LLMs and journalism

Cartoon of a robot with a pensive expression

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 …

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ChatGPT

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 …

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Emitting references

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 …

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Chat-GPT

Like every other nerd, I spent way too much time earlier last week playing with and worrying about Chat-GPT, but you can relax, I've stumped it:

Screenshot of Chat-GPT conversation

Screenshot of Chat-GPT conversation

I never thought that my addiction to lipograms would lead to any useful conclusions, but these exchanges seem to capture exactly what Chat-GPT is …

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DALL-E and you

An AI-generated cartoon of a sinister robed figure driving a yellow American school bus. A black shape resembling a crow is perched on top of the bus, entwined with the letters "HESSSS". The bus has the word "HEBSUSS" written along its side in black letters.

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 …

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DALL-E v GLOSSATORY

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 …

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DALL-E

"Graffiti art of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard"

AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard
AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard
AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard
AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard
AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard
AI generated drawing of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard

Happy Friday.

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tl;dr 2

Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity. That's what editors are for …

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tl;dr

Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thinking about what …

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Language games

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 …

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