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John Henry Mnemonic: AI Week Part 1 ft. James Vincent (Patreon)

Published:
2022-12-12 21:07:21
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

It's the free one!

The Verge’s James Vincent joins Alice and Riley (and Hussein shortly thereafter) to discuss language models - specifically ChatGPT, and how it fits into OpenAI and Microsoft’s plans. We ask - what is its “fluent bullshit” good enough to disrupt in a world that increasingly relies on paying people for bullshit jobs?

Buy James’s book ‘Beyond Measure’ here!

Comments

Nick Gully

Was Trashbot 3000 ChatGPT trying to insert itself into the pod?

Nemo

when a robot says it wants to see through my eyes i do start worrying about my skull

etienne

we need to bring back funny mascots for media projects. Megadeth had Vic Rattlehead, Anthrax had Not Man, Mr Oizo has Flat Eric, Johannes Vonk has Zwarte Piet, why wouldn't Trashfuture have a lil robot!

Dylan Frese

This "professional" NPR-y cold open is the most bizarre, surreal, out-of-character one you've ever done. Utterly unrecognizable. It turns out the AI writes like NPR podcasters.

Jonah Dichter

Right before the reveal I audibly said "oh my god" as i realized

John Leavitt

The people cry out for trashbot 3000

Nyah Wilson

Trashbot 3000 tote bag when????

OvO Hoot

My mother is a French-English translator and from her personal experience machine translation has had the paradoxical effect of increasing her pay and workflow dramatically. She previously worked for the government. Now she does contract work where she quotes her own price and regularly ignores smaller clients because she has so much high-volume/high-pay work coming in. I believe the reason is that machine translation killed only the entry-level translation work. Translating legal documents, medical documents and poetry, as my mother does, cannot be done adequately by machine translation. But without people working on the small stuff, there's almost no decent entry-level translation work and no way to build experience so that you can take on those jobs. It's created a bottleneck of expertise, which drives up prices for stuff that needs to be done better than "plausibly well". I think we'd see this pattern everywhere else, as well. The experts and celebrity writers/artists/graphic designers/what have you will continue to exist. The jobs that will vanish are the ones at the base of the pyramid. Breaking into the industry by supporting yourself with work as you learn will become impossible. It'll all be people who already made it or are getting the money from somewhere else.

mexicanhalloween .

The first Replika will be Serana from Skyrim of course

Andrew Davis

The Stack Overflow story reminds me of how chess players (at least when I was still plugged into the scene) would (at least in public) disdain "playing like a machine" and tell you to, "use your head," if you were using a machine derived line. Hopefully we choose that path instead of the banking AI that can't help you with anything.

Dylan Craig

The sponsoring letters were "A I U 8" which I read as "AI you hate" and when I realized where that joke came from I had to suck air over my teeth a bit.

Andrew Davis

I JUST READ THE SYNOPSIS OF RILEY'S FAVOURITE BOOK. LMAO.

Jordyn Clementi

I realized about half way through (didn't get the sponsorship until Dylan up above explained it but whatever). Uncanny in some ways, but made me think the entire time "am I having a stroke?" Which, to be fair, is how customer service robots make me feel anyway, so it's a marginal improvement at best.

Bruce

Quick meaningless jargon correction: - git is open source software, not a centralized service. Something can't be 'on git' any more than a .txt file is 'on notepad'. - git is version control software. Changes to a set of files are tracked in git 'repositories'. - GitHub is a Microsoft-owned company which hosts git repositories. Finally, GitHub doesn't prohibit AI-generated code. Last year GitHub actually released an AI tool called Copilot which offers suggestions while you're writing code. Basically, what if Clippy was 'trained' on open source software. This is another case of AI doing just enough to fill a slop trough.

Bulder

I love how the first clue that something was wrong with the intro, for me at least, wasn't that I could instantly tell it was AI generated babble, but because the Reading Off A Text Voice was going on just a *tiny* bit too long

Tripp

Been looking forward to y'all taking on this topic. I do think it's funny that the ambiguities y'all were talking about all get glossed over as "syntactic." I think it's appropriate given the way these language models work seem to kind of erases the idea of semantics when building a text (probabilistic Markov-ish stuff, so meaning comes from context more than the word itself). Anyone know of any computational linguists who write about these models without being completely credulous about them? I feel like I only ever noticed stuff from folks who were bought in or just breathlessly excited about the concept back when I was reading more papers.

Josep C.

I noticed you were reading after the first sentence... But It didn't click until the third one that this was a weird script. Dropping adjectives as if this were a third grade homework. Using standard cliches instead of trashfuture ones... Cool stuff Also I want merch of trashbot 3000

Petter Ericson

I'd say another area where you've had a similar evolution of "good enough" becoming cheaper and cheaper and supplanting more and more people who depend on "good enough" jobs to make rent in order to be able to actually do the artistry is the live music scene in relation to recorded music, and DJs vs playlists. It used to be that you could play bars and corporate and wedding gigs and dance gigs and whatnot and make a decent living, but now you have to basically bust ass just to survive, unless you're an actual Star(tm), which, need I remind you, not a lot of people are.

Jonas Schwammberger

Oh god... Programs will soon become absolute shite. Any software sufficiently large, like your MS Word, will become idiosyncratic behind the scene. There has already been a weird guy movement within coders, the 'clean coding ninjas'. My criticism of that movement is that it tends to look at the specific idiosyncracy, and say: "This is wrong, it should not be stupid in the specific way, it should be stupid in this general way." Now we have a machine which can say what this "general way" should look like. I give coders 5 years until we have the clean-code inquisition.

