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

This is why AI researchers like to draw a distinction between artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), the kind we have now, and artificial general intelligence (AGI), the kind we usually find in books and movies.

Your phone’s predictive text and autocorrect Markov chains update themselves as you type, training themselves on what you write. That’s why if you make a typo, it may haunt you for quite some time.

Treating a decision as impartial just because it came from an AI is known sometimes as mathwashing or bias laundering.

To take the best way forward with AI, we’ll have to understand it—understand how to choose the right problems for it to solve, how to anticipate its misunderstandings, and how to prevent it from copying the worst of what it finds in human data.