Artificial Intelligence Ethicology (WILL A.I. CRASH OUT?) with Abeba Birhane

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ologies with Alie Ward – Episode: Artificial Intelligence Ethicology (WILL A.I. CRASH OUT?) with Abeba Birhane

Introduction

In this enlightening episode of Ologies with Alie Ward, host Alie Ward delves deep into the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) with esteemed cognitive scientist and AI ethicologist, Dr. Abeba Birhane. Released on May 8, 2025, the episode, titled "Artificial Intelligence Ethicology (WILL A.I. CRASH OUT?)", navigates through the complex interplay between AI advancements and societal implications, shedding light on critical issues ranging from data ethics to AI's environmental footprint.

Meet Dr. Abeba Birhane

Dr. Abeba Birhane is a senior fellow in Trustworthy AI and an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Born in Ethiopia and residing in Ireland, Dr. Birhane specializes in cognitive science with a focus on AI ethics. Her extensive research includes influential papers such as "The Forgotten Margins of AI Ethics Toward Decolonizing Computational Sciences" and "The Unseen Black Faces of AI Algorithms." Her melodic cadence and profound insights make her a captivating guest on Alie's show.

Cognitive Science and Embodied Cognition

The conversation begins with Dr. Birhane elucidating the breadth of cognitive science, describing it as an interdisciplinary field encompassing philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology (05:41). She introduces her niche specialization, embodied cognitive science, which emphasizes that cognition is not confined to the brain but is extended through the body, social interactions, and cultural contexts.

Dr. Birhane [07:36]: "Embodied cognitive science is moving away from the idea of treating cognition in isolation. Your cognition doesn't end at your brain; it's extended into the tools you use and your social environment."

Personification and Gendering of AI Assistants

A key topic explored is the human tendency to personify AI systems, often attributing gendered characteristics to them. Dr. Birhane explains that this is both a marketing strategy and a reflection of societal norms, where female voices are perceived as more nurturing and less threatening.

Dr. Birhane [10:50]: "We tend to naturally treat AI systems as another person. Marketing them as personified entities makes them more appealing and approachable."

Traditional AI vs. Generative AI

Dr. Birhane distinguishes between traditional AI models, which focus on classification and prediction, and generative AI, which can create new content. She emphasizes that generative AI, such as ChatGPT, operates by producing outputs based on vast datasets, but this also introduces significant ethical concerns.

Dr. Birhane [17:25]: "Generative AI systems produce something new, like images or text, based on the data they've been trained on. This capability, while impressive, raises questions about data ethics and bias."

Data Harvesting and Ethical Concerns

A substantial portion of the discussion centers on the ethical ramifications of data harvesting for AI training. Dr. Birhane highlights issues such as the unauthorized use of artists' works and the lack of consent from individuals whose data is being exploited.

Dr. Birhane [18:35]: "Training datasets are often harvested without consent, and creatives are realizing their work is being used to train AI systems without proper compensation."

Legal Battles and Copyright Infringement

The episode delves into the burgeoning legal battles between artists and AI companies. Dr. Birhane discusses landmark cases where generative AI companies like Midjourney and Stability AI have been sued for violating copyright laws by using billions of artistic examples scraped from the web.

Dr. Birhane [23:38]: "In the UK, a judge ordered that lawsuits against companies like OpenAI proceed, highlighting the growing resistance from the creative community against unlicensed data use."

Technical Solutions: Data Poisoning and Tar Pits

To combat unauthorized data usage, Dr. Birhane introduces technical remedies such as data poisoning—where adversarial attacks are inserted into datasets to render them unusable for AI training—and tar pits, which trap AI crawlers in infinite loops.

Dr. Birhane [26:02]: "Tools like Nightshade insert tiny, invisible alterations in data to disrupt AI systems, making unauthorized data usage more challenging."

Regulation and Corporate Responsibility

Despite technical solutions, Dr. Birhane stresses that effective regulation is paramount. She criticizes the slow pace of regulatory frameworks and the reluctance of major AI companies to open their data practices.

Dr. Birhane [26:41]: "A viable solution has to come from the legal space. Technical fixes are temporary, but regulation can enforce long-term ethical practices."

AI's Reflection of Societal Biases

The discussion progresses to how AI systems inherently reflect and amplify societal biases present in their training data. Dr. Birhane elucidates that without thorough data cleaning, AI outputs can perpetuate historical injustices and reinforce stereotypes.

Dr. Birhane [40:34]: "AI systems mirror societal norms and historical injustices. Without meticulous data curation, these biases are perpetuated in AI outputs."

Model Collapse and Information Quality

Dr. Birhane introduces the concept of model collapse, where the quality of AI outputs deteriorates as AI systems are trained on synthetic or low-quality data, leading to unreliable and inaccurate results.

Dr. Birhane [42:56]: "As more AI-generated content floods the internet, AI systems may suffer from model collapse, producing outputs that are increasingly nonsensical and unreliable."

Job Displacement and the Human-AI Nexus

Addressing workforce concerns, Dr. Birhane acknowledges genuine fears about job displacement due to AI automation. However, she contends that AI will not fully replace human roles but will transform them, requiring continual human oversight and intervention.

Dr. Birhane [55:24]: "AI may alter job landscapes, but it won't fully automate human roles. There will always be a need for human supervision and creativity in AI processes."

Environmental Impact of AI

The environmental footprint of AI technologies is another critical issue discussed. Dr. Birhane highlights the significant energy consumption of generative AI systems compared to traditional AI, emphasizing the strain on data centers and the associated resource demands.

Dr. Birhane [62:21]: "Generative AI systems consume up to ten times more energy per query than standard AI systems, contributing to increased power and water usage in data centers."

AI in Healthcare and Education

When exploring the application of AI in sensitive sectors like healthcare and education, Dr. Birhane expresses cautious optimism. She acknowledges the potential benefits but underscores the challenges posed by AI's unreliability and the prioritization of profit over patient needs.

Dr. Birhane [65:32]: "AI has the potential to enhance healthcare through data analytics and medical imaging, but its unreliability and profit-driven motives pose significant risks."

In education, Dr. Birhane points out that while AI can assist in the short term, it may ultimately hinder learning by reducing critical thinking and problem-solving skills among students.

Dr. Birhane [68:48]: "Studies show that while AI chatbots may boost immediate performance, they inhibit long-term learning and the development of critical skills."

Listener Questions and Further Insights

The episode also features a segment addressing listener questions, where Dr. Birhane provides nuanced responses on topics such as AI's role in schools, ethical interactions with chatbots, and the portrayal of AI in media.

Dr. Birhane [43:08]: "Public education is key. People need to understand both the strengths and limitations of AI systems to make informed decisions about their usage."

AI Portrayal in Media

In discussing AI representation in films, Dr. Birhane praises nuanced portrayals like Black Mirror for their realistic depiction of AI’s societal impact, contrasting them with more fantastical narratives like The Matrix.

Dr. Birhane [76:43]: "Science fiction like Black Mirror offers more realistic insights into AI's societal roles compared to entertainment-focused depictions like Terminator."

Final Thoughts: Hype vs. Reality

Concluding the episode, Dr. Birhane voices frustration over the rampant hype surrounding AI, which often obscures the technology’s true capabilities and ethical challenges. Despite this, she remains optimistic about AI's potential to drive meaningful, non-profit-centric innovations that address global issues.

Dr. Birhane [78:24]: "The worst thing about AI is the destructive hype. However, I remain excited about AI's potential to contribute positively when aligned with humanitarian goals rather than profit."