Brian Azevedo

Yes please on TrashBot 3000 merch

etienne

what they don't tell you about Trashbot3000 is that it's just a guy in there. always just a guy.

brodie

Kids these days don't even hut a real button anymore. They touch the fake button on the screen now

Nathaniel

Please, please do get merch with Trashbot 3000. Ask Rory Blank to draw it

Cat M

riley you can run the "annoying cousins" line through part-of-speech detection to get the exact probability for the model thinking it's a verb vs an adjective. some would just look at overall probabilities for how often it's a verb vs adjective in speech in general and some would use inputs from earlier in the sentence though

Arthur Sexcrimes

As a professional translator, I'd say that Alice's assessment that MT killed the industry isn't quite right - clients remain perhaps surprisingly willing to shell out for the peace of mind that comes with a real human, especially in technically and culturally specific texts - but the sector is definitely having to adapt quickly and PEMT (post-edited machine translation) now forms a whole subsector that didn't exist five years ago (incidentally, Riley's description of these GPT-type models as "unpredictable in unpredictable ways" applies 100% to MT and remains its Achilles' heel)

etienne

basically the infrastructure you'd need to make AI genuinely useful for general purpose business code is the same you'd need to have across-the-board automated static code analysis and continuous integration, two things that would be really nice and create a lot of value,and yet don't exist outside of the context of, say, creating a new piece of executable from scratch in Java or C#, that doesn't interact with any legacy or third party business infrastructure.

Josep C.

Wait, I just realized. Trashbot 3000 is Trash Future's own Rokos basilisk. It's an AI from the future that generated itself and funded itself by making appealing tote bags. And of course it's torturing the rest of us by inflicting us psychic damage. Edit : and of course it's torturing the poor apes. Shame

Marjorie Zeager

The entry level jobs phenomenon seems to be happening in tech support too. Everywhere is implementing chatbots, getting rid of phone numbers unless the chatbot deems you worthy. It theoretically does fix a lot of things that are user error, but the humble Help Desk Phone Job is a stepping stone to higher tier tech jobs. How are you supposed to get into tech if you can't get an entry level job?

Oliver Cant

It also makes me wonder what happnes to all those displaced people, because there's only so many people you have being tortured by an amazon warehouse or precariatised by apps, and they're gonna be looking at getting rid of people too. The contradictions will highten even more, and you'll have a mass unemployed. Would the answer be more bullshit jobs? Because even with that idk how long you could keep that up before people either see through it, or that's also deemed too costly, even for the sake of keeping people in office where they can be watched over.

Jay

I'm a translator at a large agency and was lucky to avoid the whole having to work half price while doing entry level stuff by just getting a monthly salary from the start (five years ago), but AI/MT is definitely doing various StuffTM to the sector, and making my life less comfortable in the process: - When we're outsourcing jobs, we're expected to handle as many of them as possible as Machine Translation Post Editing jobs to keep cost down, so I'm effectively halving my freelance colleague's income. OR they reasonably decide to only put so much effort/time into post editing that it still pays for them, and then i have to deal with the fallout of underedited text - I learned to translate in a golden age when research was incredibly easy: specialized texts on any subject in both my languages were only ever a google away. There were huge searchable bilingual corpuses scraped from the internet (like Linguee and Reverso) where I could see translations of any word in context. Nowadays between SEO and MT there are huge mountains of machine (or underpaid human trying to compete with or please machines) generated bullshit before you reach any usable text if you research in this way. - More and more often I'm having to make human sounding German texts out of machine sounding English texts that were created by one or a combination of these processes. - around half a year ago, the low interest rate free money floor broke out under a lot of our clients, and suddenly they don't have the budget to translate mountains of their bullshit copy. Volumes have dropped incredibly steeply, we're translating ourselves instead of outsourcing. For the first time since I'm in the business, it feels like there might not be (much more than) enough work for every translator in the agency at some point, and they're not desperately looking for new translators. It now seems like a genuine possibility that some of us might be let go in the future instead of burning out or jumping off before we can burn out.

Connor

I definitely was not paying enough attention earlier and thought the tote bags were real and that Trashbot 3000 was the robot who's just a guy, so I immediately went to the TF website in my browser, only to realize I was tricked by an AI.

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i think all the time about how capital gets rid of the bullshit jobs, despite them largely being there to make sure people in offices can have people beneath them to yell at, but also to make sure that all the people in a post indiustrial economy can yknow just about squeak by on wages for a labour, because prices sure as shit can't go down and we can't give you money for nothing, and these proliferated in the 80s and 90s and are largely melting away now, because there doesnt seem to be any answer from capital as to what its going to do about it its a bizarre situation of capital being unchallenged for so long, with most things you can call communism or socialism with a straight face being more or less ended or relegated to the sidelines of global politics, with china being communist largely in name only and all other countries of particular relevance being capitalist, that in such a state of affairs capital has forgotten how all the things it created to keep it all ticking over work, they buy into the propaganda Capital has disseminated about free markets and such, forgetting that its actually a more or less planned economy with all the members of the planning committee being nominally in competition with each other, that you create bullshit meaningless jobs to keep people employed enough not to revolt, to talk of britain you maintain militaries and police largely as a backstop to prevent revolt and project your interests it makes you consider that without allowing any sort of socialist thought into your mind and assuming all its critisisms must be incorrect because communism is when bad things, that you sort of forget that capitalism has contradictions that need a state to smooth them over and then i remember that ive basically just recreated the master slave dialectic from first principles so fuck hegel i guess, this shit easy