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Janelle Shane

Artificial Intelligence Speaker, Humorist

Janelle Shane’s AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at the strange side of artificial intelligence. She has been featured on the main TED stage, in the New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Popular Science, All Things Considered, Science Friday, and Marketplace, as well as being Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian.. Her book, “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works, Thinks, and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place” uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the minds of the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining. Shane was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, and an Adweek Young Influential.

  • Janelle Shane Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

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  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Colorado, USA

  • Janelle Shane Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    Please Inquire

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Colorado, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

What AI Can Do - and Can't

AI is making headlines and disrupting entire industries. But what IS artificial intelligence, and what is it good at? At her AI humor blog, AiWeirdness.com, Shane watches machine learning algorithms struggle to deal with the complexities of the ...

AI is making headlines and disrupting entire industries. But what IS artificial intelligence, and what is it good at? At her AI humor blog, AiWeirdness.com, Shane watches machine learning algorithms struggle to deal with the complexities of the human world. From AIs that struggle to invent plausible paint colors, to AIs that struggle to recognize which pictures don’t actually contain giraffes or sheep, the funny failures of AI tell us a lot about their real-world shortcomings as well. Shane talks about the kinds of problems where AI will succeed, fail, or succeed at solving the wrong problem entirely.

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Lessons Learned from Machine Learning Gone Wrong

Through Shane’s weird and hilarious anecdotes, learn about things that give machine learning algorithms trouble (recognizing sheep, counting giraffes, telling jokes) – and the implications these have on deploying machine learning ...

Through Shane’s weird and hilarious anecdotes, learn about things that give machine learning algorithms trouble (recognizing sheep, counting giraffes, telling jokes) – and the implications these have on deploying machine learning algorithms in the real world.

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The Case of the Belligerent Search Engine

Text-generating programs like ChatGPT, Bing chat, Bard, and GPT-4 can generate paragraphs of coherent-seeming text on just about any topic. But why do they sometimes argue with the user, or insist on made-up facts? And what does that mean for applications that use them? ...

Text-generating programs like ChatGPT, Bing chat, Bard, and GPT-4 can generate paragraphs of coherent-seeming text on just about any topic. But why do they sometimes argue with the user, or insist on made-up facts? And what does that mean for applications that use them? Through hilarious examples, Janelle Shane shows how the internet training of large language models (LLMs) comes through in unexpected ways.

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About Keynote Speaker Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane’s AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at the strange side of artificial intelligence. She has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Popular Science, All Things Considered, and Slate. In 2019 she was named one of Fast Company’s 100 most creative people in business. Her soon-to-be-released TED talk is a funny and insightful look at the nature of machine learning algorithms. Her upcoming book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the minds of the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning accessible and entertaining.

She received her BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University, her MPhil in Physics from the University of St. Andrews, and her PhD from the University of California San Diego.

Testimonials

Janelle was brilliant! She had the audience cracking up with her quirky humour and fresh examples as she cut through the AI hype to deliver her clear-eyed perspective. Our audience had technical backgrounds that varied enormously, and she delivered a talk that worked for them all.

Jeremy Moon

Curator, Better By Design CEO Summit 2019

In a time when everyone else is talking in circles about the inevitable takeover of man by machine, Janelle Shane comes to the rescue.  She’s a delightfully funny and quick witted speaker who has her hand on the pulse of what advances in technology really look like.  I promise you’ll feel better about your own humanity and where all of this tech is taking us after hearing Janelle speak.  She’ll have your audience laughing, thinking and questioning all at the same time – what more could you ask for? 

Briar Goldberg

Director of Speaker Coaching at TED

As the chair of several large tech conferences, I work with hundreds of speakers a year. Janelle’s professionalism, sense of humor, and almost magical ability to turn the esoteric arcana of technology into fascinating stories the audience can’t stop talking about is unmatched.

Alistair Croll

Chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletech, and author of Lean Analytics.

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