Conclusion

This episode of Ologies offers a comprehensive exploration of AI ethics through the expert lens of Dr. Abeba Birhane. By unpacking the multifaceted challenges of AI—from data ethics and societal biases to environmental impacts and job displacement—the conversation underscores the urgent need for informed regulation and ethical stewardship in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Listeners gain valuable insights into the complexities of AI, encouraging a balanced perspective that weighs both its transformative potential and its profound ethical implications.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Dr. Birhane [07:36]: "Embodied cognitive science is moving away from the idea of treating cognition in isolation. Your cognition doesn't end at your brain; it's extended into the tools you use and your social environment."
• Dr. Birhane [10:50]: "We tend to naturally treat AI systems as another person. Marketing them as personified entities makes them more appealing and approachable."
• Dr. Birhane [17:25]: "Generative AI systems produce something new, like images or text, based on the data they've been trained on. This capability, while impressive, raises questions about data ethics and bias."
• Dr. Birhane [18:35]: "Training datasets are often harvested without consent, and creatives are realizing their work is being used to train AI systems without proper compensation."
• Dr. Birhane [23:38]: "In the UK, a judge ordered that lawsuits against companies like OpenAI proceed, highlighting the growing resistance from the creative community against unlicensed data use."
• Dr. Birhane [26:02]: "Tools like Nightshade insert tiny, invisible alterations in data to disrupt AI systems, making unauthorized data usage more challenging."
• Dr. Birhane [26:41]: "A viable solution has to come from the legal space. Technical fixes are temporary, but regulation can enforce long-term ethical practices."
• Dr. Birhane [40:34]: "AI systems mirror societal norms and historical injustices. Without meticulous data curation, these biases are perpetuated in AI outputs."
• Dr. Birhane [42:56]: "As more AI-generated content floods the internet, AI systems may suffer from model collapse, producing outputs that are increasingly nonsensical and unreliable."
• Dr. Birhane [55:24]: "AI may alter job landscapes, but it won't fully automate human roles. There will always be a need for human supervision and creativity in AI processes."
• Dr. Birhane [62:21]: "Generative AI systems consume up to ten times more energy per query than standard AI systems, contributing to increased power and water usage in data centers."
• Dr. Birhane [65:32]: "AI has the potential to enhance healthcare through data analytics and medical imaging, but its unreliability and profit-driven motives pose significant risks."
• Dr. Birhane [68:48]: "Studies show that while AI chatbots may boost immediate performance, they inhibit long-term learning and the development of critical skills."
• Dr. Birhane [78:24]: "The worst thing about AI is the destructive hype. However, I remain excited about AI's potential to contribute positively when aligned with humanitarian goals rather than profit."

Links and Resources

For more information on Dr. Abeba Birhane's work, the ongoing lawsuits against AI companies, and ethical AI practices, listeners are encouraged to visit the show notes provided on the Ologies website.

Transcript

[Alie Ward]

The Feathersnap Smart Bird Feeder brings the wild to your window, combining clever tack with nature's little surprises. It has a built in camera that captures photos and videos every time a bird stops by and it connects to your phone for real time alerts and bird identification. It's solar powered, beautifully designed and so easy to use. It's the perfect gift for parents, grandparents or anyone who loves nature. No experience required. Check out the Feathersnap Smart bird [e-mail] I've often made fun of podcast hosts who try to hawk too many supplements. One supplement I actually take is Ritual. I've been taking them for years. One thing I like about them is it's female founded it's a B corp and they believe in science. They have clinical trials already done for their best selling products like they're essential for women's 18 plus multivitamin, which is a multi I take that has nine key nutrients and two delayed release caps. It's third party tested and I love that. Ritual was founded by a skeptic who was like what do we actually need to take and and how can we do that in a quality way? So yeah, I take Ritual every morning and when I open up the bottle I wink at them and say ritual. You get it? So no more shady business. Ritual's Essential for Women 18 plus is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 25% off your first month at ritual.com ologies. You can start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 to your subscription today. That's ritual.com ologies for 25% off. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. You have to say that. Oh hey, it's the tag that you wish you'd cut out of your shirt. ALIE ward and for every one of us that has seen AI become more and more present in our lives and wondered is anyone driving this bus? I have here for you a chat with an expert who tells us exactly who is driving the bus and where it could be headed. Is AI evil? Does AI even care about us? Is it going to kill us? Should we feel bad for it? Don't ask me. I'm not theologist. We're going to get to it now. This expert is a senior fellow in Trustworthy AI and an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. And they're cognitive scientists. They research ethics in artificial intelligence and they've published papers with such titles as the Forgotten Margins of AI Ethics Toward Decolonizing Computational Sciences, the Unseen Black Faces of AI Algorithms, and the Value Encoded in Machine Learning Research. So they're on it and I got to sit down and visit and chat in person when I was in Ireland just last month. Also, just a pleasing aesthetic side note, they were born in Ethiopia but lives in Ireland and this expert has the most melodic cadence. Just like Bjork, I was mesmerized. We're gonna get to all that in a sec. But first, if you ever need shorter kid friendly episodes with no adult language, we have smologies. Their episodes in their own feed wherever you get podcasts also linked in the show notes. That's smologies. Also, thank you to patrons for supporting ologies and sending in questions ahead of time. You can join for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com ologies thanks also to everyone who's ever left a review for this show. They help so much and I read all of them. Weirdly, including this recent one by Remily who wrote this podcast will expand your horizons and help you indulge in your hyper fixations, both known and yet to be discovered. Remily says Sorry it has taken me over five years to finally write a review. Remily Anytime's a good time. Thanks for that. Okay, let's get right into artificial intelligence ethicology. It's the ethics of machine cognition. Is it cognition? We'll talk about it. What does ChatGPT stand for? Why is Siri a lady? Can you ask a robot for a cheeseburger yet? What happens when you're rude to a chatbot? Also, how do artists prevent getting ripped off? How much energy does AI take up? Will we all lose our jobs? Booby traps? Doorbell? Narcs? Commonly used fallacies? How the creators of AI feel about AI? What is hype and what is horror? What are the benefits of AI? What happens if you assign a chatbot your homework and whether or not AI is the root of all evil or a pocket pal with embodied cognitive scientist, professor, scholar and artificial intelligence ethicologist Dr. Ababa Burhane.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Questions that would take hours to unravel and they expect you to answer it in like one minute, two minute max.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And they're rushing you to get off. So no, no worries.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

I am Ababa Bruhani. She hers.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Great. And AI.

[Alie Ward]

You have been an expert in this.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Field for a while, but I haven't known about AI for that long. How long have you been studying it?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Technically speaking, I am A cognitive scientist. So I finished my PhD about three years ago in cognitive science. So halfway through my PhD, then around the end of my second year, I left the cognitive science department and joined a. Where people do a lot of testing, evaluating and testing of, you know, chatbots and various AI models.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And what is exactly cognitive science.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Cognitive science is very broad. So traditional cognitive science tends to be about, you know, understanding cognition, understanding, you know, human behavior, understanding human interaction, and so on. And cognitive science often is not taught at graduate level. It's either at a master's level or a PhD level, because cognitive science is really interdisciplinary.

[Alie Ward]

And Dr. Berhani says that cognitive science is actually a mishmash of disciplines, or what's sometimes called the cognitive hexagon, with sides representing philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology, according to some institutions. And anthropology can also mean social sciences. Different institutions will phrase it their own way, but broadly speaking, cognitive science is a lot of stuff.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So the idea is you will take, you know, important or helpful aspects from these various disciplines, and cognitive science that allows you to synthesize to combine these various theories, even computational models, to understand human cognition. That's the idea. So from philosophy, for example, you will learn how to question assumptions. You will go down into the various questions around what's cognition, what's intelligence, you know, what's human emotion? So philosophy really lends you the analytic tools. Same from neuroscience. The idea is you get to learn how the brain works and use it in a way to synthesize from all these different disciplines. So that's traditional cognitive science.

[Alie Ward]

You can call cognitive science Cogsci if you want to, and she says that she's in a really niche specialty within Cogsci, and it's called embodiment, embodied cognitive science, which isn't just about understanding the.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Human brain, whereas embodied cognitive science is moving away from this idea of treating cognition in isolation. Your cognition doesn't end at your brain, and your sense of self doesn't end at the skin, but rather it's extended into the tools you use. Anything you do, you do it as an embodied self, as an embodied person. So your body, your social circle, your. Your history, your culture, even your gender and sexuality, all these are important factors that play into, you know, your understanding, your cognition, your intelligence, your emotion, and so on.

[Alie Ward]

And when you're studying cognitive science, how.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Do you not use your brain to think about your brain all the time? How do you get out of your brain? How do you do it?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to. You have to use your brain I'm trying. So you are familiar, you know, with Descartes famous quote, cogito ergosam. So I think, therefore I am. The idea is you can know who you are, you can know you are a thinking being, you can know that you are someone. So that is like using your brain to understand your brain, so to speak. Whereas again, the emphasis with embodied cognitive science is that all that is really very individualistic, even to confirm our existence, it's through conversations with others. So that's why embodied cognitive science emphasizes others and communities and your body as really important factors in understanding cognition.

