A.I. Goes to War + Is ‘A.I. Brain Fry’ Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey’s Identity
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Well, I'm having sort of a weird day. How so? Well, I woke up this morning and I checked my social media feeds and I saw messages like the following. You're garbage and I hope you lose your job and become homeless. God, what a waste of sperm you are. And if you have never seen a message like that before 8 a.m., you might not work for The New York Times.
Well, I suspect that I know what this was about, but tell the listeners what made people so mad.
So my colleague Stuart Thompson and I recently published this quiz, which is basically a set of AI-written passages next to unlabeled sort of works from masterful human writers. Yeah. And it was sort of designed as kind of a blind taste test where you pick which one you liked better. And then it would tell you, you know, which one is generated by AI and which one was written by a human. And Casey, people did not like this quiz. Well, what were the findings of the quiz? Well, so the, the big headline finding is that like, it's basically a coin flip, like a slightly more people, uh, at least so far have preferred the AI written passages. But when you tell them that they prefer the AI written passages, they get very mad.
Because they think that they're too smart to fall for AI writing.
Yeah, or they just don't like the way that the test was constructed, or it makes them uncomfortable, or they think, you know, we're cooked now that AI can write passable versions of this thing. Or they just start saying, you know, oh, it's because it was trained on all these books, so obviously it can sort of mimic them. So I think there's a lot of different emotional reactions, but mostly the emotional reaction has been to get mad at the people who made the quiz. Yeah.
I have to say, you seem excited about this. Like, whenever a large group of people gets mad at you, you experience a glee that I rarely see in people. It's not a glee. It's just like... Yeah, you're right, baby.
It's a little glee. Kevin Russo, tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork.
This week, how AI is reshaping the war in Iran. Then, researcher Julie Bedard joins us to discuss the discovery of a strange new condition they're calling AI brain fry. And finally, I was turned into an AI editor against my will by Grammarly. Here's how I stopped it. It involved overwhelming physical force.
All right, Kevin, let's get into the biggest news of the week, which is the war in Iran. Specifically, we want to talk about what we know about how AI is being used in this fight.
Yeah, and I think the reason to talk about this is not just because it's happening, it's the biggest story in the world, but also because I think this is really a turning point in the use of AI in the military. We've been hearing for years and reading science fiction books and listening to people talk about the use of AI in military applications. But now I think we are starting to see exactly how these tools are being used on the battlefield and what kind of effects they might be having.
We are. And I'll say up top that any time you're talking about the use of technology in war, there is always the risk that you are just passing along propaganda, right? Because both the military and the contractors have a vested interest in telling you, hey, we have some real gee whiz new stuff and it's totally changing the game, right? Everybody has an incentive to tell you that. And yet, as you and I have dug into it, we do believe that there are some notable ways that AI are being used, and I think it is worth mentioning them. If for no other reason than I think it's been the experience in the United States over the past couple of decades that tools that are deployed abroad during times of war sometimes come back home after the war and wind up being used against American citizens.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–18:17
2
How is A.I. actually being used by the U.S. and Israel in the war with Iran?
18:17–50:19
3
Are military A.I. tools making targeting decisions or just assisting humans?
50:19–1:01:59
4
Which A.I. models (like Anthropic’s Claude) are deployed in classified military systems and why does that matter?
1:01:59–1:09:07
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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