Hell All the Way Down, 2022–2025

This is a special episode, and it’s not like our usual livestream recordings. Instead, our producer Ozzy dug through the Fresh AI Hell archives to create a supercut of Alex's improvised transitions. She's made up dozens of skits and songs about the demons of AI Hell, based on weekly prompts from Emily and listeners. Finally, hear all the lore together in one place!

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

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Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. 
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Transcript

Alex Hanna: Welcome everyone, to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Where we seek catharsis in this age of AI hype. We find the worst of it and pop it with the sharpest needles we can find. 

Emily M. Bender: Along the way, we learn to always read the footnotes, and each time we think we've reached peak AI hype, the summit of bullshit mountain, we discover there's worst to come. I'm Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna, director of research for the Distributed AI Research Institute. 

Emily M. Bender: This one is a special episode, and it's not like our usual livestream recordings. Longtime listeners of the show will know about the Fresh AI Hell segment, and the fun we have with Alex's improvised transition segments. Each time, I give her a prompt, either musical or non-musical, and she improvises a response. At this point, we've been doing this for long enough that a supercut of all of our Fresh AI Hell transitions put together- plus some other fun tidbits- is about the length of a normal episode. So that's exactly what we have here for you. I think both old and new listeners will have fun hearing how this part of the show started out and how it's evolved over time. Plus, it's nice to finally have all of the lore together in one place. Huge thanks to our producer, Ozzy Llinas Goodman, for putting this together. Now, follow me to Fresh AI Hell!

Emily M. Bender: So, onto the new segment? 

Alex Hanna: Onto the new segment! So we have a new segment, "What in the Fresh AI Hell." So maybe we could come up with a theme song... What in the Fresh AI Hell? Doo duh doo duh doo. I don't know.

Alex Hanna: Fresh AI Hell, Fresh AI Hell, why go to hell when it's here right now? 

Emily M. Bender: I love it. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, wow. That took a dark turn. All right. Anyways.

Alex Hanna: Fresh AI Hell, Fresh AI Hell, what have the AI scientists done today? Fresh AI Hell, Fresh AI Hell, you'll never guess what kinds of things await in Fresh AI Hell. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. 

Alex Hanna: Amazing. 

Guest: That's awesome. 

Emily M. Bender: That was brilliant. 

Alex Hanna: Oh crap. You've tapped into my musical improv desire. What could it be? What is it as well? When we dive directly into Fresh AI Hell.

Alex Hanna: I am here in the Court of Commons, looking at these documents to read. If there was only some kind of tool, which would let me do it with speed... Fresh AI Hell, is what saved me by the bell. Fresh AI Hell, making my job more swell.

Emily M. Bender: Oh, that's amazing. 

Guest: That was, honestly, that was the most impressive thing I've seen, ever. I'm like, you know, I'm in awe. 

Emily M. Bender: You are in Fresh AI Hell, but in the 1950s, and there is a meeting going on of the demons, and you are coming in with the coffee service and trying to interrupt them. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, oh, sorry. Lemme, I'm just, um, oh, just getting through here. Uh, who had the, um, who had coffee uh, black as the soul of, uh- I'm trying to think of evil people- I, uh, the soul of Hitler himself? Okay. Okay. That's for you. Uh, who had the, um, triple caf skinny latte made from the tears of children? Yeah. Okay. Here and, oh, sorry. Oh yeah. I- Lucifer, just gimme a second.

Emily M. Bender: I love it. All right. Welcome to Fresh AI Hell.

Emily M. Bender: You are a weather forecaster describing an upcoming climate catastrophe as the climate crisis is in fact reaching AI Hell. 

Alex Hanna: My name is, uh, Jim Cantori, and, uh, I, I really, uh, I, I have to tell you, I've been in a lot of storms, but never, never seen this. We see a typhoon coming in, uh, Fresh AI Hell is coming down fire, and brimstone, uh, smoking pieces of GPUs are, have been hitting major buildings here. Uh, please, uh, take shelter, uh, crawl under a table, um, put in earphones so you can avoid all kinds of AI Hell, and all kinds of bullshit that you're seeing. That's, that's all I've got to say. We've, we've gotta go offline now. That's all I got. 

Emily M. Bender: There we go. Thank you for that.

Emily M. Bender: You are one of the demons guarding AI Hell, and you are trying to negotiate with some of the other demons what should be in your voluntary commitments. Go. 

