Measuring your talk time? Counting your filler words? What about "analyzing" your "emotions"? Companies that push LLM technology to surveil and summarize video meetings are increasingly offering to (purportedly) analyze your participation and assign your speech some metrics, all in the name of "productivity". Sociolinguist Nicole Holliday joins Alex and Emily to take apart claims about these "AI" meeting feedback tools, and reveal them to be just sparkling bossware, with little insight into how we talk.

Nicole Holliday is Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley.

Quick note: Our guest for this episode had some sound equipment issues, which unfortunately affected her audio quality.

Main course:

Read AI Review: This AI Reads Emotions During Video Calls

• Marketing video for Read AI

Zoom rebrands existing and introduces new generative AI features

• Marketing video for Zoom Revenue Accelerator

Speech analysis startup releases AI tool that simulates difficult job interview conversation

Fresh AI Hell:

Amazon Echo will send all recordings to Amazon beginning March 28

Trump’s NIST no longer concerned with “safety” or “fairness”

Reporter Kevin Roose is feeling the bullshit

UW’s eScience institute pushing “AI” for information access

OpenAI whines about data being too expensive, with a side of Sinophobia

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

Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.

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Emily

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• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

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

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

Emily and Alex read a terrible book so you don't have to! Come for a quick overview of LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman's opus of magical thinking, 'Superagency: What could possibly go right with our AI future' -- stay for the ridicule as praxis. Plus, why even this tortuous read offers a bit of comfort about the desperate state of the AI boosters.

References:

The cursèd book itself

AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark

Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre

Fresh AI Hell:

Parents rationalizing exposing kids to AI

Underage, sexualized celebrity bots

Bossware a bad look, actually

CalState faculty union opposes AI initiative

The kids are alright

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

Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

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 Christie Taylor.

In the weeks since January 20, the US information ecosystem has been unraveling fast. (We're looking at you Denali, Gulf of Mexico, and every holiday celebrating people of color and queer people that used to be on Google Calendar.) As the country's unelected South African tech billionaire continues to run previously secure government data through highly questionable LLMs, academic librarian Raina Bloom joins Emily and Alex for a talk about how we organize knowledge, and what happens when generative AI degrades or poison the systems that keep us all accurately -- and contextually -- informed.

​​Raina Bloom is the Reference Services Coordinator for University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.

References:

OpenAI tries to 'uncensor' ChatGPT

Elon Musk's DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts

Guardian Media Group announces strategic partnership with OpenAI

Elon Musk's AI-fuelled war on human agency

• Archive version

(Post now deleted) A DOGE intern asks Reddit for help with file conversion

When is it safe to use ChatGPT in higher education? Raina recommends the table on page 6 of UNESCO's QuickStart guide.

Fresh AI Hell:

Irish educational body, while acknowledging genAI's problems, still gives LLMs too much credit

From haircuts to dress design, AI slop is creating unrealistic expectations that hurt small businesses

Attorneys still falling for "AI" search

The latest in uncanny valley body horror robotics

Google claims to have developed AI "co-scientist"

Is AI 'reasoning' or 'pretending'? It's a false ch

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

Our book, 'The AI Con,' comes out in May! Pre-order now.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

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 Christie Taylor.