the energy demands of data centers were preventing dirty energy sources from being sunsetted. Now hyperscalers are reaching even further, resurrecting Pennsylvania's infamous Three Mile Island. Emily and Alex are joined by Maia Woluchem and Dr. Livia Garofalo, who have researched the impacts of data center construction across PA.

Maia Woluchem and Livia Garofalo are with the Trustworthy Infrastructures program at Data & Society. Their latest article, "Pennsylvania is perfect," is part of the New Internationalist's AI–themed issue.

References:

• Three Mile Island press release
• Sen. McCormick on AI investments in PA
• McCormick's wife Meta president

Fresh AI Hell:

• Amazon data center targeted by Iran
• "AI-powered bombing quicker than 'speed of thought'"
• Meta's AI glasses use human reviewers (See also: original Swedish reporting)
• Bernie posts video with Yudkowsky
• Grammarly offers fake advice as if from real writers
• Google data center water estimates
• "AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It"
• High schooler questions surveillance

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Data centers are overburdening the planet, so tech billionaires have a new scheme — put 'em in space! Astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker joins Alex and Emily to launch this plan into the sun. We unpack all the reasons that this hilariously terrible idea will never be viable outside of sci-fi-villain fantasies.

Dr. Adam Becker is the author of More Everything Forever, a book about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. Keep an eye out for his new podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine, which is launching soon.

References:

• SpaceX press release on "space-based AI"
• "How data centres in space sustainably enable the AI revolution"

Also referenced:

• Nvidia blog post on data centers in space
• Starcloud white paper

Fresh AI Hell:

• Judge rules chatbots can't offer attorney-client privilege
• "RFK Jr's Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum"
• AI company seeks writer who doesn't use LLMs
• Altman likens AI energy use to human nutritional needs
• SXSW promoting panel with "AI speaker"
• The agent-erati just want servants
• News editor mad that journalism students don't want to use AI
• Simple rules for fighting fascist tech

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Our merch store is now live on the DAIR website!

Find our book, The AI Con, here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.