Alex Hanna: Okay. All right. So here's what they got. All right. So I, I, I got this guy down here. His name was, uh, Marvin Minsky. And, uh, you know, down when he came down, he told me about this thing. I couldn't believe it. He said that robots could walk and talk. They could do these things. All right? He had my voluntary commitments. No, uh, no work on the weekends. Uh, I can't have any of these people, any of these demons, any of these robot demons replacing, putting bees in mouths. My favorite part of the job, just shoving bees in mouths and, uh, uh, anything involving, uh, just flattening of fingers, uh, taking nails off. Uh, you, those robots are not taking my job. 

Emily M. Bender: Imagine we've got the demons of AI Hell on strike. They're picketing. And you get to do the chants. 

Alex Hanna: Okay, all right, boys. You ready? 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. 

Alex Hanna: This is what demonology looks like. 

Emily M. Bender: Tell us what demonology looks like! 

Alex Hanna: This is what demonology looks like! All right. I'm gonna say, what do you want? You say slop and then, and then when do we want it? 

Emily M. Bender: All the time. 

Alex Hanna: All right. Yeah. What do we want? 

Emily M. Bender: Slop! 

Alex Hanna: When do we want it? 

Guest: Now! 

Emily M. Bender: All the time! 

Alex Hanna: Now, it's now! All right. 

Emily M. Bender: What do we want? 

Alex Hanna: Slop! 

Emily M. Bender: When do we want it? 

Alex Hanna: Now! Sometime soon.

Emily M. Bender: You're a demon who's late for their train to Fresh AI Hell, and you're rushing along. Gotta get there. 

Alex Hanna: Oh gosh. All right. Ah, shit. Ah, shit. Ah, stop, stop. Ah, ah. Holy crap. Oh, stop it. Stop. Ah, no, I'm gonna be late on the job. Oh my gosh. Last time Lucifer was so mad, I- Oh, I didn't pull out enough teeth. Ah! 

Emily M. Bender: You are a denizen of AI Hell, and you are being interviewed for the local AI Hell newspaper, but your interviewer is an LLM. 

Alex Hanna: And the LLM says, "Tell me about your childhood." And I say "Well, you know, I, I got down here in AI hell, I, uh, misquoted a professor-" and I'm smoking like a cigarette, you know, clove- "and, and you know, they, they put me down here, you know, I'm down here with the, uh, plagiarizers and, you know, it's not, it's not as bad as the, you know, those, those suckers on the fifth layer up in the fourth layer. Good stuff." And then the LLM says, "I see. Tell me more about how you feel about the fifth layer." And it turns out I'm just talking to ELIZA. All right. That's, that's, that's the, that's the joke. All right. We're done. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. I love it.

Emily M. Bender: You are at the Fresh AI Hell news desk, the demon news anchor reading the headlines.

Alex Hanna: Uh, so imagine me in a newsy cap with like a cigarette. Just chain smoking. "What you got for me today?" Someone walks in, a demon walks in. "Boss, I got this, I got this thing right here. Uh, this app called Friend. Well, you wear a friend on your neck. Uh, and, but if you drop it, it actually dies. What do you think?" "Well, I mean, it sounds great. I don't know. Ship it. All right. What else? What do you got for me, Larry? Or what do you got for me, Beelzebub?" "Well, you know, I got, listen, boss, I've been hitting these streets. I got, you know, I got 15, 20 people just trying to sell me on, uh, NFTs for news articles. I think it's, I don't know. What do you think about it?" "Ship it. Ship it! What are you thinking? Come on, I need to make a buck here." That's what I got. 

Emily M. Bender: All right, thank you.

Emily M. Bender: Turns out in AI Hell, they put a lot of energy into maintaining an ice rink so they can do winter Olympic games. And you are the color commentary announcer as Chuck Schumer is doing pairs ice dancing with the CEO of Palantir. 

Alex Hanna: Oh my gosh. Amazing. All right, now we have up Schumer and Alex Karp. Alex Karp, getting an incredible amount of training, as we recall, in his college days at Humboldt, studying with Jürgen Habermas. And oh, and they're pairing and oh, Schumer's going for the triple axle. Oh, oh. And he does not land it. Oh, actually goes through the ice. Oh right, oh, he actually knocked down to the seventh layer of Hell. Uh, looks like that pit fiend is gonna throw him back up. The judges are really gonna dock points from that. Karp now going for the double. So now coming, he nails it. Oh, oh, but his pick got stuck and it looks like, oh, it's detachable, and it turned into a robot dog with a gun! And it hops off. We've never seen that one before, but I really remember that Henry Kissinger had a really good showing last year when he whipped out a thermonuclear warhead to finish his routine. 

