You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place
“You look like a thing and I love you” is one of the best pickup lines ever ... according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness. She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans — all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives.
We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations, and to put cat ears on our selfie videos. We also trust AI with matters of life and death, on the road and in our hospitals. But how smart is AI really ... and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars?
Shane delivers the answers to every AI question you've ever asked, and some you definitely haven't. Like, how can a computer design the perfect sandwich? What does robot-generated Harry Potter fan-fiction look like? And is the world's best Halloween costume really "Vampire Hog Bride"? In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt — and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking.
Author: Janelle Shane | Publisher: Voracious
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Rating: 3 / 5
“On the one hand, online movie reviews are convenient for training sentiment-classifying algorithms because they come with handy star ratings that indicate how positive the writer intended a review to be. On the other hand, it’s a well-known phenomenon that movies with racial or gender diversity in their casts, or that deal with feminist topics, tend to be ‘review-bombed’ by hordes of bots posting highly negative reviews. People have theorized that algorithms that learn from these reviews whether words like feminist and black and gay are positive or negative may pick up the wrong idea from the angry bots.”
I read You Look Like a Thing and I Love You as part of my subscription to the Next Big Idea Club, which is curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink. I thought it was an interesting little book that told me a lot of quirky stories about AI, and gave me a bit more vocabulary with which to discuss AI. I didn’t necessarily learn anything life-changing, but I did find myself entertained.
Janelle Shane runs a blog called AI Weirdness, where she draws cute and funny cartoons and reports on the weird and also funny results of AI experiments. This book is really an extension of that blog, or maybe a more organized precursor. She goes through systematically to explain what AI is (and what it isn’t) and what it can do (and what it cannot, and why). She gives fun examples to illustrate. For example, “you look like a thing and I love you” was an AI algorithm’s attempt to write a pick-up line.
Admittedly, I listened to this one’s audiobook, so I missed out on a lot of the cute cartoons that pepper the book’s pages as well. But while I think they would have added smiles, I don’t know that they would have added much substance.
If you know absolutely nothing about AI (which, you might surprise yourself actually), then this book could be really eye-opening for you. But if you’re even a bit familiar, I thought this book felt more like novelty knowledge. Still, that can be fun, too (and it was)!