Published in 2019
272 pages
5 hours and 33 minutes
While moonlighting as a research scientist, Janelle Shane found fame documenting the often hilarious antics of AI algorithms.
Janelle Shane’s humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at, as she tells it, “the strange side of artificial intelligence.” Her upcoming book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place, uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the minds of the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining.
According to Shane, she has only made a neural network-written recipe once — and discovered that horseradish brownies are about as terrible as you might imagine.
What is this book about?
“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.