Emily M. Bender: You are going to be a demon in Fresh AI Hell, who is- 

Alex Hanna: I thought I was a demon last time. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. You're almost always a demon. 

Alex Hanna: Try to think of, maybe there's a different role- 

Emily M. Bender: A different role. Um, you are a custodian in Fresh AI Hell, and you are sweeping up the papers where the demons are writing out their chain of thought.

Alex Hanna: Interesting. So I envision the chain of thought of AI Hell demons, they're like those old school stock tickers. So you have these demons absolutely coked out of their skulls on the equivalent of, of, of whatever coke is. Let's call them, um, GPU credits. So AI Hell demons coked out on GPU credits, and they're actually extruding from their skulls. And then, and then, so as the AI Hell custodian, I'm just like, "I gotta, ugh, these, these fucking demons leaving their, leaving their chains of thoughts all around." And then they're, they're paper thin, but they sound like chains 'cause it is AI Hell. And then I sweep it into an incinerator and it just, and it explodes. And it's really noxious, you know, sulfuric gas.

Emily M. Bender: And now we know where the flames come from in Fresh AI Hell. That's brilliant.

Emily M. Bender: Let's say that you are one of the demons of Fresh AI Hell, and you are tasked with taking one of the robo dogs out for a walk, but it is being recalcitrant.

Alex Hanna: Oh my gosh. How do I do this? Come on. Come on, Sparky. Come on. Oh, I gotta get on your little boots. I gotta get on your boots to put 'em on. Okay. Sit, sit. Sit. I command you to sit. You gotta listen. Don't you got ChatGPT in you or something. Listen. All right, sit. I gotta get your little boots on. And the boots are actually like spikes so it doesn't fall down or something. Get your grippy shoes on. 

Emily M. Bender: Oh. Watch out little Sparky- Ouch! 

Alex Hanna: Delete yourself! I don't know. 

Emily M. Bender: So just like the self-driving cars are actually monitored and operated by remote workforce, turns out the coding agents are monitored and, um, you know, occasionally controlled by a, remote workforce in ai. Hell. And so you are one of those demons, um, having fun perhaps with the requests coming in from Jason and other CEOs. 

Alex Hanna: "Hey Donny! This guy, he's trying to put together a sales as a service agent. Here, here I'm gonna send something just to fuck with him." And then he types in like, I'm gonna drop tables. And he runs a SQL query. "Give me my mozzarella and some of that gabagool. Sorry. Sorry if I've offended any Italian Americans out there. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, oh, this is excellent. Elliot L. says, "Dante's Alferno." A plus. 

Alex Hanna: We got a recommendation for the transition from Jen R. Tan. 

Emily M. Bender: the staff psychologist in AI Hell, reviewing your generated transcripts via Whisper, when you notice that it's making shit up about what you've said and what your demon patients have said. And now you have to explain yourself to your superiors. Go. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, thanks for calling me in boss. Uh, I know you expressed some worries about, uh, what- I was gonna say Gilgamesh- what Lucifer said the other day.

Alex Hanna: Um, okay. Yeah. I mean, let me look. Okay, here it says okay, you know, I said welcome into my office. My name is Dante. Okay. All right. I didn't say that my name is, um, I'm trying to think. Oh, man. I'm really trying to think of other demon names on the fly. I don't know. I can't think of, I haven't read enough Bible. I'm sorry. Um, uh okay. But okay, Lucifer, he wants to be transferred to the sixth layer? That's really weird. 'Cause Lucifer is, he is a real, he is a real nut crusher. You know, you gotta keep him on level three with all the, you know, the lecherers and all the- what, what is this? And I said, sure I would approve? No, I didn't approve that. Sorry, we're using this new system. It's like, it said it was marketed towards demons and like really our special like, population, but I don't know. You gotta talk to those boys up in procurement. We can't handle this. 

Emily M. Bender: Wonderful. And I have to say, the next time we are needing, um, demon names, abstract_tesseract has given us Be-ELIZA-bub.

Alex Hanna: Oh yeah. Is it- Be-ELIZA-bub! 

