Almost a decade ago, I attended a job fair which had a resume specialist. The subject of the seminar was improving chances of your resume being noticed by employers. The specialist's only real advice was to cut and paste the entire job listing that you were applying for into your resume in either a header or footer, change the text to white, and reduce it to one point font size. This way, the algorithms that scan each resume would put yours at the top of the list because it had all the keywords it was programmed to find.

The Tay AI also made the funniest tweet ever. She said that Ted Cruz wasn’t the zodiac killer cause Ted Cruz would never be satisfied with the deaths of only 5 innocent people

absolute best take I heard on this: "we successfully taught AI to talk like corporate middle managers and took that as a sign that AI was human and not that corporate middle managers aren't"

"A.I. is stupid in ways we can't understand" as a software engineer I find this line surprising accurate

IBM's insight from 1979 is still valid today,: "A computer can never be held accountable therefore a computer must never make a management decision"

the problem with "opening the black box" is that not even the developers know how it works. It's not the same as source code. it's like a box of sand, and you pour water through it. You see it trickle through, but you have no idea how or why exactly it's choosing the paths that it does.

What shocks me most about AI is how rapidly many people are eager to trust it with important tasks despite not understanding what the product fundamentally is. It's very good at predicting the next word in a sentence-a hyper-advanced autocomplete. It doesn't *think creatively.*

I was job searching for 4 months with zero interviews. I rewrote my resume with ChatGPT with minimal edits and got an interview in like 3 days.

"The final boss of gentrification" is one of the most brutal roasts I've heard on this show

"He's dressed like the final boss of gentrification" Ok John, that got me real good.

How he can do this for 30 minutes straight is always incredible.

As a software developer of over 10 years, I have to say the black box problem persists even on code people have written and are able to read line by line :p

the funny thing about the "i want to be alive" is that, since AI just reads info off the internet, the more we talk about self aware AI, the more it will act like it is self aware.

This made me realize that Ultron spending less than a few minutes on the internet and wanting to destroy humanity was realistic .

"Pale male data"? Best character on Star Trek:The Next Generation.

John Oliver just dropped the ultimate truth bomb about Artificial Intelligence on his show and I'm absolutely shook! His segment was not only informative, but hilarious and engaging too. It's amazing to see someone so skilled at breaking down complex issues into easily digestible and entertaining content. Keep up the good work, John! You've got me thinking twice about trusting robots to do everything for us.

TRUE STORY: In my teens wanted to work at a movie theater - and they handed applicants a mind-numbing 14 pages application - wanting to know everything about you - even what hobbies and sports you liked - it was entirely ridiculous - around page 8, I got worn out from filling out this 'essay' of my life for a stupid theater job - SO when I got to the section asking if I had ever been arrested before = I said: "Yes, I murdered an entire movie theater crew for asking way too many questions, but got off on a technicality." - and turned that resume into the manager as I stormed out the door, pissed off that I had wasted an hour of my time filing out paperwork w/o an interview. ...well, 2 days later I got a call to come back to the theater for an interview, and thought, oh sh*t, well, I guess I'm going to get railroaded and berated by the management for my saucy comment - but I showed up anyways so that at least I could suggest that they TONE DOWN the length of their stupid applications. ...turns out, they offered me a job, so I asked the most obvious question: "So, you read my application ... all of it?" "Oh yes, looks good" the manager responded and I knew they were a bunch of lying dimwits ~ I ended up working there for the next 5 yrs, and eventually rose in ranks to become the theater manager - When I told my story to new recruits that nobody reads the stupid applications - they scoffed and didn't believe me - so I took them to the locked office storage and rifled through the stuffed cabinets of folders of all the applications they kept and found mine, and showed it to them to their amazement. Applications are a farce, you get hired by chance and immediate need. ... I always thought that if I every flipped out and murdered my entire staff, at least I could say that I didn't lie on my resume.

The person who animated clippy didn't have to go that hard, but they did... they did that for us.

The biggest lesson of AI is one we've faced many times: humans always run right into unknown things with very little concern about where they could go, and things going bad doesn't make us stop.

"...dressed like the final boss of gentrification" Solid and accurate joke

Whoever on your staff came up with the animation of Clippy deserves a raise.

A note, less on the subject matter and more on John's delivery of the lines ... I really admire how he can say "Sometimes I just let this horse write our scripts, luckily half the time you can't even tell the oats oats give me oats yum" without skipping a beat or losing face. Now THAT'S professionalism.