[Alie Ward]

So embodied cognitive science kind of goes downstairs a bit, and it considers how a person's body experiences the world and how the environment shapes thinking and perception. And cognitive scientists have this thought experiment that tickled me, and it envisions a little person in your brain interpreting inputs. But then who is in the brain inside that little person's brain? Like, does it have its own brain inside the little person's? It's like Russian nesting dolls. And there are just infinity little humans inside humans brains to interpr what the brain inside the brain is braining. And this is called, endearingly, the homunculus argument. And yes, embodied cognitive science is like it's more than a tiny person in your skull. And how can we truly understand artificial intelligence if we don't first grasp intelligence intelligently?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And when we're thinking about who we interface with with AI, way back in the day, there used to be a search engine called Ask Jeeves, and it was like a butler who would find you the answers to things. And now we have Siri and Alexa. Why do you think with AI, they've gendered and they've personified these voices that are actually a huge network of artificial intelligence. Is that to help our brains understand?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

It's a little bit of like a marketing strategy, but it's also a little bit of appealing to human nature. We tend to kind of gender and personify objects. So if you are interacting with ChatGPT, for example, we tend to just naturally, you know, treat it as another person, another being, another entity. And on the one hand, as you said, these chatbots, you know, there is no intention, there is no understanding, there is no soul in these machines. They are just pure machines. But also the developers and vendors of these systems, they tend to market them as kind of personified entities because it's much more appealing to think that you are interacting with another sentient thing.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I always wonder if they made some of them female voices because we're more accepting we're less threatened by females. We're socialized to have a mommy figure come and help us with something. It's not as threatening that it'll turn on us. And also it's like, oh, a lady will get it for you, you know?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we naturally tend to think women are much more like, nurturing and they have the role of helping you. So it is kind of related to the social norms that really dictate society. So it's really also to some extent leaning on that stereotype that if it's a woman, you know, it's approachable, it's there to help you.

[Alie Ward]

And yes, I am far from the first person to notice that digital assistants tend to be ladies. And some historians and media scholars think that it starts early by hearing a female voice while you're cooking in the womb, and that's why people love a lady voice. Or that the first telephone operator in the late 1800s happened to be a woman with a great voice and then it just stuck. But as these AI avatars start to have faces and personalities and pastimes and Instagrams, why do we see mostly younger, hotter avatars? Well, There was a 2024 article published by Reuters Institute, and it reached out to this multimedia professor, April Newton, who noted that a gentle, well modulated woman's V is usually the default for AI assistants and avatars because, quote, we order those devices to do things for us, and we are very comfortable ordering women to do stuff for us. And also, just a side note for me, did you know that the word robot, it comes from a Slavic root for forced labor or slave. It's creepy. And historically, humans have loved capable servants, but not too capable, or else you're just begging for an uprising. So the future, it's also the past. Am I rooting for the robots now? I don't know.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

When it comes to Siri or virtual assistants, how is that different than the AI that's been ramped up in the last couple of years? Is Siri and Alexa, are those AIs or are those just search engines? Is Google and AI? We call some things AI and then other things just computing.

[Alie Ward]

What's the difference?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, so what's really difference between, say, traditional AI wizard, it's implemented as a chatbot, or as a predictive system, generative AI that has really exploded over the past two years. Think of ChatGPT, Gemini and Cloud and so on. The fundamental difference is that, do I go into the technical details or remain clear of technical details? Yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

No, you can give us some technical details.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, I'll try to keep it light. There is no way of explaining the difference without getting into reinforcement learning. A typical classification system is an algorithm that you give it massive amounts of data. Think of like a face identification system. And these days datasets have to be really big. You might even have trillions of tokens of images of faces. And you train your algorithm like, this is a face, this is a face, this is not a face, this is a face, this is not a face. It's called machine learning. If you have succeeded in your training, then your AI should be able to tell you it's a face or it's not a face. So this is like a typical classification system. What we consider AI is a very broad term that encompasses so many different subcategories.

[Alie Ward]

Just side note, how alone am I in not knowing that Apple Virtual Assistant SIRI stands for something Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface. Did you know SIRI was an acronym? I didn't. Also app Apple is reportedly freaking out behind the scenes about ChatGPT for the last few years being generative and having chatbot capabilities and longer conversations in Siri. So apparently a lot of their efforts in self driving cars got shuttled over to their AI division. And a lot of people at Apple are like, I can't even speak publicly about this.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

The other big subcategory under the broad umbrella of AI is NLP or Natural Language Processing. So this is the area that deals with human language. So you have audio data that you feed into the AI system. And the idea there is that you are building an AI system that even make predictions about human language. NLP tools would learn, for example, predictive text. So what the algorithm is doing is kind of predicting what the next word is likely to be. So it's just predicting the next token. The next token. So that's kind of traditional classification or.

[Alie Ward]

Predictive systems and that was machine learning or nlp, which is natural Language processing. And those deal with visual data turned into tokens and they predict language like when your phone knows you better than you know yourself. And it's heartwarming and it's scary. It's like love. Now ChatGPT for example, I didn't know this, but the GPT stands for generative Pre Trained transformer. And a transformer is this type of deep learning system and it converts info into tokens and can handle more complex processing from language to vision to games and audio generation. So it's definitely a step up from just simple prediction.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Whereas over the past year with generative AI. These are AI systems that do more than classification, more than prediction, more than aggregation. They are called generative systems. They produce something new. So image generators, for example, you can put a text description as a prompt and the AI system will produce an image that resembles based on your description. The same with language systems. So ChatGPT, for example, you put in a prompt and it's able to produce new answers. So this is where the new, this is what's new with generative systems.

[Alie Ward]

And the systems also need to learn which of the words in a language model are the important ones, which is part of the self attention mechanism. And then they generate based on statistics, like what is the most probable way based on the data sets it's learned from, from completing a certain sentence or prompt.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So the training data really has a really significant impact in what outputs, whether it's image or text, what output these systems can generate.

[Alie Ward]

Let's get to the juicy parts.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

So with any tokens, would that data be in tokens? Like you were saying, facial recognition might have a trillion tokens. Does AI kind of scrub what we know of impressionist art and science fiction and anime, does it scrub it and grab a bunch of tokens so then it can have those as reference points?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So the training data sets is one of the most contested issues in AI because data is constantly harvested. So your search history feeds into some kind of AI one way or another. I don't know if you are like me, if you signed up for some kind of bonus point, you go to a grocery shop and you tap that. So that is kind of like in the background that's kind of collecting your behavioral data.

[Alie Ward]

So that data may breeze through infrastructure like Google Google and then just be on its merry way to a third party aggregator or a broker or an AI company itself and they just yum yum yum, gobble up the data.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So this kind of practice puts a lot of data gathering for the purpose of training AI systems either illegal or borderline illegal. Yes, because you know, first of all, there is no consent. People are not even aware that you know, their data is being used to train AI.

[Alie Ward]

So that's just number one on the general level, let's get to art.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But you will also have noticed over the past year or two, the creative community, writers and artists are realizing that their work, their novels, their writing, their arts are being used to train AI systems again without any compensation or with very little compensation after the fact if they go and contest the use of their data. And because large companies that are kind of developing AI. Think of Google, DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic. They are businesses, they operate under the business model. They are commercial entities. Their objective is to maximize profit. My work is auditing, for example, large scale training data sets. People don't have access to what kind of data set these companies hold. So we don't have any mechanism to kind of take a look, to scrutinize what's in the data set, where does it come from, how large is it? These are the kind of questions that simply there is just no mechanism for tech corporations to be transparent, to open up, for us to have an objective understanding.

[Alie Ward]

So big companies are like, no, you can't see it. But auditors like Dr. Bahani and colleagues can observe open source, publicly available similar data sets as proxies or substitutes to kind of figure out what might be going on organizationally behind the locked Willy Wonka factory gates of the other big tech companies.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So we do get an idea, but through proxy data sets. So to answer your question, I mean, if you are an artist, a writer, if you have produced novels and so on, it's very, very likely that your work is being used to train AI. But there is very little legal mechanism to actually have a clear idea.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Is it like they're stealing a bunch of ingredients and then making something, but they're like, you can't see our recipe and you're like, you stole the ingredients and they're like, you can't see our resume, we made something with it. Is that sort of how it's going?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So the fact that they are protected by proprietary rights as a commercial entity means that there is virtually no mechanism to force these companies to open up their data sets. Of course you can encourage them, you can kind of appeal to their good sides and so on.