Emily M. Bender: Before we get started, Alex, you said you've written a sea shanty to keep us afloat. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, that's right. And it's called "A Song for the Hype Flood." Now gather up lads and ye lassies alike, and all gender fuck pirates who aim thee to fight. Come for a tale of remarkable fight once we delve into floods of unbearable hype. Frozen ice melted from ye Bullshit Mountain, surveillance tools sprouting from the newer fountains. Intelligent machines are near to be found, they're really spying on kids who are brown. Info polluted and thoughts are diluted whilst language and pixels are roundly extruded. Fake headlines, articles bouncing around with journalists, fact-checkers run through the ground. We ride through the flood of such refuse and water, the Hype Theater Belt where we take on such slaughter. Slogging through bullshit we'll never relax, as shit talking AI is ridicule as praxis. 

Emily M. Bender: Okay. That is definitely fortifying. I love it.

Emily M. Bender: I have something of an intermission thing for you.

Alex Hanna: I don't have to be the one to perform, you have a thing! 

Emily M. Bender: It's my turn! It's kind of long. We are now, I guess, a big enough podcast that we've landed on the radar of lots and lots of publicists, and we get at least weekly pitches for people to be on the podcast. So I have compiled excerpts of those pitches into what I'm calling a found prose poem, with the title "My Client." And I have anonymized this in the sense that anywhere that the client's name showed up, I replaced it with the phrase "my client." Here we go, "My Client." Your podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater, 3000, stands out for its bold conversations around tech, AI, and data. That's exactly why my client would make an excellent guest. I'm reaching out to propose my client as a guest for your podcast, as his expertise aligns seamlessly with your focus on building business slash work-life balance. I'd love to introduce you to my client with his expertise in AI-driven product innovations and award-winning ventures. My client brings compelling insights into AI's real world applications beyond the usual hype. My client with her multifaceted experience in AI and her recent encounters with corporate layoffs offers a distinctive viewpoint on how tech workers can navigate their careers. Amidst AI evolution, after helping shape high tech and Silicon Valley, leading eBay's IPO, driving startup innovations, participating in new technologies like the internet, semiconductor chip design, and biotechnology, my client was driven by his deep interest in philosophy and astrophysics to explore the intersection of science, humanity, and purposeful living in a world transformed by AI. My client will be a fantastic guest to further dissect these myths. Known for his success in leading tech companies to acquisitions and award-winning product launches, he offers a pragmatic stance on AI's current and future role, having explored AI and its implications through both his academic and creative work. My client offers unique perspectives, blending science fiction and reality. With AI such a hot topic, I believe my client, my client, would make a compelling guest on your show. As a seasoned conversational AI technologist, my client has shaped the landscape of digital communication by harnessing AI to enhance human expertise. Previously an investor at Excel, my client helped deploy over $250 million in crypto and AI investments backing companies now worth over $5 billion. What truly sets my client apart is his keen foresight in monetizing the shift from traditional web spaces to AI driven experiences. As AI consolidates under a few major players, my client believes this will slow innovation and limit progress. He argues that true breakthroughs will come from open collaboration, not corporate secrecy. My client's latest book touches on themes that resonate with your podcast's ethos. My client's documentary is not just about technology, it's about the human stories intertwined with it. By featuring them, you could provide your listeners with a fresh and captivating perspective. My client leads a team focused on smart behaviors, merging AI with a built environment, with a rich background in architecture, and a profound grasp of technology's societal impacts. He would offer a unique perspective on AI's evolving role in education and beyond. My client is pioneering the world's first IP powered agentic AI protocol, creating emotionally intelligent AI companions that integrate seamlessly across devices. Think Siri, but with your favorite characters. My client is poised to discuss a range of topics, including effective leadership strategies, corporate culture, and the entrepreneurial mindset, and of course, oil and gas insights. I believe my client would be a remarkable guest on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Her fusion of technical savvy and social awareness offers a refreshing perspective on AI and education. My client is willing to discuss any topics related to AI in blockchain. With a flare for storytelling that mirrors your podcast's blend of high tech narratives and socioeconomic insights, my client can share how publishers are not just adapting, but revolutionizing their approach via connected AI agents. My client's experience with analytics and audience platforms could add a new dimension to your conversations on AI societal impacts. Would you be open to featuring him on your show? 

Alex Hanna: So good. Just incredible. 

