You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane

Ireland Ireland who? Ireland you money, butt.

These workout DVDs are very useful. You can cover your whole butt with them.

on scale from bieber to gandalf, how epic

17 Times The Most Butts 43 quotes guaranteed to make you a mermaid immediately

18 secrets snowmen won’t tell you 15 emo football fans share their ways

25 unfortunate cookie performances from around the world 21 pictures of food that will make you wince and say “oh i’m i sad?”

24 times australia was the absolute worst

18 delicious bacon treats to make clowns amazingly happy 29 things to do with tea for Halloween 7 pies

“ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag ag” translated from Somali to English as “As a result, the total number of the members of the tribe of the sons of Gershon was one hundred fifty thousand”

King of the Poop Bug Failed Steampunk Spider

This is all fine and good if, like me, you establish weirdness as your goal.

In normal conversation people don’t start quizzing each other about the number of giraffes when they both know there aren’t any.

Star Sh*tter

However, Bethesda found that these new AI-driven NPCs could sometimes break the game. In one case, there was a drug dealer who was supposed to be part of a quest but who sometimes would fail to show up to play his part. It turned out that the drug dealer’s customers were murdering him rather than paying for their drugs, since there was nothing in the game to prevent them from doing so.17 In another case, players entering a store found that there was nothing on the shelves to buy because an NPC had come by earlier and bought everything.

Hail to the Dave

An example of an adversarial attack that’s targeted at humans with touch screens: some advertisers have put fake specks of “dust” on their banner ads, hoping that humans will accidentally click on the ads while trying to brush them off.

Maybe there’s a rare but catastrophic bug that develops, like the one that affected Siri for a brief period of time, causing her to respond to users saying “Call me an ambulance” with “Okay, I’ll call you ‘an ambulance’ from now on.”4

Is all this art AI-generated? Absolutely. But is the AI the thing doing the creative work? Not by a long shot. People who claim that their AIs are the artists are exaggerating the capabilities of the AIs—and selling short their own artistic contributions and those of the people who designed the algorithms.