[Alie Ward]

Good luck.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But yeah, there is no legal mechanic, there is no law or regulation that says you have to open access or you have to share your data set.

[Alie Ward]

Then why not you ask?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Of course, if that is to happen, then all these AI companies would go out of business. As it is, a lot of them are under a lot of lawsuits from Meta to OpenAI. OpenAI itself is under a lot of lawsuits, including from the New York Times. So the minute they open up their data, it becomes clear that a lot of people's suspicions, especially the creative and artist communities, the minute the data sets are open, why they are going to.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Court, is there any recourse that artists or writers have, Is there anything they can do other than trying to open a really big expensive lawsuit?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So Writers and creatives are organizing for class action suits. I know there are a bunch of class action lawsuits both in the US.

[Alie Ward]

And in the UK now, last August there was this landmark case and it decided in favor of artists. It found that generative AI systems like Midjourney and DeviantArt's Dream up and Stability AI's stable diffusion, that those were violating copyright law by using data sets of billions of artistic examples scraped from the web. And Gettysburg Images sued Stable Diffusion for copyright infringements. And the evidence was like almost funny if it were such a bummer. But apparently the generative AI so relied on Getty Images that it started adding a blurry gray box to some of its AI output, which was learned from the iconic Getty Images watermark. Just embarrassing. Now, in March of this year, a judge ordered that this lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI can proceed, despite OpenAI begging it not to. And the newspaper New York Times, along with a few other journalism outlets alleges that OpenAI scraped a lot of their work to train ChatGPT. So there are lawsuits, but there are also just huge glaring holes.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But also in the uk, for example, they are considering a regulation that leaves massive loophole for intellectual copyright issues. That leaves artists and writers with absolutely no protection at all. So people are really organizing on the ground and they have massive amounts of petitions signed and so on. But also there are technical, I don't want to say solutions, technical kind of remedies. So you can use data poisoning tools, for example, you have. Oh yeah, so you have like a booby trap. Like one of them is called Nightshade. So for images, for example, you would insert various adversarial attacks that will make the data unusable for machines because it's maybe a tiny pixel that's been altered so that's not visible to the human eye, but kind of messes with the automated system or how machines kind of use this dataset. So there are various tools like that.

[Alie Ward]

Another type of AI booby trap is called a tar pit and it sends AI crawlers in this infinite loop where they just get stuck and they can't escape. And I just love to think of like the AI system on the toilet, just scrolling, just not being able to exit and get back to work.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Even if you find technical solutions now, the big companies are likely to come back with another solution that makes your own solution defunct. So you really have to be adapting to that constantly. So I think a viable solution has to come from the regulation, from the legal space.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And how do you feel about, is it Sam? Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Sam Olmsman.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Thank you. I almost said Sam Edelman, which is a shoemaker.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

What is wrong with me?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

How do you feel about kind of some recent changes? Like, last May, I believe he went before congress in the U.S. saying, like, hey, we better watch out. And now I think he was, like, at the inauguration.

[Alie Ward]

So we chatted about this in 2023's Neurotechnology episode, because just a few months prior, in May 2023, Sam Altman was in the news a lot as a cautionary voice. And as we said in that episode, if you're wondering why this was a big deal. Sam Altman is the head of OpenAI, which invented ChatGPT. And in spring of 2023, he spoke at the Senate Judiciary Committee Committee on Privacy Technology in the law hearing called Oversight of AI Rules for Artificial Intelligence. He also signed a statement about trying to mitigate the risk of extinction. And he told the committee that, quote, AI could cause significant harm to the world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

My worst fears are that we cause significant. We, the field, the technology, the industry.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Cause significant harm to the world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

We want to work with the government.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

To prevent that from happening.

[Alie Ward]

And ultimately, Altman urged the committee to help establish a new framework for this new technology. And though in 2016, Altman declared that Donald Trump was terrible, he recently backpedaled on that. And Altman said that he's changed his mind and donated $1 million to Trump's reelection campaign in 20. So Altman's thoughts on AI regulations likely have pivoted in the last few years. Since that hearing, it doesn't seem like.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Regulations are going to happen very fast.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So this idea of, oh, we got to watch out, because our AIs might become sentient and might be out of control might cause existential risk and lead to human extinction. So, unfortunately, this is a very popular and commonly disseminated worry emerging out of AI, but there is very little scientific evidence for it. People have done a thorough analysis how such a possibility is just zero percent likely, really.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

But human beings can be so terrible, and they're learning from us.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So there is no intention, there is no wish, or there is no desire to act on something, to do something. But at the end of the day, it really is a massive, complex algorithm, of course, and that is to some extent, unpredictable. But that doesn't mean AI systems, as they Develop further, you know, all of a sudden, develop intentionality or wishes or interests or needs. I mean, you and I are, you know, as human beings. We do something and we get satisfaction out of it. I have a motivation for doing the research I do. And if that doesn't happen, I feel disappointed, I can feel sad. I also feel accountable. When I put out, you know, a research paper, I know if there are errors in it, I know I'm the one responsible for it. So there is none of that. So when an AI system gives you an output, it's not because it might be worried about if it's an incorrect answer or it's because it wants to please you. It's just a chatbot that is designed to provide given answers, again, based on prompt. So. So this idea of AI systems causing existential risk leans on this huge leap of faith that requires you to believe that there is intention, there is emotion, there is motivation. All these human characters, all these things that makes us human, but it's just not there. It can't emerge out of nowhere. That's part of what makes us different and unique as individuals, as biological organisms. These are things that are hardwired on us. These are also things that makes us human.

[Alie Ward]

This is why I fret still.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Of course, we have to worry about powerful people using AI to do terrible things. And what worries me is over the past year, and especially since the rise of Trump and since the Trump administration came to power, you have a lot of large corporations really abandoning their voluntary pledge to protect basic fundamental rights. So Meta has, for example, walked back their commitment for dei, their commitment to fact check and monitor their social media platforms against hate speech too, as well. Which is what exactly. What really is worrying also now is you have superpowers in powerful governments like the US government, the UK Government, even the European Union itself, using AI, moving into AI for surveillance, for military purposes, for warfares. And a lot of AI companies, starting from OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Google, they had voluntary principles not to use AI for military purposes. But over the past year, all of them have abandoned that. So even here across in the eu, you have a French AI company called Mistral announcing that they are open to working with European governments to provide military AI. So of course we have to worry about governments using AI under the guise of national security, which really means, you know, monitoring and surveillance and squishing dissent. And really this is against, you know, fundamental rights for freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and so on. So we have to worry about AI. But AI in the hands of powerful governments and people in position of power rather than the AI itself, because the AI can't do anything by itself.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Is it sort of like the guns don't kill people, people kill people kind of a situation?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, exactly.

[Alie Ward]

How is that working out for us in the US though? Well, death by firearm is the leading cause of mortality for teens and children in the U.S. according to the Pew Research Center. And over half of our nearly 50,000 gun death a year in the US are suicides. That's not going well. And that's because the NRA slogan guns don't kill people, people do is what is known as bumper sticker logic or a misdirection, also called a false dichotomy or plainly speaking, a fallacy according to philosophers. So giving AI a sense of technological neutrality is a bit misguided.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

The regulations being walked back is terrifying, especially trying to put trust in a government to stop things when a lot of our people in power, like, don't know how to use their own printers, you know. So some of the questions and like the congressional hearings are like, how does this even work to Google track my movement? Does Google through this phone know that I have moved here and moved over to the left? Which is terrifying. So maybe they don't have morals and guilt and things like that and ambitions. But I was looking at some research showing that AI is being trained to become more and more sexist, more and more xenophobic, more and more racist, use more and more hate speech. And is it learning from the worst of humanity?

[Alie Ward]

Is it amplifying it?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Is that just exposing how much hate is in the world?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So let's maybe walk back 20 years, because that's when real progress in AI started to emerge. I mean, we've had a lot of the core principles for AI since in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s. Some of the foundational papers about reinforcement learning, deep learning, were written in the 1980s. So Geoff Hinton's famous paper on, I think was convolutional learning was written, you know, late 1980s.

