Pumpkin Spice AI & AI College Classes

This week I was alone behind the mic with dog Cooper snoring at my feet. 

I read the piece I posted on Substack about how pumpkin spice and AI are not good in everything.

Then I lighten it up further with some AI college classes being offered across the nation, and finish with a short list of sexified class names that upped enrollment because, well, humans.

Denver University's AI Course Offerings

College Confidential chat about sexier class titles

Fantastic College April Fools' Jokes

How to Spot FAKE AI Courses Online, Digital Journal

Great Pro-Human AI Organizations...

80,000 Hours

Center for Humane Technologies

If you are searching for a fresh, binge-able podcast, this might be the one for you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Fucking clankers. Fucking clankers.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hey, this week I'm joined by my dog Cooper, who's panting on the floor behind me. So if you hear heavy breathing, it isn't a rabid fan. It's my dog. Uh we went outside and played in the sunshine for a little bit before I hit record. We didn't do, Jesse and I did not do a proper doom hole this week. So I thought I'd hit you with a couple things that you might not have caught. One of them was the silly pumpkin spice AI essay that I wrote on and I posted it on Substack. And the second thing is like a I was teasing Jesse, but he was like distracted during the live stream because he was trying to get our friend Sam to join. Basically, it's the actual college courses that are being taught right now in AI. So enough of the goofing around and enough of the heavy breathing for my dog. Here it goes. Pumpkin spice AI. This isn't something I'd post in late September, the official start of sweater weather in the hashtag PSL season or after the AI bubble has popped. It's not my intention to toss an emotional Molotov cocktail into the collective like that, believe it or not. So before you listen further, take a deep breath and exhale with me. Alright, here it goes. Pumpkin spice flavor does not make everything better. And neither does AI. What started out as a sort of gusto homage to possibly the most perfect food creation in American history, the pumpkin pie, of course, has been adulterated into a culinary Frankenstein these last few years. Foods adjacent to pumpkin pie, like pumpkin bread and pumpkin scones, they capture the same warm creamy essence of the original. Then someone came along and thought, hey, why not make a syrup flavor that tastes like pumpkin pie? And soon pumpkin spice lattes took socials by storm and hashtag PSL was born. Insta models donned riding boots, tan chaps, and LL bean overcoats, stood in piles of candy corn-colored leaves with fancy coffees in hand. Someone, maybe a patient friend or hopeful romantic, took photo after photo, which would be posted for thousands of likes, after a myriad of filters were added, of course. Manufacturers saw dollar signs and scrambled to add fake pumpkin to their products. Then they were stuffed into orange boxes, tubs, and canisters and shipped across the United States. Grocers filled shelves that had been depleted by back to school mania with the pumpkin crap that became a harbinger of spooky season. Crammed in end caps and mid-aisle round thingies, shoppers faced an oleo of orange, pumpkin spice Pop-Tarts, pumpkin spice cream cheese, pumpkin spice popcorn, pumpkin spice margarine, pumpkin laced Cheerios, and yogurts and Twinkies and cereals. Cereals besides Cheerios joined the party. Food bloggers saw potential in this craze too. They bought one of each and penciled articles about the products, making catchy lists of bests and worsts. Some writers even admitted to puking after trying a bite of this or taking a whiff of that. 365 days later, approximately, manufacturers, or should I say their corporate marketing teams lost their ever-loving minds. The following September, shoppers faced shelves of products thought up and packaged for social media posts. And by October, pumpkin spice Kool-Aid, pumpkin spice hummus, pumpkin spice extra chewing gum, organic pumpkin spice kale chips and pumpkin pie pringles, littered clearance shelves across the nations. Consumers had voted with their dollars saying, uh, yeah, hell no. AI is like that. It's in my toothbrush and my dishwasher. It runs the staff bridge and self-driving cars around me. It has infected college essays, published books, newspaper articles, movie studios, music apps, current event headlines, veterinary clinics, and bylines. It's been forced into the workflows of engineers, doctors, and lawyers and accountants and information specialists by upper management. AI data centers, they're swallowing up more land than the San Andreas Fault and Bill Gates combined. AI chatbots are posing as therapists and pharmacists and friends and lovers and substitutes for our dead loved ones. And the AI models, they were raised on reams and reams of copyrighted material. And when those sources dried up, programmers fed the models Reddit threads and tweets and really terrible, not safe for work content. It calls to mind those parents in Heyomayazaku's movie spirited away. But at least those folks turned into big fat hogs. No such luck with AI models. Pumpkin spice tastes best in pie and bread and maybe even an occasional latte. AI's primary language is numbers. It's code, math, and pattern recognition. AI is good at search. But in the words of a recent guest on my podcast, how much better does my internet search need to be? I mean, I'm good, really. I am good. On a recent phone call with my daughter, we talked about AI and had the realization that we wish it would mirror our experience as human beings. If you think of it in a spiritual sense, we humans are ensoled individuals that are part of a whole. At present, AI is not good at humaning. Before AI culture eats every acre of land, every drop of drinking water and human job. How about we set up guardrails, boundaries, parameters? And maybe that begins with acknowledging where AI works best and the places it does more harm than good. There's value to being individuals. Our unreplicated experiences inform the whole of the universe. Now imagine AI working as individuals for industries, companies, apps, and the like. And the models that run them aren't stretched to do