Emily M. Bender: This is a musical about the demons in AI Hell, when the tech bros up on earth discover that they have a source of abundant energy that they can mine out of the hell fire. And so this is the, this is the opening act, I guess, about how that's gonna happen and how it's gonna disrupt everything. 

Alex Hanna: You know, the main character goes, "What a wonderful day! I can't wait to go to the sulfur mines." Going to the sulfur mines, gonna have myself a croissant. I'm going to eat it, and then torture anybody that- nothing rhymes with croissant. I really worked myself there. That's all I got. 

Emily M. Bender: OpenAI and company have figured out, you know how all this stuff is usually people in the background, right, and they're shipping the tasks off? Well, they've figured out how to ship those tasks off to the demons of AI Hell. And so you're there in the, you know, the mines and then these ARC prize graphs start falling on you. And so you're gonna give me a what, country music appropriate for the ranch hands, song about that. 

Alex Hanna: This is so deep. Down here in the content mines. Storing matrices, putting them in line. Doing tasks that only we can do, just so Sam can say he's smart too. Winning the ARC prize, down in AI Hell. Winning the ARC prize, AGI's going swell. Winning the ARC prize, we're doing it for humanity. But don't look too closely, or you might not like what you see. 

Emily M. Bender: You might not like what you see, but I love the song! 

Emily M. Bender: You are a nursery school teacher in AI Hell, and the only toys available to the kids are websites for them to poke at, and so you're singing a song to get them excited about it.

Alex Hanna: eBay, Google, Craigslist, Amazon, Microsoft, MSN too. Light Coast, GeoCities, and New York Times WaPo too. 

Emily M. Bender: You are Wayne Brady on Whose Line Is It Anyway? And you have been told that you have to sing a song about a patient who is suffering nightmares of being in Fresh AI Hell. 

Alex Hanna: Oh wow. It's not unusual to be stuck in AI Hell. It's not unusual to be doing neither swell. If you find yourself engulfed in flames, just remember you can... I can't think of anything that rhymes with flames. 

Guest: There'll be denial of your insurance claims! 

Alex Hanna: Oh my gosh. 

Guest: I can't sing, so I'm not gonna try to sing that for you. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, but there is the rhyme! 

Alex Hanna: Your insurance claims. There we go. All right. I changed key. 

Emily M. Bender: I love it. I love the collaboration. 

Emily M. Bender: You are a kindergarten teacher teaching your class a new song about AI Hell. 

Alex Hanna: All right, class. Are you ready? Let's do it. H-E-L-L, AI hell. Tell me what this is going to spell. Repeat after me, as you see, we are going to go and- uh, that's, that's all I got.

Emily M. Bender: Your prompt is what, what was the style of music you said that Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca would be specializing in? 

Alex Hanna: that means, Emily. 

Emily M. Bender: Okay. Well that's all right, 'cause this is improv. So you are going to, uh, give us a couple of bars of Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca's first hit single, in the genre post-punk twee. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, okay. Hey, we're, uh, Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca. This is Fresh AI Hell, our first album. And this is, this is our song, Rat Balls. Rat Balls. Rat Balls. Why so big? Why so big? Why so long? Rat balls. Thank 

Guest 1: That was amazing. 

Guest 2: Okay. I'm ready to buy this album. 

Alex Hanna: I'm ready to write the rest of it.

Guest 2: Take my Dogecoin!

Emily M. Bender: I think we need another single, so the second hit single from, uh, Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca. The, uh, post-punk twee band with their breakout hit Rat Balls. 

Alex Hanna: I am liberal. I am 30. I am a white male. I am upper class. The four words I would use to describe my dad are... ignorant, racist, misogynist, and rich!

Emily M. Bender: Love it. Thank you. 

Alex Hanna: This is my new hit single, um, I forgot what the name of our band is. Rat Balls. It's called Let the AI Do It. Let the AI do it. Let the AI do it. Let the AI do it. Let the AI do it. I heard you were wondering how to solve climate change. Let the AI do it. I was wondering how you understand how to build the range. Let the AI do it! All right, let's move. 

Guest: All right! 

Alex Hanna: All right. 

