404 Media: Elites Just Don't Get AI

[AStern]

We start this week with Sam telling us all about the commencement speeches where speakers have been praising AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That did not go down well! After the break, Jason tells us how he was offered the chance to buy a bunch of images of poop to train AI (really). In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how researchers planned to stick cameras onto preschool teachers to train AI.

Story 1
00:56 Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’
01:12 - UCF Graduation Speech Sparks AI Backlash
02:18 - Why Humanities Students Booed the Speaker
04:21 - How AI Threatens Humanities & Research Jobs
07:00 - AI Anxiety and the Entry-Level Job Market
09:11 - Eric Schmidt Booed at ASU Commencement
11:17 - “AI Is Inevitable”
13:08 - Commencement Speeches Becoming Protest Targets
15:15 - Magic Johnson’s Different Take on AI
17:33 - Students Using ChatGPT to Graduate

Story 2
24:44 - AI Poop Analysis App Selling User Data
25:47 - Inside the “Poop Check” Dataset Marketplace
28:25 - What the Poop Analysis App Actually Does
32:49 - The Community Forum for Sharing Poop Photos
34:34 - Buying Access to the Dataset
38:15 - Privacy Problems and Hidden Terms of Service
41:32 - The Underground Market for Weird AI Datasets

[Warpy]

1. Totally tone deaf

What that first woman should have doneis point out what AI is doing brilliantly that would likely take huma an extremely long time to accomplish and which would have bored many of them into working while chemically impaired, leading to a huge amount of errors. I'm talking about things like analyzing the fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls byauthor according to handwriting analysis and then assembling the fragments or analyizint the Voynich Manuscript and coming up with worsening schizophrenia as the likely origin. AI has been useful at analyzinh language patterns. It has been far less useful at generating them.

Had she read the room and realized she was talking to arts and humanities grads, she would have gotten a much warmer reception.

The problem now is that it has become such a buzzword. It has been vastly oversold, especially to tech bros who seemingly don't understand its strengths and limitations any better thanlay people do. They only see something they think will allow them to dispense with paying workers to generate and maintain their software and have projected that across the board. In other words, the whole planet will become their Galt's Gulch, devoid of the rest of humanity since they won't need us any more. They have been unclear about what they're intending to do with us or who they're going to sell their products to.

Even if the techdudes try to turn AI into a master instead of a servant, the way China has, onsider just how much infrastructure AI will need in order to intrude country wide. That is its vulnerability, makiung it very vulnerable to sabotage. It can be, however, a powerful too.l in the arts and humanities as well as in most other areas were the work is stultifying, boring, and frustrating.