Episode 35: AI Overviews and Google's AdTech Empire (feat. Safiya Noble), June 10 2024

You've already heard about the rock-prescribing, glue pizza-suggesting hazards of Google's AI overviews. But the problems with the internet's most-used search engine go way back. UCLA scholar and "Algorithms of Oppression" author Safiya Noble (safiyaunoble.com) joins Alex and Emily in a conversation about how Google has long been breaking our information ecosystem in the name of shareholders and ad sales.
References:
Blog post, May 14: Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you (blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-goog…)
Blog post, May 30: AI Overviews: About last week (blog.google/products/search/ai-overviews-updat…)
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Noble (nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppre…)
Fresh AI Hell:
AI Catholic priest demoted after saying it's OK to baptize babies with Gatorade (80.lv/articles/ai-catholic-priest-demoted-afte…)
National Archives bans use of ChatGPT (404media.co/national-archives-bans-employee-us…)
ChatGPT better than humans at "Moral Turing Test" (arstechnica.com/ai/2024/05/chatgpt-shows-bette…)
Taco Bell as an "AI first" company (x.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1794479938101280886)
AGI by 2027, in one hilarious graph (x.com/leopoldasch/status/1798068281414414350)

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park (naomipleasurepark.com).
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.