You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

hardcover, 272 pages

Published Nov. 5, 2019 by Voracious.

ISBN:
978-0-316-52524-4
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5 stars (3 reviews)

4 editions

On the weird things that AIs do.

5 stars

An excellent and hilarious book about the state of actual AI technology in the world (as opposed to the AIs you may see in popular media) and why they can do weird things. As it turns out, the weirdness can be due to the data used to train the AI, in how the AI processes the data and in how we tell the AI to solve a problem for us. You will get a good understanding of how AIs actually work and what they can (and can't) do, and also how AIs can actually help humans do their jobs (or entertain us with hilarious failures).

Chapter one looks at what kinds of AI are featured here. While the public may have some ideas about AI from the popular media, the kinds of AIs looked at here are actual ones in use, which means machine based systems that accept data, apply …

A fun, accessible introduction to how machine learning works...and how it sometimes doesn't!

5 stars

Still relevant despite recent advances in AI-generated imagery and text, because the new systems still work on the same principles as the ones that were around three years ago. They just have a lot more data and processing power. This also means they have the same limitations and blind spots. What was it trained on? How was it trained? (This is the most obvious way human bias can leak into an AI model.) How well is the goal specified? And of course, did the AI actually latch onto relevant details, or did it notice that all the training pictures labeled sheep had green fields and blue skies, and completely ignore the actual sheep?

These are things to keep in mind as we enter the landscape of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: You can train an LLM to write a book review, and it'll give you a great piece of text …