[Alie Ward]

We don't have to go too deep into it, but I do want to tell you that Geoffrey Hinton is apparently considered the godfather of AI and a leading figure in the deep learning world. And in 2024, he won the Nobel Prize for his work. He's also worked for Google Brain, and then he quit Google because he wanted to, quote, freely, speak about the risks of AI quit Google so he could talk about it. Now, in 2023, during a CBS Saturday morning news segment, he warned about deliberate misuse by malicious actors, unemployment and existential risk involving AI. He is very much in favor of research on the risks of what could become a monster that he helped create. He's like, yo, we need some safety guidelines and regulations buddies and that it's not really happening. But yes, he is among a few who over the last many decades drove these innovations.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But what really made the AI revolution possible is the World Wide Web. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, it became possible to kind of scrape, to kind of gather, harvest massive amounts of data from the World Wide Web through chat forums or domains like Wikipedia. They are really a core element of training AI, at least for text data. So that means that a lot of our training material for AI comes from the World Wide Web, whether it's our digital traces, whether it's the pictures we put on social media, pictures of your kids, your dogs, yourselves and so on, or the kind of infrastructure, digital infrastructure like, like Google is everywhere has dominated. Whether you want to email or, you know, prepare a presentation or write a document, Google has provided the infrastructure that means they have the infrastructure to constantly harvest training data. This means that a lot of the data that we are using for training reflects, you know, humanity's beauty, but also our cruelty and the ugliness of humanity.

[Alie Ward]

And just last week a tech report released by Google admitted that its Gemini 2.5 flash model is more likely than its predecessor, Model 2.0 to generate results outside of its safety guidelines. And images are even worse than text at that. And I mentioned this in a 2023 episode we did with Dr. Nita Farhani about neurotechnology. But around Juneteenth of that year, I saw this viral tweet about ChatGPT not acknowledging that the Texas and Oklahoma border, the Panhandle, was in fact influenced by Texas desiring to stay a slave state, which is fact that ChatGPT would not acknowledge. So Dr. Berhani notes that when an AI is built on racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc data set, the results, like history itself, are not kind to minoritized identities.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

She says it reflects societal norms, it reflects historical injustices and so on. Unless you really delve into the data set and ensure that you do a thorough job of cleaning the data set. We've audited numerous data sets and you find content that shouldn't be there. You find images of genocide, images of know, child rape. One of the early data sets we audited back in 2019 was a dataset called 80 Million Tiny Images. It was held by MIT and we found several thousands of Images, really problematic images. Images of black people labeled with the N word, images of women labeled with the B word, the C word, in words I can't really say on air.

[Alie Ward]

So while the upside of AI is detecting cancer from scans earlier or predicting tornado patterns, there's also so much concern. Now, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Observed and proclaimed that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But I think we might consider that the arc of the Internet is short and it bends towards smut and hate.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So you can assume any data you collect from the web is really horrible. And in one of the recent audits, actually we found an overwhelming amount of women, women concepts really represented by images that come from the pornographic space. So massive amounts of the web is also really, you know, pornographic and really, you know, problematic content. So you have to do a lot of filtering. So as a result, this is why DEI initiatives, this is why obligations to audit your data set to ensure that toxic contents have been removed and so on. This is why it's so critical.

[Alie Ward]

So an AI is only as ethical as its data sets. And the Internet is a weird dark place where people say things they would never say in person. So the data sets are feeding that.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But as we are seeing now, a lot of these companies are abandoning their pledges and we're really walking backward. But for any given AI system, whether it's a predictive system or classification or generating, you can assume that deeply held societal injustices and norms will be reflected in how that AI performs in the kind of output the AI gives you. So that's the default. So we have to work backwards to improve, ensure we are removing those biases.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Let's say that some of the comments online, some of the hate online is AI generated comments, which sometimes I'll look at now X and I'll say, who are all these people? Like, why are comments getting meaner and meaner with Facebook with a lack of fact checking more and more sort of hateful speech, does that mean that the next tokens and data sets pick up on that and say, oh, this is how people think and then the next one. So does it get amplified like mercury toxicity and like a tuna fish?

[Alie Ward]

That's one way of putting it, yeah.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Okay, yes, yes, you are encoding those biases and you are exaggerating them.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

The technical drawback is that, so we train a given AI for a next word prediction, for example. It's based on this massive amounts of data that kind of tells you how people text, how people use language for English, for example, how people construct a current sentence, that data, that training data comes from actual people activities, people interactions. That is your baseline, so to speak, when you are modeling how language operates. But now, as you said, as the world wide web is filled more and more with synthetic text or syntax data that comes from generative AI system itself, then your AI system has no frame of reference. It tends to forget. So the quality of the outputs starts to deteriorate.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

That's so scary.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So this is called model collapse.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Okay, does this keep you up at night?

[Alie Ward]

Does it?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I mean, I know that it's like don't be afraid, don't be afraid. But it's also like this is very new territory for humanity, right?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, but at the end of the day, I mean, people should be in control. If an AI system starts producing output, that is rubbish. That is irrelevant. I don't think it should scare us. It should make people like, okay, that's not helpful to me anymore, so I'm not going to use it.

[Alie Ward]

Maybe the more it unravels and crashes out, the less people will rely on it. But of course that hinges on being able to tell that it's spitting nonsense at you. And in this day and age, the world is so profoundly absurd that truly anything is believable. And Dr. Berhani says that public education is key and just getting the word out that a lot of what we think about AI's capabilities are just big corporations pumping out hype and PR. But the auditors on the inside, like her and her lab, know that. Woo boy howdy. Hot damn. It is a bunch of horse pucky flim flam. And not to believe the hype, the.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Actual performance is nowhere near what the developers claim. So these are the facts that we really have to communicate. A lot of the AI systems that we are interacting with are actually subpar in terms of performance, in terms of what they are supposed to do, in terms of what people expect them to do. Because these big corporations have really mastered public communication and pr. A lot of the failures or the drawbacks of AI systems are new to people when you actually communicate it. But this should really be common knowledge. And if people want to use AI, they should know both the strengths and what they can do with it, but also where the limitations are and what it can't do for them.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Does abstention work? Does not going on meta and giving them more fodder? Does not using ChatGPT? Does any sort of like boycott work?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yes and no on the one hand. So a lot of these AI systems have really cleverly been integrated into the social infrastructure. Yeah, so for example, I'm not on Facebook. I haven't been on Facebook for over 10 years. But the apartment complex I live in can only be communicated via Facebook groups. I still refuse to create a Facebook account. But situations like this really gives you very little option to abstain to not use these platforms. And you can't avoid Google, for example, Google Search and like, you know, Gmail and like Google Docs. It makes it really difficult if you want to apply for a job. Almost all companies now use some kind of AI to filter your CV before it reaches human. So in some senses you don't even have the option to opt out. If you are someone looking for a job, you can't say, oh, I don't want you to use an AI system to sift through my cv.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

It's just like it's going to happen.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, it's going to happen.

[Alie Ward]

Dr. Berhani says that it's pretty unavoidable. And I have asked tech lawyers and even they don't read Apple's terms and conditions, they're like, I just checked the box.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So Instead of using WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, which you know, really gathers all your text, all your information, we can move to other messaging apps like Signal. So Signal has, you know, end to end encryption. There is no backdoor. Nobody can access it, not even government. This is one of the things Meredith Whitaker, the CEO of Signal has been really strong in standing up to large governments is that nobody should have a backend access that gives them the opportunity to gather data.

[Alie Ward]

And yes, Signal is run by a nonprofit [e-mail] and Meredith Whitaker is Signal's president and she had worked at Google for 10 years and she was raising concerns about their AI. And she was also a core organizer of the 2018 Google Walkout in protest of sexual harassment, harassment there and pay inequities. She also advises government agencies on AI safety and privacy laws. So Signal, good, yay Signal. And many recently laid off government staff that I know of will only communicate via Signal, which is kind of telling in terms of their own safety concerns.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But yes, use Signal so we can do some things. We can use less and less of these large corporations infrastructure and we can use, you know, more open source tools. But also sometimes, you know, it's just out of your control. But every little helps and every awareness, you know, it kind of culminates and it will eventually lead to, you know, this massive switch.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I hope at least that's encouraging.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

I hope. Yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And can I ask you some questions from listeners? Is that okay?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Okay, yeah, for sure.

