You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

paperback, 272 pages

Published March 23, 2021 by Voracious.

ISBN:
978-0-316-52522-0
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4 stars (5 reviews)

7 editions

On the weird things that AIs do.

5 stars

An excellent and hilarious book about the state of actual AI technology in the world (as opposed to the AIs you may see in popular media) and why they can do weird things. As it turns out, the weirdness can be due to the data used to train the AI, in how the AI processes the data and in how we tell the AI to solve a problem for us. You will get a good understanding of how AIs actually work and what they can (and can't) do, and also how AIs can actually help humans do their jobs (or entertain us with hilarious failures).

Chapter one looks at what kinds of AI are featured here. While the public may have some ideas about AI from the popular media, the kinds of AIs looked at here are actual ones in use, which means machine based systems that accept data, apply …

Accessible intro to AI concepts that is based in the real world

4 stars

Its important for me to understand AI models and capabilities to a certain extent for my job. The author did a good job of writing a book that explains these concepts in an entertaining way. This is one you should absolutely read if you are interested in AI but dont want to get caught up in a "web 3" grift.

how many giraffes are in this review

5 stars

i read this, like many people did i suspect, because i like Janelle Shane's AI Weirdness blog. This book does rehash some of the material from the blog as you'd expect, but the focus is more on explaining AI in a non-technical, non-sensational, & friendly manner. Probably the people who would get the most out of it are those whose knowledge of AI begins & ends with how they're portrayed in the news & in fiction.

Review of 'You Look Like a Thing and I Love You' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This was a solid piece of work on the state of machine learning which is so rapidly changing that one of the main platforms she uses in her examples, GPT-2, has already been replaced by another one with capabilities a hundred or more times that of its predecessor. So while it gives a good account of the challenges in applying the technology, it will only be a snapshot in time of how far researchers have been able to go (until it is revised perhaps some day). It draws on her popular blog with examples of her own experiments along with descriptions of what other researchers have been working on as broadly as can be accommodated in a work aimed at a general audience. Although I do have some involvement with deep learning in my job, my own interest is that of someone who is interested in the technology in a …

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rated it

5 stars