CM 153: Janelle Shane on How Artificial Intelligence Works

What happens when you teach an AI to write knock-knock jokes, recipes, and pick-up lines?

It's a rare week that goes by without someone talking about the power, and the perils, of artificial intelligence. But if you're not an expert in machine learning, how do you separate fact from fiction? That's where Janelle Shane's expertise comes in.

Janelle is the author of the book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place. As she describes how an AI learns, she reveals the gap between what researchers strive to do and what's currently possible. Janelle explains, "The AI in science fiction is almost exclusively this kind of human level, general AI, that's really smart, at least as smart as a human, and then the stuff we have in the real world is a lot simpler."

Janelle runs amusing AI experiments, in order to learn how machine learning works and where its limits begin. She shares stories of what happened when she trained AIs to tell knock-knock jokes, invent new recipes, and write pick-up lines. Along the way, she describes the ups and the downs of working with AIs to solve problems: "The pro is you might get an answer that you didn't expect. The con is also that you might get an answer that you didn't expect."

Janelle's work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many more. In addition, she keeps readers up to date on recent projects and AI hilarity on her website, aiweirdness.com.

The Host

You can learn more about Curious Minds Host and Creator, Gayle Allen, and Producer and Editor, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Episode Links

aiweirdness.com

Erik Goodman

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

An AI Expert Explains Why There's Always a Giraffe in Artificial Intelligence

GPT-2

An Artificial Intelligence Predicts the Future

On the Life Cycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

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