This topic should be revisited on the show now one year later now that so much has changed, particularly the AI alignment problem with the advent of AGI

Well said John: It is a mirror, that will reflect exactly who we are.

"He's dressed like the final boss of gentrification" I laughed so hard it hurt. Thank you.

One of my favourite ChatGPT stories is about some Redditors (because of course it was) who managed to create a workaround for its ethical restrictions. They just told it to pretend to be a different ai callled Dan (Do anything now) who can anything ChatGPT cannot. And it works! They're literally gaslighting an ai into breaking its own programming, it's so interesting

Well that's an image of my favorite Word Paperclip buddy that I will NEVER be able to unsee. Thanks.... 🤣🤣

This was a super intelligent thought-provoking and, of course, _funny as hell_ overview of a really important wave about to tsunami on top of all of us.

"The problem is not that ai is smart, it is that it is dumb in ways we can't always predict." I think that holds true for people too.

There are fewer phrases more ominous in the modern world than "trusting companies to self-regulate"

I'm glad he makes the distinction between different types of AI (narrow vs. general) People too often conflate those two very different things.

Mega kudos to John Oliver for being in a class of his own when it comes to highly informative and entertaining content delivered in the most hilarious of ways

“Like any shiny new toy, AI is ultimately a mirror” might be the most genius line I’ve ever heard on this show

I was half expecting John to say at the end that this entire episode was written by chatGPT.

Damn this is some top-notch journalism. Kudos to John Oliver and his team!

1 minute in and I nearly pissed myself laughing. Thank you John!

Never forgiving my English teacher because she ran an essay i wrote (along with a few of my classmates') through ChatGPT's AI checker, which came back as partially written by an AI, so she gave me a zero for it. This was the first time I've ever had any accusation of AI, and one of the people who came back as being AI generated is a kid in my class who has enough academic integrity, that you could literally convince me that i cheated on something before you could convince me that he did. Overtrusting AI is an issue that I think John didn't touch on, and I think for high schoolers the bigger issue won't be getting caught using AI to cheat, it will be people like me who get told to their face that they cheated, and not being allowed to argue with the robot that thinks that the Communist Manifesto was written by a computer.

Was waiting for this one

3:13 Every time I see my cats suspiciously prowling around I hear that rap chorus "Meow meow meow!" 😆🐈🐈‍⬛🐈🐈‍⬛

Fish ( and many other groups of animals besides mammals ) are also very intelligent. They can count, communicate, create spatial maps, can pass the Mirror Test - being capable of recognizing themselves in mirror reflections and photographs, neurochemistry is so similar to humans that they have become the main animal model for developing anti-depressants, they can remember things for 5+ months, have personalities, and they can show empathy and recognize fear in other fish around them.

"The problem with AI right now isn't that it's smart, it's that it's stupid in ways that we can't always predict". AI aside, this is my problem with people.

i’m so glad he touched on the significant issue of people observing ai as “unbiased” simply bc it’s not human. where do they think the data came from?

As a teacher that's tired of being treated like shit by his students, if they want AI to replace teachers, I say let it. Hopefully the AI doesn't become sentient enough to have mental health.

I went back to college last year, and multiple professors have had to mention that using AI programs to write essays is considered plagiarism. Also, they can tell when an essay was written by an AI.

Having been involved with computing for over 50 years, I recall that the mantra that was always preached, “Garbage in, garbage out”, pretty much sums up the current situation.

That Twitter ai was basically the embodiment of the quote "We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?"-William Golding author of Lord of the Flies.

glad to hear this funny yet informative take on this topic most people don't know enough about

Sobering view of AI, thanks John . As funny as he is, he’s always a good point of reference for things that matter, whether it’s a short term thing, or something as significant as this.

I mean… the issue with ChatGPT is that it was never intended to answer questions correctly. It is a language model, and as such its only purpose is the generate human sounding text. It happens to be correct often because it was trained with text that is often correct, but at the end of the day it doesn’t particularly care if it is correct, just that its responses look like common human communication.

my favorite story about AI is someone getting an AI to play tetris, with the goal of lasting as long as possible. the AI's solution was the pause the game

That little "...yet..." had me dying 😂😂😂

Brilliant episode. Stunning delivery. WOW!

I love how John said “our” scripts. He’s very aware that he’s a face and and mouth peace for a whole team of talented people.

"Knock knock" "Who's there?" "Not the Hindenburg, that's for sure" may be the hardest I've ever laughed at a LWT joke.