everything kind of so-so, but position them to do a specific set of tasks really well. Create NSD box models for specific industries or companies that run under the watchful eyes of information specialists and engineers who update data sets and tweak the metaphorical algorithm levers. That's how AI has the potential to be highly effective, efficient, and maybe even innovative. Collectively, this might be a path that leads to the future world we dream about. Maybe a planet with clean air and water, maybe no more hunger or war, a place of art and music and medical advancements and peace. If that sounds too grandiose for your taste, how about we start with honesty and acknowledge where this global social experiment has been an abject failure? Right now, AI is screaming for us to be the grown-ups, the discerning consumers, responsible citizens of the planet that say enough is enough. Here's where you're allowed to be used, and here's where you cannot go. If you're not okay with this non-consensual rollout of AI, or if you just have questions and want to learn more, here are some pro-human organizations on the front lines doing just that. Give them some love, would you? And you'll find those in the show notes. But for the time being, the two favorites I have are 8,000 hours and Center for Humane Technologies. Also, please give some love to Karen Howe, who is an amazing journalist on the forefront of this subject. And maybe even dip into futurism. So, as promised, I wanted to share with you some actual AI courses. A few that I made up, and I'll let you know about the ones I made up, but I feel like maybe I'm putting them into the zeitgeist, and they're gonna become realities soon enough. Here's the first Psychedelia in the age of artificial intelligence. This is offered by the University of Denver, a course exploring the intersection of altered states of consciousness and machine intelligence within arts and humanities. The next course comes to us from the University of Virginia, Reading and Writing with LLMs, a humanities-based AI literacy course exploring how students read and write with large language models. Okay, that feels like a contradiction to me, but whatever. The next one is I just made it up, but I feel like it's gonna happen soon enough. So I'm just putting it out there into the zeitgeist that I created this. Vibe coding your way out of a mental health crisis. And also, spoiler alert, don't do that. This is a very true, real, authentic uh class that you can take at Carnegie Mellon. It's the seven-week Agentic AI course because we all need to know how to use those little bots, don't we? And then English 3707 from Denver University, which the next three are, so just go ahead and uh rinse and repeat. I'll just be sure to tell you which department the courses are from. This one's English 3707, as I said, post-humanism, Androids, cyborgs, AI, and the future of humanity. I feel like that was like created by somebody, a professor that was like, I'm not getting a lot of students into my classes. So maybe this will get people to enrol. The second one from the same university is marketing for uh 4220 or 4220. It's customer experience management. And the third one from Denver is uh computer science 3525, human-centered AI mind reading machines. Okay, that's kind of creepy. But maybe those kids will get to do some experiments and see if it helps them with, say, I don't know, stock market bets. I'm not saying, but interesting. This, I'm not, oh, I think this one even so it was four in a row that came from the Denver U. Uh R L G N. So religion 4645, artificial intelligence, and what it means to be a human. Yeah. You know what? Sometimes you have to look at the darkness to see the light. One defines the other, and maybe that's why AI will help us to better define what we are as human beings. This one I made up, but I swear to goodness, it's gonna show up at like Washington State University or something. Dogs bite and cats scratch using AI and veterinary medicine. I went on college confidential to find uh some courses there as well. And what I did find instead of AI courses were subjects that they gave sexy titles to to up the enrollment. And here are a couple I found and the way people describe them. My writing class is about blasphemy and religion, God, sex, and the human body, something like that. And that's why I signed up for it. Another poster said this: My son chose the class how to stage a revolution. Anything with war and riot will keep his interest. Okay. A class on religious dissension and witchcraft in the Atlantic world was called History 311, Witchcraft, Demons, and Divination. I had visions of Hogwarts and Harry Potter in my head. Obviously, I was thwarted in that respect, but it still was my favorite class in college. Boston College, German studies professor Michael Ressler, searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his German lit of the high middle ages class a few years ago, settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting Knights, Castles, and Dragons nearly tripled enrollment. Oh my god, humans, humaning. A popular class at Oswego when I was there, writes one poster in the early 90s, was History of Organized Crime. I still wish I had taken that class. Then there's jailbreaking AI as an assignment. Some university computer science and philosophy electives require students to intentionally trick chatbots into giving hilarious, weird, or completely off-topic answers to demonstrate the limitations of safety protocols. And then finally, there's this gem from Lando Calriz on YouTube. And I feel like that's a fake name, don't you? Okay, but whatever. I've got links to it in the show notes. Prompt disasters. College courses now feature comedic case studies of students copying essays straight from Chat GPT, failing to strip out meta commands, like, and he gives this example make this more formal so my dumb teacher won't know. So that's the state of things this week. Next week we might have a proper doom hole, or we are playing with a whole new um, I don't know, I don't want to call it a mini-series, but a a teeny little snippet to add to your week. Until then, and until Friday when our new episode drops. Stay curious. I love you.

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Fucking clankers. Fucking clankers.

unknown 15:34

Fucking clankers.