[Alie Ward]

But before we do, let's give away some money. And this week Dr. Bahani selected the cause, the Municipality of Gaza and UNRWA, which directly supports Palestine refugees and displaced families in Gaza. They say every donation, no matter the amount, helps them reach families with life saving food assistance, shelter, health care and more. And for more info you can see donate.unrwa.org which is linked in the show notes. And for more on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, please see our genocidology episode where with global expert in crimes of atrocity, Dr. Dirk Moses, which we will also link in the show notes. So a quick break now. Have you ever thought about personal style and how there's like an art and a science behind it? There's neuroscience behind that. We don't have time to get into that. But having some confidence really changes the decisions that you make day to day.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

If you're like personal style, I don't know where to begin with that.

[Alie Ward]

Perhaps Daily look can help you out there.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

They are a styling service. They use daily data, science and your.

[Alie Ward]

Own personal stylist to help you find your perfect balance between style and comfort. If you're like, what's Daily Look?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Daily look is the number one highest.

[Alie Ward]

Rated premium personal styling service for women. You can get started, you take a.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Style quiz and then from there your personal stylist takes the time to kind.

[Alie Ward]

Of understand what your preferences are and creates a box of timeless and really versatile pieces just for you. How many things are in there?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

There's up to 12 premium pieces per box and you get to keep what you love.

[Alie Ward]

You return the rest. My first Daily look box, I was like, everything in here so fits my vibe.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

A lot of black, a lot of angular things. And there were really lovely brands, pieces that I can hang on to for a while and I love that I.

[Alie Ward]

Can try it on at home. Anyway, elevate your style by signing [e-mail] today. Take your style [e-mail] and get 50% off your first styling fee with code ol Daily Look. You're looking good. So am I. You know me, you know I love Squarespace. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies launched.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Here's the deal.

[Alie Ward]

I needed a website. I put it off for three years. I heard an ad about Squarespace on another podcast in one night. I put up my own website and then I was able to launch Ologies with it. You need A website. You need Squarespace straight up.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

They have amazing cutting edge design tools.

[Alie Ward]

Anyone can build a bespoke online presence that totally fits your brand or business. They make it so, so easy.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

They have these really intuitive tools they have built in analytics.

[Alie Ward]

So if you're a data dork, you can get into the numbers with website traffic. You can track money you're making from bookings or invoices or product sales all in one place with Squarespace to get paid 12 out of 10, no regrets. Anyone who needs a website, either for their personal brand or if they're launching a business or if they're selling classes, I'm like, squarespace, use my code, save some money, head to squarespace.com ologies for for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code ologies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Do it.

[Alie Ward]

Make a website. You will not regret it. I'm with you, holding your hand in spirit, not creepy. This is an advertisement from Better Help. Listen. On Ologies, I talk about mental health a lot. I talk about my own. We go into the science of it and around here we're pretty pro therapy. But in other circles, there's still a fear of judgment or a fear of stigma. And when people hesitate to get help, that doesn't just affect them and how they feel, it impacts families and workplaces and relationships and entire communities. So I try to encourage people, if they are struggling with something, to seek therapy. It's helped me so much. I've used BetterHelp and it got me through some really tough times as my dad was in hospice. They match people with the right therapist from their big network of credentials, their therapists who have all these different specialties. And if for any reason you're not vibing, you can switch therapists. No charge, no extra drama. Better Help has been at this for over 10 years. So if people are curious about therapy and are looking in particular for an easy way to start that's affordable, BetterHelp is designed for that. So as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse array of experience. We're all better. With help, Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Ologies that's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com Ologies oh, Mother's Day gifts. More slippers. How many feet does she have? Probably not more than two. What does your mom want? Love and appreciation. This means an aura frame. Trust me. So an aura frame. It's a digital photo frame you upload via an easy app any pictures you want on there. And then this beautiful digital photo photo frame, which was named the best one by wirecutter, means that your mom, instead of having to look on her tiny phone, her aura frame just sits there on her dresser and it scrolls past all these wonderful photos that you probably forgot you took. You can even just keep uploading more photos. There's unlimited storage. I got one of these for my dad. No joke. We brought it with us to the hospital when he was sick. Aura frames are such a good gift and if it's for your mom, not only will she be grateful it's not another cardigan, but she'll also love that an aura frame means that she gets to see more of you. And Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. For a limited time, listeners can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off plus free shipping on their bestselling carver matte frame. So that's Aura Frames. A U R A frames.com promo code is Ologies. You can support the show by mentioning ologies of check out terms and conditions apply. Isn't it bonkers? You have to eat every day multiple times a day. Can I make a suggestion? The suggestion is Home Chef. Home Chef can help you save money and eat healthier. They have fresh. They have delicious meal kits. They are delivered straight to your door and they got options. They have easy prep meals. They have fresh start meals. They have family friendly meals, Gluten smart. They have keto friendly. They also have one pan meals which I love cause I hate washing dishes. I also love that they have express options. They have classic meal kits with recipes. All the ingredients come pre portioned ready to go. They also have oven ready kits. They have pre chopped ingredients in an oven safe tin. Put it in, eat it. They also have fast and fresh. Those assemble really quickly. They heat in the microwave in just a few minutes and users of the leading meal kits have rated Home Chef number one in quality and convenience. Also value value, taste and recipe ease Home Chef reason why people love them For a limited time Home Chef is offering Ologies listeners 50% off and free shipping on your first box plus free dessert for life. Go to homechef.com Ologies that's homechef.com OlogieS for 50% off your first box and free dessert for life homechef.com OlogiEs must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. You probably guessed that that. Okay, we are back. Let's run through some questions from your real squishy brains made of human beings out there.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

There's some great ones. Job replacement Carla de Azebo Elia Meyer's Red Tongue Jennifer Grogan Ian Jenna Congdon Rosa Rebecca Rome Other Maya Sam Nelson, Howard Nunes all these people wanted to know, in Ian's words, will all jobs be obsolete soon? Did the people working on AI give any thought to compensating people for the lost income? Jenna Congdon said, when will AI get so good that human writers are basically crowded out of a job? This goes for visual art as well. In a capitalist economy, when you got a hustle to make money as it is, what is going to happen job wise, do you think? Or do AI experts such as yourself?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So some of the worry about job displacement is genuine and grounded on real worries. You hear even the so called godfathers saying things like you shouldn't bother learning code or like, the job of software engineering, for example, will become obsolete and so on.

[Alie Ward]

So whether you're a software developer or a writer or an artist, Dr. Brahani.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Says, I don't think AI will fully automate AI will fully replace human task force. Because at the end of the day, what even the most advanced AI systems do is really kind of aggregate information and kind of output a very mediocre, whether it's image or text, some of.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Them are so good though, some of the art is so good and you're.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Like, but some of the arts, it's not just the pure, the raw outputs, people have tweaked probably like a thousand times people have tweaked it. People have spent hours perfecting the right prompt and so on. So there is always people in the loop. There is always, whether it's data preparing, data annotation, data curation to building the AI system itself, to then kind of ensuring the output is something appealing. You really, you need people to interact with.

[Alie Ward]

So for me, as a former newspaper journalist, and I was also a newspaper illustrator, I I'm not as optimistic. So so many writers are copywriters who are making content and articles for websites to raise their profile. And now I'm hearing from those people that articles are just written by AI and they are full of shit. And just doing this aside is making me depressed and my chest hurts. But Dr. Berhani is an expert, so I'm going to try to find some bright spots. And before she had mentioned that Lawsuit with open New York Times. And I was looking for it and I found a recent article, this was published literally yesterday, which had the headline, AI is getting more powerful but its hallucinations are getting worse. A new wave of reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don't know why. That's the headline. And this New York Times article explained that AI systems do not and cannot decide what is true and what is false. And sometimes they just, just make stuff up. A phenomenon that some AI researchers call hallucinations. And in one test, the article says hallucination rates of newer AI systems were as high as 79%. And I also want to note that my spell check tried to get me to change the ITS in the headline to one with an apostrophe, which is incorrect. So computers, what's going on? But yes, Dr. Bahani says that a lot of journalism has been replaced by AI, even though we all know that the generative system is unreliable.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

