"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.