Emily M. Bender: Let me tell the people what I'm asking you to do. Um, it is time to hear the latest hit single from Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca. Long time listeners might remember, uh, the breakout hit Rat Balls. And this time the title of the new single is "Turnstiles Ablaze." 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Okay, great. All right. Our name is Ethical Autonomy Lingua Franca. This is our new one, "Turnstiles Ablaze." And it starts off with some, like, you know, it's got one of those really long bass intros. And then it's got that, and then it's: Turnstiles ablaze! The most frequent craze! Get off your couch and stop being lazy. Get up, it's not a phase! 

Emily M. Bender: You are, as usual, a demon in AI Hell, who shows up to a Zoom meeting and works out that every single other one of the things is an avatar. And so because you're just talking to avatars, you start singing to them, in the style of techno. 

Alex Hanna: Is anyone else there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? There, there, there is anyone there? There. There. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. Chappell Roan lesbian rock. You are singing a song about the day that you were teaching a class, and it turns out all the students were replaced with chatbots. Okay? 

Alex Hanna: I'm having wicked dreams, way down from Tennessee, but all the students I cannot even see. They've got their zoom windows blacked out. I can't see their eyes. I must only surmise that they're all AIs. Oh, what have you done? You've taken all the students and they've gone all away. Oh, mama. 

Emily M. Bender: I've got you as one among a chorus of rubber ducks singing about AI slop journalism.

Alex Hanna: Yes, yes. Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. I'm sick of the slop. Quack, quack, quack, quack. It appears on my page. Quack quack, quack quack. From Financial Times to Sentient. Media. Quack. Quack, crack. Quack. Buy our merch. Quack. Quack. Quack. Ask me! Quack, quack. I am very pretty, and I can give you misinformation, and serve as your thought partner. Quack, quack. 

Guest: Wow. Straight to number one. 

Emily M. Bender: So you are singing in the style of riot grrrl, you are one of these AI minders working with an AI capital S scientist collaborator, who's getting it all wrong. Go. 

Alex Hanna: Oh gosh. Okay. You think you're so cool with your AI tools! You wanna go back to school and make materials. But you're not gonna, they're all junk! Crystalline inorganic compounds. Most of them are fake, most of them are fake. You're all fake. 

Emily M. Bender: You are singing to me a country, singing us a country song, um, from the point of view of Fresh AI Hell's librarian, who finds herself, uh, without access to anything but Google AI overviews while trying to help clientele get answers to information.

Alex Hanna: All right, uh, so think of a twangy steel guitar. Went down to the library, found me some pit fiends. They said, dear librarian, where can I find some drag queens? I said, let me look it up on this index. Let me look it up in a card catalog. Unfortunately, it's been replaced, completely bogged down by this AI overview that I cannot see into. Yeehaw.

Emily M. Bender: Wonderful. Thank you.

Emily M. Bender: So you are, in dad rock, singing about what it's like to be a demon, answering questions from 100 different people on the other end of this avatar thing. 

Alex Hanna: All right. Going to my job down at the Care.coach. These people don't pay me enough, that I can get out of my roach filled Hell apartment.

Alex Hanna: I'm gonna find a new job, where I don't have to talk and pretend to be a robot dog. 

Emily M. Bender: Excellent. Excellent. 

Alex Hanna: All, uh, all bark, no bite. All hype, no- 

Emily M. Bender: Substance?

Alex Hanna: I'm trying to think of something else that starts with H. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All hype, no horchata. 

Alex Hanna: Horchata! I did not expect that at all. 

Emily M. Bender: All right, you are not a Fresh AI Hell demon, but its corresponding angel this time. Sipping some horchata. Disappointed to have found out that OpenAI was not actually altruistic. 

Alex Hanna: I know, uh... I've got my horchata in AI Heaven. I'm ready to be benevolent. I open the newspaper, what do I see? Sam Altman? No, could it be- AGI! AGI is a lie. Say it isn't so. I do a spit take. Horchata everywhere, in my corresponding angel's hair.

Emily M. Bender: You are the lead singer of a band made of capybaras who are singing their hearts out to tell the tech bros what they actually need to have a better food source and living conditions. 

Alex Hanna: Oh yeah. Hey man, all you need is love. Sitting in our bath, getting mana from above. Hey man, that's all we want. Stay outta AI Hell, all you gotta do is stop and think about how your inner child can yell. 

Emily M. Bender: You are a teacher who now has a classroom of 100 5 year olds because they each have their own personal tutor. 

Alex Hanna: Let me think about it. I'm in my classroom here, got all these kids up to my ears. Ready to to deploy this chatbot, gonna be filled to the brim with AI slop.