It hallucinates a lot of the time. It gives you information that sounds coherent, that seems factual, but it's just absolutely made up. It just there is, it even sometimes gives you citations and so on of things that don't exist. So we always need people to babysit AI, so to speak. So a writer might be, you know, your hours might be reduced and you might, might be getting paid less and your company might be bringing AI to kind of do the bulk of the job. But still you can't put out the raw outputs because most of the time it's not even legible. So the role of writers and artists and journalists and so on becomes more of kind of a babysitter for AI, verifying the information that's been put out, kind of ensuring it makes sense and so on. That's right, Ken.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

The babysitter is dead.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

To some extent. The answer is yes and no. Humans will always remain at the heart of AI. The minute human involvement ceases, the minute AI stops operating, because AI is human through and through, as I said, you know, from the data that's gathered from humans. And so much work goes into data preparation, data annotation, cleaning up the data, detoxifying the data. And unfortunately, a lot of this time task is allocated to, you know, the developing world. So you have a lot of data workers in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Ethiopia, in India, for example, that really do the dirty work of AI. There are even a bunch of stories where you have Amazon checkout, for example, AI checkout or self checkout where Amazon was introducing this AI where you can just collect groceries and your items and just walk out. And the AI is supposed to kind of identify what you have picked up and charge you from your credit card for whatever you have used. But then it turns out that it was actually data workers in India that were scanning every item you are picking up. So.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Oh man, what a world.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. And I mean, McDonald also recently partnered with IBM or one of those companies is to have like an AI drive through where AI systems take order and they have to close it within the next few weeks because people were getting orders of like, you know, bacon on top of ice cream and things like that.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

You added bacon to my ice cream? I don't want bacon.

[Alie Ward]

What else can I get for you? Why raise the national minimum wage for the first time since 2009 when you can just spend billions of dollars tweaking unpaid machines like, welcome to the future maybe?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So I guess the point I'm trying make is like, you always need humans for AI to function and operate as it's supposed to because at the end of this day, these are like really mere machines that don't have intention, understanding, motivation and so on. Like we humans are.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

So maybe our jobs will look different, but there will be jobs.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yes.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I know a lot of people, myself included, wanted to know the environmental impact.

[Alie Ward]

Lily, a bunch of folks and first time question askers Eleanor Bundy and Megan M. And we also did a recent episode for Earth Day with this climate activist and humanitarian rights lawyer Adam Met, who said that AI could be solving some environmental concerns, which is optimistic. But what does an AI expert's take on that?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Megan Walker asked, environmentally, how bad is AI when compared to the current computing we do? Yeah, what's going on?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

How much energy does it use?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So again, like, we have very little information about training data. The kind of energy consumption used by AI systems is very opaque. There is very little transparency.

[Alie Ward]

Okay, but what is the damage generally?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So generative AI really conceives massive amount of power compared to traditional AI. For example, if you are using Google to put a prompt, say, how many glasses of water should I drink per day? And if you do the same, exact, exact same prompt and you ask the generative system, such as ChatGPT, people estimate you use about 10 times more energy to process that query and to generate answers.

[Alie Ward]

I wanted to go straight to the source. So I used Google AI and ChatGPT for the first time, asking them both, how much energy does ChatGPT use as opposed to Google now Google AI said in what I Hope is a snotty tone that ChatGPT consumes significantly more energy per query, five to ten times more electricity than a standard Google search. Now it cited a 2024 Goldman Sachs report titled AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand. Then I asked ChatGPT and it said that its version 4 can use up to 30 times more energy than a basic Google search. And it also noted, I like to think defensively that Google has had decades to optimize for a lower footprint. Now, Dr. Bahani said that the energy consumption of generative AI systems has become indeed a big issue and that in countries like Ireland, the data centers are power hogs.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

The compute resources required to running AI systems equals or is more than the total amount of energy that's required to run Irish households. But in places like Texas US sometimes that energy consumption is taken away from households to run data centers. Wow. So it kind of results in reduced energy for households. And this is before we even get into the massive tons of water that you need to cool down data centers.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, and the water also has to be pure because you can't use say, you know, ocean water or seawater because of the sea salt that might damage the servers and so on. So again, there is competition. It tends to be when you use water that is used for households. As a result, you know, people tend to pay for the consequences of that. So yeah, water consumption is another massive area as well.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And do you think that more companies will look towards some sort of nuclear power for their supercomputers or is that still too highly regulated?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

I think companies like Google are actually talking about using nuclear power. But yes, that option is being considered. Yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

How about healthcare? Several people, Benjamin, Brenna Schwert, Anneliese de Young, Emil, Nikki G. Asked how can AI be ethically applied to healthcare like data analytics, treatment options, medical imaging, interpretation, Second opinion, Is there some hope there for it?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, I think there is some hope. There is some hope for sure. I think there is some hope in numerous domains for AI to be useful.

[Alie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

However, that just remains a theory. It's possible in theory. But the problem, there are a bunch of problems. One of them is that generative systems are fundamentally unreliable. So for example, there is a new audit that came out, I think to our towards the end of January where they looked at this new AI tool where the system kind of records your conversations between say a healthcare provider and a patient and it summarizes the conversation and it Kind of it's supposed to reduce a lot of the work for nurses and so on. And what they found was that in some cases, eight out of the ten summaries were hallucinations.

[Alie Ward]

No.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So generative systems tend to be unreliable. And the other thing is, because a lot of these tools that are supposed to be used in health care tend to be built by businesses with the objective of maximizing profits, they tend to have a different kind of objective than say, you know, know what's good for the patient. So another famous case is United Health that is in court at the moment where they were using a suit of about 50 algorithms to look at mental health services. And what they found was that they were using, you know, cost as a proxy rather than the need of the patient as a proxy. And they were cutting a lot of services, a lot of like, you know, therapy services and meditations and other necessary services. Again, because they are, you know, they are looking at the wrong motivation, the wrong proxy. They are looking to save the company money rather than to ground what they do in the needs of the patient. Let's go. So if we correct, for example, hallucinations and biases in AI systems and if we kind of, it's impossible to start, strip down all capitalist motivations, but if capitalist motivations come second to the needs of the patient, then it's possible to develop AI systems in various areas of health care that prioritize patients, that prioritize people, as opposed to just inserting technology for the sake of having technology and also for using technology to maximize profit as opposed to ensuring patients safety, which.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Is once again, good luck. I mean, our healthcare is above and beyond frustrating. But a lot of people wanted to know. Samwise Emily heard Amalia Magda Kasauka wanted to know Kira Hendrickson asked first time question asker. How do we feel about AI and chatbots and using them in high schools? Schoolwork Samwise, AI used in schools. Thoughts? Is there a way to flag it? Are we doing education and injustice?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So on the one hand, I know some people that find using AI chatbots really helpful. You give it a prompt, it gives you just a bunch of answers. Of course, these are people that know how to craft the perfect prompt, that know where AI can be useful and where it might fail you. So with all that in mind, it can be useful, but you need to be an expert. Having said that, for young kids, studies are starting to emerge that for example, they did a control study, I think with over 3,000 students, where some of the students were given chatbots. To help them with, I think it's maths problems, the others weren't. And they did a test. So what they found was that the kids that had chatbots did better than the kids that didn't have. Then they performed another test a few weeks later and they found that the kids that use chatbots performed way worse than the kids that didn't have. So people are realizing that, that these systems inhibit learning. Of course, education is not just information dissemination, the teacher going into class and just like telling the students facts, but rather it's an interaction. It's a two way street both for the student and the teacher developing the skills, especially critical skills, to analyze and to decipher fact from fiction, you know, information from misinformation and so on. And when you use AI chatbots without knowing their limitations, you tend to kind of trust the output, you tend to treat it as fact, but also it inhibits your learning, it inhibits your critical skills. And if you don't have the knowledge to begin with to verify the answer, you have no way of knowing what you have. What you are getting is correct or incorrect. So in the long term, studies are coming out to show that, that they might seem helpful in the immediate term, but in the long term, these chatbots might be inhibiting the learning process.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Last listener question. And I know my husband has this question too. Deviancy, Sherry Rempel and Chelsea and her dog Charlie want to know. Chelsea asked, why does AI do better when you threaten it? Is that ethical? Because it doesn't feel like a good precedent to set in any part of life. Deviancy asked, is it weird that I feel the need to say please and thank you when talking to chatbots?

