The author is a scientist and blogger. The book takes a look at Artificial Intelligence (AI), how it works, and some of the humourous outcomes (the title is a unique AI pick-up line).

This was quite enjoyable. There is plenty of humour (from pick up lines to cat names to recipes to ice cream flavours). Also some very cute illustrations of AI (AI itself is illustrated as a box with eyes and stick arms). And of course, interesting information on how it works. A couple of things I will remember: it works better if the focus is quite narrow; it also has very little in the way of memory. Now, I should add that the book was published 5 years ago, so pre Chat-GPT and other more current versions of AI that have come out for widespread use, so I don’t know how much improvement there has been since the author wrote the book. ( )

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.

While I appreciated Shane's humor and adorable little AI illustrations throughout, this also contained plenty of useful information written in a way that was relatively easy for someone without much of a technical background to understand. I'd have liked to see slightly more technical information than Shane provided (for example, I feel like I got a good general understanding of how AI training works, but I still can't picture what actually doing it looks like), but overall Shane's explanations were really clear and made good use of examples. One real-world example that stuck with me that illustrated AI's reliance on its training data and difficulties when asked to do a broader task than it was trained for (because AI does better with narrower tasks) was a self-driving car that had only been trained for highway driving. Its human driver had it take over while it was still in the city and it ended up hitting the side of a semi - it had only ever been trained to recognize semis from the back, so when it saw one from the side it interpreted it as best it could, decided it was an overhead sign, and didn't slow down for it.

I've already recommended this book to several of my fellow librarians as an accessible way to learn about AI and maybe get some ideas for how to talk about it to faculty and students.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

I cannot recommend "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You" highly enough. If you've ever had the slightest interest in AI, this is your cup of tea ;-) Very informative, very accessible, easy to read, and very very very funny. It is also a great book for those who are sure that AI will take their jobs/take over the world tomorrow. (The answer is: not really.) I also feel like reading more about AI now... ( )

I loved this so much. I know that's what all my reviews say but this one is *chef kiss* ( )

I've enjoyed the author's blog, AI Weirdness, for quite some time, so I was looking forward to reading this. I was not disappointed - not only is this one of the clearest explanations of how artificial intelligence works I've ever come across, it's also often laugh-out-loud funny. I flew through it in record time, enjoying every moment. If you are at all curious about AI and enjoy bizarre non-sequiturs, you will enjoy this. Highly recommended. ( )