Review:
This came out in 2019, after OpenAI released GPT-2 but well before ChatGPT's release. While I'd love to read an updated work by Shane (no amount of checking has made it poof into existence, alas), as far as I could tell this was still a really useful introduction to how artificial intelligence works and what its strengths and weakness are. Shane lays out what AI is and isn't, how it learns, the various ways it can run into trouble, the instances of disconnect between what humans ask AI to do and what it actually does, and more.
I first became aware of this work after stumbling on some of Shane's hilarious machine learning blog posts on Twitter (way back when Twitter was Twitter). In fact, the title of this book comes from one such post on AI-generated pickup lines. Still, it sat on my TBR pile for years until ChatGPT came out and became a hot enough topic in academia to be mentioned several times during a Q&A session with a library job candidate.
