A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

Machines Like Us

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI: how it’s changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness.

But what we haven’t done on this show is try to explain how AI actually works. So this seemed like as good a time as any to ask our listeners if they had any burning questions about AI. And it turns out you did.

Where do our queries go once they’ve been fed into ChatGPT? What are the justifications for using a chatbot that may have been trained on plagiarized material? And why do we even need AI in the first place?

To help answer your questions, we are joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, and the best person I know at helping people (including myself) understand artificial intelligence.

Further Reading:

“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building It Anyway,” Machines Like Us podcast

“ChatGPT is blurring the lines between what it means to communicate with a machine and a human,” by Derek Ruths

“A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going,” by Michael Wooldridge

“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” by Melanie Mitchell

“Anatomy of an AI System,” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler“

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, how has generative AI helped businesses?,” by Joe Castaldo