After all the dreaming, our technologies can still take unexpected turns, amazing and alarming us. As we agonize through another year about whether, as the Christmas carol says, "the wrong shall fail, the right prevail," I've traditionally started each new year with what I've called "a massive MapReduce on the year gone by" -- a lively lightning round of overlooked moments, in a final closing ceremony for the year gone by. But in asking what was truly significant about 2022, are we also highlighting events that foreshadow things to come? Besides technology playing a role in the world's geopolitical conflicts, there was also one unmistakable trend in 2022 that was both haunting and hilarious. It was the advances in both the performance and the accessibility of AI technology.

AI is slowly getting more creative, and as it does it's raising questions about the nature of creativity itself, who owns works of art made by computers, and whether conscious machines will make art humans can understand. In the spooky spirit of Halloween, one engineer used an AI to produce a very specific, seasonal kind of "art": a haunted house. It's not a brick-and-mortar house you can walk through, unfortunately; like so many things these days, it's virtual, and was created by research scientist and writer Janelle Shane. Shane runs a machine learning humor blog called AI Weirdness where she writes about the "sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong." For the virtual haunted house, Shane used CLIP, a neural network built by OpenAI, and VQGAN, a neural network architecture that combines convolutional neural networks (which are typically used for images) with transformers (which are typically used for language).

With April 1 almost here, a computer researcher wanted to see if an AI could generate some knee-slapping April Fools' Day pranks. Social distancing is still in effect so Janelle Shane tasked the popular language modeling software GPT-3 to come up with gags people could play on themselves. One version of the neural net suggested sawing your mattress in half or standing in line for a movie for 30 minutes and then just walking away. Another suggested '[creating] a secret language that only you and your cat can understand.' 'Take a bunch of jellybeans,' it offered as an alternative, 'put them in a Ziplock bag and tie the bag around your neck.'

A powerful AI algorithm has some, well, unusual predictions for what lies in store down the road. It's a been a weird year, what with monoliths, terrifying animals, and of course a global pandemic dominating the news cycle. Inspired by all that chaos, research scientist and author Janelle Shane asked GPT-3, a powerful text-generating algorithm, to guess the future. With killer orchids, monster toads, and deadly puffballs, the algorithm seems to have missed the mark. But then again, who could have predicted half of the nonsense we've endured lately?

AI Outside In is a column by PAIR's writer-in-residence, David Weinberger, who offers his outsider perspective on key ideas in machine learning. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Google. Suppose you want a machine learning system to suggest paint names based on any color you specify. This has been done hilariously by Janelle Shane -- "burf pink," "navel tan" -- but let's say we want to do it more seriously (and without any reference to how Shane actually did it). Machine learning, at least of the common sort called "supervised learning", learns from the data you give it, so you first want to gather a large set of colors to which humans have applied various labels.

A photo of the cover of Janelle Shane's book on AI: You Look Like A Thing And I Love You. There are five principles of AI weirdness, according to author and researcher Janelle Shane. One of them is: "The danger of AI is not that it's too smart but it's not smart enough." But another is: "AI does not really understand the problem you want it to solve." The world feels like absolute chaos right now. And often, AI feels like part of the problem.

If, like many people these days, you're trying to get a firmer understanding of what AI is and how it works but are secretly panicking a little because you're struggling with terminology so opaque that you're lost before you get to Markov chains, you may want to crack open Janelle Shane's new book. She recently sat down with VentureBeat to talk about the book, whose title, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, is actually an AI-generated pickup line. Shane maintains the AI Weirdness blog and combines knowledge from her Ph.D. in electrical engineering, fascination with AI, and propensity for slightly deadpan absurdist humor to explain AI in a way that is both hilarious and easy to understand. More importantly, she uses humor as a frame to display how AI is actually dangerously bad at most things we wish it could do. Her take is a refreshing counter to the often overly fantastical notions about AI, its looming sentience, and its capacity for either utopia or dystopia. Although the book walks the reader through what AI is and explains how AI "thinks" and how we should think about how AI thinks, it's full of giggle-inducing hand-drawn illustrations and endless comical examples.

It's the holiday season, and there's no better way to get in the spirit than with a nice slice of artificial intelligence (AI). As CNET reported, one AI researcher, Janelle Shane, decided to feed her neural network with a combination of pie recipes and Harry Potter fan fiction. The results of the experiment might not be from our Rosmerta's Recipes section, but some of them don't sound too bad. Shane explained on her blog that she can mess with the network and make it more chaotic. I have ways of messing with the neural net, however.

One of the most anticipated books of the fall! - Adam Grant, Ars Technica, Philadelphia Inquirer, Next Big Idea Club, BookPage "If you're terrified that artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, you clearly haven't asked a computer to write pick-up lines, name pets, or do anything else social or creative. Janelle Shane has, and she's the perfect tour guide to explain what machine learning can and can't do--and why it's already affecting your life. I can't think of a better way to learn about artificial intelligence, and I've never had so much fun along the way."―Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals "While everyone else is making questionable predictions about the future of AI, Janelle Shane cuts through the fog by telling you how AI actually works. And even better: she makes it fun!"―Zach Weinersmith, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and New York Times bestselling author of Soonish "An incredibly accessible, informative, and hilarious look at how the AIs deciding things around us operate."―Ryan

Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized Talk recommendations and more. The danger of artificial intelligence isn't that it's going to rebel against us, but that it's going to do exactly what we ask it to do, says AI researcher Janelle Shane. Sharing the weird, sometimes alarming antics of AI algorithms as they try to solve human problems -- like creating new ice cream flavors or recognizing cars on the road -- Shane shows why AI doesn't yet measure up to real brains. The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.