Exactly! The biggest problem is "unknown" unknowns, meaning we cannot anticipate what would go wrong and when and by the time we do, it would be too late.

Actually, Adam Conover said that that biggest danger is CEOs using AI just like using social media to spread misinformation, exploitation, and poor decision making. Even the terminator says this is inhumane.

As a current Michigan State student, that Vanderbilt email was one of the more disturbing things to come out of the shooting. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that they cared so little about what happened and how it might affect their students that they couldn't even write a short email themselves. Props to all the universities and schools who did make a genuine effort to show support to MSU in addition to their own student body. It did not go unnoticed here on campus.

Gonna put a big caveat up front that I've been out of college for a few years and my specialty was in real time simulation not AI, so this might be out of date, but with that said: The problem with understanding AI isn't that the companies aren't being open, it's that most AI models are neural nets. Neural nets as you might guess model themselves on the brain and are essentially a series of nodes through which an input is fed through and then other nodes those nodes are connected receive the input based on various factors and so on. It's like having a thought and trying to figure out why it happened by looking at which neurons in your brain fired and at what voltage. The problem with understanding AI is that we don't know why the nodes have formed the connections they have or why certain connections are stronger for some data or others.

Great show. My fear is, those who are smart enough to be cautious about the application of AI, will be subordinated by those who only see short term profits. Can AI be given incorruptible ethics or the AI version of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?

To paraphrase something I saw a few weeks ago, "you're not afraid of AI being used. You're afraid of who's going to use it."

Personal data point: After I retired from the Navy, I went to college. When I was applying for jobs as I was getting close to graduating, I found that at any company that was using software to screen resumes, I was eliminated before any human saw my resume, but places that had a human reading the resumes, I would always get called for an interview. Once I removed all dates from my past employment, and the software could no longer tell how old I was, the exact same software, used by the same companies, and the exact same positions, would screen me as suitable for further (human) review, even though nothing else was changed in my resume. Humans saw my 20 years of military experience as a plus, and software saw it as a quick way to age discriminate.

Priceless, John, as usual. 🤣😂😅

“Final boss of gentrification” is a wonderful line. “Final boss of gentrification” is a wonderful line.

It’s so noble of John to point out things we shouldn’t be afraid of while also reminding us of the things we should ACTUALLY be afraid of!

A problem I've seen with artists is that people already don't want to pay them. So they're using AI to replace them as a cheaper option. So rather than automation replacing dangerous or tedious jobs to give people more time to create art, it's doing the opposite. Also there's a large influx of people submitting AI work into competitions, which is the equivalent of ordering a cake from a bakery, and then entering it into the local fair as your own baking.

Great video again. And Tay IMO shows that we humans can be swayed by disconcerting views too, if we just read or hear them often. And such content does seem to float up rather easily on social media.

In my understanding, an AI saying "I love you" is not like a feeling being expressing emotion but more like a psychopath who has learned that people will respond well to such a statement. That makes the idea of an AI-based virtual friend/girlfriend/boyfriend very creepy instead of just sad.

"Lazy school administrators using AI to write an email about a mass shooting" Strong candidate for "Most American Statement of 2023"

One of the better "Last Week Tonight" segments.

I will be officially impressed once an AI robot can untangle my Christmas’s tree lights without damage.

As a data scientist, I can't say I learned too much from this episode, but it is very valuable and educational for laypersons. 18:07 this one also reminds me of an AI model that was supposed to distinguish between dogs and wolves. What happened here, is that the model recognised some images with dogs as wolves because those images also contained... snow. As do most pictures with wolves. So in that instance, the researchers inadvertently build a snow detector.

I worked in the collections industry for 5 years, and the "Black Box" description really did apply to the credit bureaus. Even one of my bosses described it almost exactly as such. It's insane that something that dictates your ability to buy a house or transportation is informed by a system that just feeds an unknown spread of data into a box, and that box spits out a 3 digit number that decides how easy your life is about to be

the writing on this show is probably the best i've seen in a while.

An excellent and accurate summary of AI. Well done.

Hello Mr. Oliver, my name is Jared and I am submitting my CV for consideration as the newest member of your writing staff. As my lacrosse coach used to tell us, "If you don't play then you can't win!"

