THE AI CON — available for pre-order!
We are beyond excited to announce that our book, The AI CON: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want is now available for pre-order. It'll...
ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom
By Emily On November 20, 2024, OpenAI and an outfit called "Common Sense Media" released a guide to using ChatGPT in K-12 education—a guide which shows a...
The AI/Fascism Nexus
The AI/Fascism Nexus By Alex Oops, we did it again. I can't say that I'm terribly surprised, as Harris ran a center right campaign and tossed a mighty chunk...
Information literacy and chatbots as search
By Emily This post started off as a thread I wrote and posted across social media on Sunday evening. I'm reproducing the thread (lightly edited) first and...
"Virtual Employees" and Remixing Machines Devalue Human Work
Nadella's Arguments against Copyright Misrepresent both People and Computers By Emily According to Katie Prescott in The Times Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is...
Happy International Podcast Day!
Shout outs to our faves In honor of International Podcast Day, we thought we'd give a shout out to a few podcasts we enjoy that we think Mystery AI Hype...
Correcting the Record
By Emily Objecting to my words being used to create AI hype I have a lot of respect for the craft of journalism and the work of serious journalists. It has...
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Turns Two Years Old!
Happy Birthday MAIHT3k! Two years ago today, we went live with our first MAIHT3k live stream! The title was there, but we had no idea it was going to be more...
Medical Science Shouldn't Platform Automating End-of-Life Care
JAMA Network publishes a view from deep inside the hype By Emily Caduceus symbol by Eliot Lash In a viewpoint article published in JAMA Network last week,...
The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble
What kind of residue will the AI bubble's popping leave behind? By Alex Photo credit: Marc Sendra Martorell Q2 earnings are in. According to Pitchbook data,...
Emily & Alex on other podcasts
We've been working hard to keep to something like a biweekly schedule for pod drops (thanks Christie!), and of course sending the occasional newsletter post,...
On the energy demands of "AI"
Big Tech's Tempting Promises of Carbon Zero are Hollow By Emily tl;dr Researchers have been sounding the alarm about the carbon footprint and other...
In Praise of the Ephemeral
Piles of Data Don't Add Up to AI, But They Do Add Up to Trouble Sunset in the San Juan Islands, photo copyright Emily M. Bender 2011 By Emily The past couple...
Information Access as a Public Good
Learning from Librarians, Libraries and Library Science Inside the Seattle Public Library, photo copyright Emily M. Bender 2019 By Emily Yesterday I posted...
Information is Relational
Google's AI Overviews Fails Helpfully Highlight a Source of Danger By Emily The local volcano that did erupt during my lifetime: Mt St Helens on May 18,...
Where's the Vaccine against AI Hype?
Moderna x OpenAI = Best Case, a Nothingburger By Emily I don't do predictions, but I do spend a good bit of time these days pondering how things might play...
Lavender, "The Gospel", and the Scale of AI War
By Alex Earlier this month, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and +972mag published a harrowing report about a system called Lavender, a technology which the...
More collegiate FOMO
AI Hype is Warping How Universities See Themselves By Emily It seems to be the season of universities announcing their AI initiatives, and it seems like...
Doing their hype for them
Defeatist, second-hand hype goes to college By Emily I find that one of the most frustrating kinds of AI hype is when people who are actually in a position...
Facial recognition in Gaza; Guest Cohost Timnit Gebru Joins Us!
A Fresh AI Hell Roundup: March 29, 2024 Edition By Alex Senator Scott Wiener has sponsored a "frontier model" bill in the California State Senate, which...
I'm Obsessed with the Glasgow Willy Wonka Scam
I'm Obsessed with the Glasgow Willy Wonka Scam What a chocolate-y experience indeed. AI-generated image from the House of Illuminati. Photo from Stuart...
African AI data workers are being locked out.
A Fresh AI Hell Roundup: March 21, 2024 Edition By Alex Data workers in Africa are being locked out of their accounts. Journalist Karen Hao reported on...
US DHS attempts to use "AI"
Three more uses cases where synthetic text is not appropriate, now paid for with tax dollars By Emily The DHS announced today that they are going to "test...
"AI safety" is AI hype
"AI safety" is just more AI hype—and our policymakers are dangerously distracted by it By Emily In early March, SV Angel put out a statement in the form of...
Episode 28: LLMs Are Not Human Subjects
Episode 28: LLMs Are Not Human Subjects In this episode, we put on our social scientist hats and take on the churn of research papers suggesting that LLMs...
Hello World!
Hello world! We here at Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 have found that sometimes, between episodes, we want to get something of our chests. Sometimes, we post...