Book Review: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

A week is a long time in politics and a couple of years is an aeon in AI. Published in 2019, just before the dawn of the LLM, this is an overview of all the weird and charming ways Artificial Intelligence can go wrong. It is fully of delightfully silly examples and rather charming illustrations. Lots of the examples are drawn from the always-entertaining AI Weirdness blog.

But it does suffer from being somewhat dated and having an over-reliance on lists. The constant "I trained an AI on topic X and here's a list of daft things it said" wears rather thin and feels like padding. There are a few glitches in the eBook formatting which are a little distracting, and the illustrations don't have alt text. There are a few screenshots of the things which are being described - but not quite enough to make it obvious what's occuring.

The fundamentals of the book remain sound. Garbage in; garbage out. And without a strong guiding hand, AI often goes off on a tangent. It is a solid grounding in the principles of AI without getting bogged down in the actual coding of it.

The money quote is:

That’s the other thing about AI. It can sometimes be a needlessly complicated substitute for a commonsense understanding of the problem.

The book does deliver on its promise; AI is weird and this does go some way to explaining why. I'm looking forward to an updated version in a few years.