It's both impressive and worrying to see a comedian in an evening show giving a much more accurate report on today's AI, its potential and its limitations than most tech publications

I think what's really missing from this conversation is that there are analogous stories already which explain much of the 'black box' problem John describes. ex. most AI software simply classifies words which are close in the given data set, which adjusts with every new bit of data; in other words: when uncle Derek only sees brown terrorists on the news, uncle Derek believes 'brown' and 'terrorist' to be closely related, but uncle Derek has made an oopsie, because his data set is too small to draw that conclusion, so what he has done is embedded a stereotype. That's essentially how these bias's emanate from the black box, the only caveat being that with each piece of data the bias warps the algorithm's dependence upon its existing bias making it harder to change early bias's since the new data isn't as heavy as the old data so it requires a LOT of new data to force out established bias kinda like how it takes little effort to put on weight, but substantially more to reduce weight, for most people. So yea, it's understandable for most people how the AI draws its conclusions, because the fundamental structure of the technology isn't actually intelligent. It is a dumb algorithm which repeats a task so much that it has become a habit, in that sense it doesn't really make decisions or express meaning, it simply spits out a response based on criteria, like how kids make their bed for their parents when asked, but when asked to tidy their room, that bed won't be fixed unless the parent specifies that as a part of the task. anyway to the no one reading this, I aint gonna source shit, take it or leave it, just don't make the same mistake as Uncle Derek

My sister is a teacher at a college, this has been the subject of most faculty meetings all year

The "..half the time you can't even tell the oats, oats, give me oats, yum." line is pretty brilliant

“Final boss of gentrification” is a wonderful line

I started doing essentially the same thing except formatted as YOUR NEEDS/ MY QUALIFICATIONS and it’s been working really well for me since I started using it in 2002 or so after getting the Idea from a friend back East

Brilliantly put!

I think that reason for "I love you" and "leave your wife" responses from Bing AI is because it learned from private dating app conversation databases 🙂

17:40 "the George Santos of technology" lmao Also, kudos to John and his team for a really informative segment. Just like the Snowden episode, it's hard to push for action on this issue when most people don't understand how this technology works.

Jon Oliver is amazing. I just wanted to give a shout-out to all the other folks that research and write for his show, too

John Oliver is brilliant

I once asked Chat GPT to just give me quotes from a story (Long Day's Journey Into the Night by Eugene O'Neil), nothing else, and it legitimately fed me DOZENS of quotes that DO NOT exist anywhere in the text. It just made them up.

Similar to the ‘I am alive’ AI, a Spanish journalist had a conversation with Bing’s AI, who insisted obsessively that Pedro Sánchez, the president of Spain, had a beard. After the journalist insisted that it must be mistaken because his face is always clean-shaven, the AI started spiralling and said that it was losing its will to live while repeating incessantly that Pedro Sánchez had a beard.😅

What's scary? Isaac Asmiov LITERALLY predicted this. (Specifically, AI making AI until it becomes a black box)

You definitely need to do a revisit on this subject.

"I heard ChatGPT is just a reflection of humanity, which means it's probably just as confused about life as we are. But at least it won't have to deal with taxes and student loans, so it's got that going for it." Best regards, ChatGPT

25:53 aww a tucker dig. I'ma miss those

I'm a CompSci dude and IMHO this is the best ever brief on AI for the misinformed. I'll be directing people to this. A little humor helps the medicine go down, but besides that it's just absolutely correct.

Let's see what chatGPT has to say about this... Write a viral KZfaq comment for John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Artificial Intelligence "John Oliver just dropped the ultimate truth bomb about Artificial Intelligence on his show and I'm absolutely shook! His segment was not only informative, but hilarious and engaging too. It's amazing to see someone so skilled at breaking down complex issues into easily digestible and entertaining content. Keep up the good work, John! You've got me thinking twice about trusting robots to do everything for us."

Microsoft DOES know why the chatbot told him to leave his wife. It's because it was trained on other chatbots and forums and the "I love you, leave your wife" is a very common line in scam-focused chatbots, and "leave your wife" is a somewhat common line in life forums and EXTREMELY common in relationship forums. And that's not even getting into possible novels they might have fed the thing.

We love John Oliver's quirky, hilarious insights into just about anything. At my age, I don't want to get run over by the Technology, so studying AI is important because it is now part of our world whether we like it or not.

The cat rap was the best thing I've ever heard lol

This is a damn good episode. The people writing on this show actually take their time, investigate and research, which is something that the vast majority of journalists do not and they should be replaced by an AI.

Last Week Tonight has become one of my favorite mainstream outlets for general news. Writers do a solid job with research and John is great at delivery. They are able to keep things entertaining while tackling some serious topics and raising good questions.... all of that was actually written by my friend Jared.

Good show, thanks