About a month ago I had to rest up at home following a medical emergency, and I was looking for a way to distract myself which wasn't getting stuck on the harder levels of Baba Is You or reading Boswell's Life of Johnson (which was good, but sometimes too gloomy …
more ...
This post is meant to point out some of the ways in which I think mainstream journalism has been dropping the ball in its coverage of large language models. I'm not an AI expert, but I can tell when journalists are confused and out of their depth when writing about …
It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.
Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …
more ...Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …
more ...I put filters on "ChatGPT" and "LLM" on Mastodon because the constant flow of discourse, to which I was also contributing, was starting to wear me out, so I'm writing this post with a slightly guilty conscience.
Here's something about nerd culture which it has taken me longer than it …
more ...
This is the presentation I gave last week at eResearch Australasia in Brisbane. There's a page of links to the tools and references mentioned here. The slides were converted to blog form with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md converter.
PDF version | Powerpoint Version
Hermes Trismegistus driving a schoolbus
Last week I saw someone describe GitHub Copilot—the code-completion tool which has been trained on all of the public source code on GitHub—as a form of license-laundering, and the same thing occurs to me about DALL-E.
Clearly, it's been trained on an enormous …
more ...GLOSSATORY is a bot which posts spurious definitions from an RNN trained on a dictionary, and every morning I use its output as a prompt for little drawings, some of which I post at GLOSSATORY. Today I tried feeding some recent definitions to DALL-E to see what it came up …
more ...I've been reading a bunch of books this year about the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the linguistic / analytical turn it took in England under the influence of Wittgenstein and A J Ayer, most recently Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals …
more ...