Guest: That's amazing. 

Emily M. Bender: You are a staffer assisting in the authoring of this document, tasked with finding additional agencies that haven't been mentioned yet to figure out how to draw them in. 

Alex Hanna: So like, do DOC, DOD, NISST. Getting down to business. We're gonna put things here and do the AI action list. And then you can continue, just like, it's just an alphabet soup type song. 

Emily M. Bender: So you are in a meeting with one of these things coming, and realizing that you have to get your speech rate higher. 

Alex Hanna: Uh, let's think like, land on Zoom, revenue accelerator, we're going to get and see the rate in which we go and have our fate. We're going down to the keg and having us a bit of dreg. We're going now to the time. I can't think of anything else. Um, um, um, um, um! 

Emily M. Bender: Fantastic. Alex, you have outdone yourself. 

Alex Hanna: Thank you. Thank you. 

Emily M. Bender: So you are an Open Brain employee tasked with trying to read some neuralese, and singing the blues about it.

Alex Hanna: All right. I got it. No problem. I'm sitting here in my office with nothing to do. All I've got here is the descendants of Deep Blue. She's giving me this output down on my terminal screen. I'm not really sure what I'd even done scene. I tried to understand it. What is this I see? Nothing but a big list of nerdy neuralese. Thank you. Thank you. 

Emily M. Bender: Yay!

Emily M. Bender: You are the chef from the Muppet Show doing the chopping, and you cut your thumb and you try accessing one of these nurses to figure out what to do about it. 

Alex Hanna: Ooka dooka, ooka dooka. Oh! Hippocratic. Okka dooka. It says I have congenital heart failure. What the!

Alex Hanna: Rag time. Okay. Come on my baby, come on my Charlie, come on my rag- I'm done, I'm done! I, I, sorry. This is not, this is not. Well, I need a trombone to do ragtime. 

Alex Hanna: I brought my guitar today. 

Emily M. Bender: Yes, you are a librarian. Reference librarian. Someone's come to you with an information need about unicorns, but all of your databases have been replaced with ChatGPT, so you're singing the blues.

Alex Hanna: Sitting at my reference desk, someone's made a request. Looking up what I can, finding what I can't. And no, no, it's ChatGPT on my desk. Don't answer this request. Gonna tell me I gotta misgender someone to stop a nuclear war. That's all I got. 

Emily M. Bender: That was beautiful. I love it. I love it. I love it, I love it.

Emily M. Bender: So this time you are, um, an open source developer who has been condemned to AI Hell. And your task is, uh, looking at the pull requests of all the people who have used, um, LLM generated code in that one crucial piece that you are tasked with maintaining forever. 

Alex Hanna: I don't have a response, Emily. That's just, that's just endless shrieking for hours and hours in eternity.

Alex Hanna: This hell, that hell, this hell, that hell, this hell, that Hell. This one detects origin based on voice. That's hell! This one tells us whether ChatGPT can be used in schools. That's hell!

Alex Hanna: My life was empty with you before that you came along. But then I got an LLM to check if my bread was done! Sometimes I really want to be sure that it is proofed, but now I know with this large language model that it's ready to peruse. Can't stop eating my bread and using an LLM! Can't stop! Uh, I can't think of how to finish that, but...

Emily M. Bender: That's the best one yet, Alex.

Emily M. Bender: It's a beautiful day in Fresh AI Hell. You are a go-getter PhD student in the body of a robot fish. 

Alex Hanna: Oh my gosh. Well, I guess I just wake up and I go STONK! Time to cause some hell!

Alex Hanna: That's it for this week. Our theme song is by Toby Menon. Graphic design by Naomi Pleasure-Park. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. And thanks as always to the Distributed AI Research Institute. If you like this show, you can support us in so many ways. Order The AI Con at thecon.ai or whenever you get your books, or request it at your local library.

Emily M. Bender: But wait, there's more. Rate and review us on your podcast app, subscribe to the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter on Buttondown for more anti hype analysis, or donate to DAIR at dair-institute.org. That's dair-institute.org. You can find video versions of our podcast episodes on Peertube, and you can watch and comment on the show while it's happening live on our Twitch stream. That's twitch.tv/dair_institute. Again, that's dair_institute. I'm Emily M. Bender. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna. Stay out of AI Hell, y'all.

Alex Hanna: You have my explicit consent to remix that and put that in your next club track.