[Alie Ward]

Will the AI overlords be nicer to.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Me when they take over? I assume all of my conversations will be logged for eternity. And Jarrett, my husband also doesn't use ChatGPT very much, but when it came out he was trying to teach it to be civil and I was like, boy, I don't think that's gonna work. Do manners matter?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for models like ChatGPT, they have what they call a knowledge cut of dates. So. So the training data, your interaction won't really input into the learning system of the model. It's the training data set for, I think, ChatGPT that ends, I think around 2021 or 2022. So ChatGPT, for example, can't give you a coherent answer for any event that has happened recently.

[Alie Ward]

So different models are using data from different timelines. They have to collect it and clean it and process it first. So it's not as real time as I thought it was or as some.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

People might expect for I. For kind of when you speak to it, was it aggressively threatening?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Yeah, threateningly. Why does, why does it do better when you threaten it?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So it's the first time I'm hearing this, so I should try it out. I should check it out and see if that also happens to me. But yeah, it's the first time I'm hearing it.

[Alie Ward]

Okay, let's hit the books for this. Specifically, a 2024 study about how to interact with large language models. And it's titled should we respect LLMs? A cross lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance. So this abstract explains that they did testing in English, Japanese and Chinese language models and that as the politeness level descends, the answers generated get shorter. However, on the far side of the rude scale, impolite prompts often result in poor performance. But overly polite language does not guarantee better outcomes outcomes. And the best politeness level is different according to the language. And they say that this suggests that LLMs not only reflect human behavior, but are also influenced by language, particularly in different cultural contexts. So what about the future? The researchers say that it is conjectured that GPT4 being a superior model might prioritize the task itself and effectively control its tendency to grow, quote, argue at a low politeness level. So as it matures, it just won't engage. It's like this AI new generation has been to therapy if it were a person, which it's not.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

And as to the AI overlords again, I mean it's just models. It's just you know, data sets and algorithms and you know, connection of networks.

[Alie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

There is no kind of all knowing, godlike, all seeing AI. But of course the people that are running AI companies come close to that because they have access to the data, because they have access to the algorithms. So you might worry about those people using your data. It has almost invisible but very nuanced downstream impact. So in the US for example, authorities are forcing companies like Meta to give up data so that authorities are hunting down women that had abortions, for example, in areas where abortion is prohibited. Law enforcement is working with Amazon, for example, for. Was it Amazon bail ring? Bail ring.

[Alie Ward]

Oh right, this is that camera enabled and Amazon owned ring doorbell.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So law enforcement like ICE uses that kind of data from those to, to do something, to even deport people. So what we should worry about is not really AI overlords But these companies working with powerful entities to really kind of identify people that might be in trouble with the law or that might be doing, you know, that that violates the law because that data gives them access, gives them the knowledge about the whereabouts and the interactions and the activities of people. People.

[Alie Ward]

Yeah. And previously, According to a 2020 Newsweek article titled Police Are Monitoring Black Lives Matter Protests with ring Doorbell Data and drones, activists say it's reported that Amazon Ring has video sharing partnerships with more than 1300 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. however, in January 2024, Ring said that it would stop letting police departments request and receive users footage on its own app. Now, on the flip side, some ring doorbell owners are posting on the Ring Neighbors app when ICE raids are going down locally and they're alerting their community. Now, Ring, of course, notes that those are user generated posts. It has nothing to do with them. Whether or not they'll censor those user generated posts is like anyone's guess. Hey, let's take a welcome departure from reality for a sec, shall we?

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Do any movies get it right? Like, does the Matrix get it right? Any. Does AI that old Spielberg movie? Does anyone actually get AI right? Or does that drive you absolutely insane to watch tv?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So I love science fiction, actually. Like, the Matrix is one of my favorite movies.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I knew it. I knew it. It's a good one.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

But also that's like, that's nowhere. You have to treat science fiction as science fiction for the sake of like, it's really some really good science fiction. Really brings you into a world that you couldn't even envision. So I love that element about science fiction. But a lot of this, like, Robot Uprising, Terminator, like movies are really just for entertainment. There is nothing that can be extrapolated and said, oh, this could happen to real AI but you have kind of very nuanced sci fi movies that nail it. So you have Continuum. It's not a movie, it's a series. It was on Netflix a while, but a few years back.

[Alie Ward]

For what? For what you're going to do.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

So what happens here is that, you know, as AI companies become powerful, they take over government and they become, you know, the bodies that really govern society. So that kind of sci fi is very close to reality than, you know, Terminator like movies. Yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

How about Black Mirror?

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Oh, Black Mirror is so good. I mean, Black Mirror, there are some things that are like now when Black Mirror came out, it was just like, wow, this could happen. And now it's like, oh, that has happened. Or it's like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, this is what's happening with this in that government. So. Yeah.

[Alie Ward]

Wow. Yep.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And the last two questions I always ask are always worst and best. I guess your most loathed thing about AI and your favorite thing about it, I guess we've talked a lot about cautionary, but like, in terms of what you do or in terms of your job, worst and best thing.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. So the worst thing is really just the hype. As a researcher, I have my own research agenda, but the hype is so destructive. You see something that's not true being disseminated, going viral, and, you know, as an expert, it's really troubling. So you have to stop what you are doing and do some work to kind of correct it or at least attempt. So. Yeah. And a lot of the hype really is. Is what really gets on my nerve and it becomes also a problem in terms of getting my own work done. But what excites me about AI is I'm still extremely optimistic about AI, but unfortunately, a lot of the AI I get excited about is not something that results in, you know, massive profits. So, you know, using AI for disaster mapping, using AI for soil health monitoring and so on, these are things that really excite me. But there is no monetary value in developing AI for this system. So these are the things that really get me excited, that really make me feel like, wow, this is powerful tool that we can use to actually do some good in the world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Yeah. We could make sure that everyone is fed and has healthcare and that resources are allocated in a way that's fair and we just don't. Because of money.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yeah. Because it doesn't make you money. Yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Which is, I think, once again, money is the root of all.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Thank you so much for doing this. This has been so illuminating and it's great to talk to someone who knows their shit about this.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversations.

[Alie Ward]

So ask real people real not smart and important questions because how else are we supposed to learn anything? So thank you so much to Trinity College's Dr. Behani for sitting down with me and making the trip to Ireland so eventful. I loved this talk and you can find links to her and her work in the show notes as well as to the cause of the week. We are ologies on meta owned Instagram and on bluesky and I'm giving my data as alie ward with just one L on both. And our website has links to all the studies we talked about and that link is in the Show Notes. If you're looking to become a patron, you can go to patreon.com ologies and you can join up there. If you need shorter kid friendly versions of Ologies episodes, we have them for free in their own feed. Just look for smallogies that's also linked in the show Notes. Please spread the word on that. And we have ologies [e-mail] thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group Avileen Malik does our professional Human made transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our flesh and blood scheduling producer. Human Organism Susan Hale managing directs the whole show Alive editor Jake Chaffee helps put it together and the Connective Tissue lead editor is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. And Nick Thorburn made the theme music using his brain and ears and fingers. And if you stick around till the end of the show, I tell you a secret and this week it's two. One is that I think I'm gonna be shooting something next week and I will tell patrons about it first, but also I'll do some posting on social media if and when it happens. I'm really excited. I don't mean to be secretive, but just send good vibes. Next week I'll tell you as a secret after it happens. And the other secret is before I went to Ireland, I got a couple of those film cameras dispos because it's like, ooh, what is this? There's film in this and I took all the pict and I haven't gotten them developed yet and I kind of feel like the longer you wait to get them developed, the more you'll like them. And so I don't know what the appropriate amount of time is to forget about this disposable camera and then get it developed if it should be like a couple more months or if I should get it developed in a year. And so now I just have this disposable camera in my backpack and I don't know how long I should I also don't know where to get it developed if I'm being honest. But anyway, if anyone has thoughts about that, feel free to advise me. That is a very analog update here for me. All right? Fucking Please do not use ChatGPT to write papers or illustrate anything important. Hire an illustrator if you can. Illustrators, writers, artists, musicians. Please let them live. They are alive. Okay, Be good or Bye. Pachydermatology Cryptozoology, Lithology, Nanotechnology, Meteorology, Coal factology, Mapology, Serology.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

We marveled at our own magnificence as.

[Dr. Ababa Burhane]

We gave birth to AI.

[Alie Ward]

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[Unnamed Interviewer]

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[Alie Ward]

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[Unnamed Interviewer]

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[Alie Ward]

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