Dónal and Ciarán continue the 2025 season with a second quarterly update that looks at some recent themes in AI development. They're pondering doom again, as we increasingly grapple with the evidence that AI systems are powerfully persuasive and full of flattery at the same time as our ability to meaningfully supervise them seems to be diminishing.

Topics in this episode

• Can we see how reasoning models reason? If AI is thinking, or sharing information and it's not in human language, how can we check that it's aligned with our values. 
• This interpretability issue is tied to the concept of neuralese - inscrutable machine thoughts!
• We discuss the predictions and prophetic doom visions of the AI-2027 document
• Increasing ubiquity and sometimes invisibility of AI, as it's inserted into other products. Is this more enshittification? 
• AI is becoming a persuasion machine - we look at the recent issues on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView, where researchers skipped good ethics practice but ended up with worrying results
• We talk about flattery, manipulation, and Eli Yudkowsky's AI-Box thought experiment

Resources & Links

• The AI-2027 piece, from Daniel Kokotajlo et al. is a must-read!
• Dario Amodei's latest essay, The Urgency of Interpretability
• T.O.P.I.C. - A detailed referencing model for indicating the use of GenAI Tools in academic assignments. 
• Yudkowsky's AI-box Experiment, described on his site.
• "The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen" - coverage of the University of Zurich / Reddit study, by Tom Barlett for The Atlantic
• ChatGPT wants us to buy things via our AI conversations (reported by Reece Rogers, for Wired)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán start a new season for 2025, with a slight change in format to bring you roughly quarterly updates on the themes and topics required to help you know enough about AI. This first episode of 2025, recorded in mid February, gives a summary of what's happened since last November and answers some of your submitted questions. (Thanks for those!)

Topics in this episode

• We can't avoid talking about them: Musk & Trump and some of the effects they've both had on the AI space in the last three months
• Regulatory Developments, and the EU's AI Act starting to come into force
• US - EU relations, and the continued innovation vs regulation chatter
• DeepSeek and China's bold entry into the contemporary AI model space
• What are Reasoning Models and how do they work?
• Some history and concepts related to machine logic
• AI Benchmarks - a quick primer as we move closer to "Humanity's Last Exam"

Resources & Links

• JD Vance's Speech from the Paris AI Conference is here (The American Presidency Project)
• Details on HLE (Humanity's Last Exam) here, including some sample questions. Let us know how you did!
• Details on the ARC-AGI here.
• A graph of OpenAI model performance (and discussion) is here (80,000 hours)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss the ways - both real and imagined in fiction - that AI could bring about civilization-ending doom for us all. What can we learn from how sci-fi has treated this topic? What are the distant and nearer potential dooms, and what can we do now, apart from saying thanks to ChatGPT? Oh, and note that listening to this episode may drastically affect your life and cause a future powerful AI to punish you in a psychic prison!

Topics in this episode

• What is p(Doom) and why are we hearing about it from AI researchers and investors?
• How has AI doom been dealt with in Sci-fi and can this teach us anything useful?
• What is Dead Internet Theory and why might AI contribute to the Enshitification of the internet?
• Why has the religious concept of Paschal's Wager found a new form in AI discussions that started on internet forums?

Resources & Links

• More on the history of p(Doom) on wikipedia here.
• An interesting article on Dead Internet Theory & AI Walter, Y. Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory. AI & Society (2024).
• Read about Roko's Basilisk (if you dare)
• More on Roko's Basilisk on the LessWrong forum where the though experiment emerged in 2009

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss some of the concerns about misinformation and disinformation that have emerged with the rise of impressively capable GenAI models, and provide some detail on what their effects might be. They discuss the calls for regulation and how this has begun to take shape in the EU, Ireland,  and elsewhere.

Topics in this episode

• What are the implications for misinformation inherent in the current and emerging GenAI models?
• Why have there been calls to pause development, and why did this not lead anywhere?
• How have the various language, image, audio, and video models already been used for problematic content?
• Is social media ready for the onslaught to come?
• Can we regulate AI to combat this and how is that beginning?
• Why should we be critical of offers to self-regulate from the tech companies?
• What's the EU AI Act? 
• And why is Ireland using the word "doomsayers" in policy documents about AI?

Resources & Links

• The EU's AI Act: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
• Some of ISD's work on AI & Misinformation: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/disconnected-from-reality-american-voters-grapple-with-ai-and-flawed-osint-strategies/
• More on the Slovak Deepfake case discussed by Ciarán: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/beyond-the-deepfake-hype-ai-democracy-and-the-slovak-case/
• GenAI & ISIS: https://gnet-research.org/2024/02/05/ai-caliphate-pro-islamic-state-propaganda-and-generative-ai/?
• The Irish Government's "Friend or Foe" Report: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/6538e-artificial-intelligence-friend-or-foe/

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss the vast ocean of data that Large Language Models (LLMs) depend on for their training, covering some of the issues of access to that data and the biases reflected within it. This episode should help you better understand some aspects of the AI training process.

Topics in this episode

• What data is being used to train models like ChatGPT?
• What are "supervised" or "unsupervised" machine learning methods?
• How have the owners of copyright data, like news organisations, reacted to the use of their text?
• What issues of bias arise in training models based on existing text?
• What happens when AI models train on AI output?
• How do we morally and ethically align the actions of AI models, as part of their training?

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán talk you through everything that's emerged since capable Large Language Models entered the chat a few years ago - up to late 2024, at least! This episode covers the companies, models, and tools that have become central to contemporary GenAI, and will broaden your understanding of where things are beyond ChatGPT.

Topics in this episode

• What are Transformer models and why are these significant?
• How did OpenAI come to dominate this space?
• Who are the other organisations to know and what other GenAI models should you be aware of?

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán go back, back, back to see how the long history of computing machines connects to the AI revolution we're in now.

Topics in this episode

• How far back does the history of humans building machines to aid our thinking go?
• Why are  French weaving machines and alcoholic poet's daughters involved?
• How does the history of computing go through County Cork in the 1800s?
• Who are Turning and Shannon, and why do workplace disagreements leading to new companies fracturing off seem to be a repeating theme?
• What are the key developments in the evolution of computing that allow us to build AI systems now?

Links & Resources

• The Antikythera Mechanism (Wikipedia)
• Information about George Boole's time in Cork (UCC Website)
• Crash Course video on Boolean Logic (YouTube)
• An image of "The Mechanical Turk" (WikiMedia Commons)
• Tom Standage's (2002) The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine 
• Information about and images of the Jacquard Loom (Science & Industry Museum)
• The portrait of J.M. Jacquard, woven in silk by his loom, which took 24,000 punch cards to program (WikiMedia Commons)
• Photograph of a young Claude Shannon, juggling on a unicycle (Ray Soni, Photo courtesy of the Shannon family)
• Ray Cavanaugh's (2016) article Claude Shannon: The Juggling Unicyclist Who Pedaled Us Into the Digital Age (Time Magazine)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán start the series with some explainers that should help you sound much more knowledgeable discussing the state of contemporary AI at your next dinner party.

Topics in this episode

• What is AI? Why has it seemed to appear so recently and become so important?
• What's the difference between AI and GenAI?
• What is ChatGPT and how do models like it work?
• What are the other important AI tools to be aware of?
• What does this technology hold for the future of science and society?
• Are we all doomed?

Links & Resources

• Dario Amodei's Essay, Machines of Loving Grace 

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!