In AI and Language in the Urban Context, I make the case that cities are substantially linguistic entities, their social, cultural, and material dimensions shaped and sustained through conversations. As large language models (LLMs) exert increasing influence within public life, they not only automate services but contribute to these urban conversations. The AI Index Report 2025 that…More
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AI briefs an architect
Inspired by the game design scenario of my last post (Share your expertise) I asked NotebookLM how the ideas outlined in the collection of sources (e.g. my own published writing) could inform the creation of a physical architectural work. Here’s what it said: Informing Architectural Design The sources provide a wealth of concepts and frameworks…More
AI fever dreams
Reinstating Panpsychism: Cities and the Machinery of Mind in the Age of AI City: A sprawling, feverish organ of matter and thought, a monstrous convergence where steel skeletons fuse with the blood and minds of the masses. It pulses with an energy both alien and intimate, a grand machinic beast, dreaming its electric dreams. To…More
Chain of thought
A report by OpenAI on its recent release of ChatGPT o1 asserts: “Similar to how a human may think for a long time before responding to a difficult question, o1 uses a chain of thought when attempting to solve a problem. Through reinforcement learning, o1 learns to hone its chain of thought and refine the…More
A Dubliner’s guide to AI
I asked ChatGPT to revise some of my AI glossary entries in the style of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It took a bit of prompting for this highly creative output, though the AI had trouble being ungrammatical. GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer): Original: GPT is a type of AI model designed to process and generate human-like text. It…More
AI through the looking glass
I invited ChatGPT again to configure elements of my glossary. See previous post A critical AI dictionary. This time I prompted the AI to reword some of the definitions in the manner of Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass. Dall-e: A generative graphics product accessed via ChatGPT and other LLMs. DALL·E uses a transformer model…More
A critical AI dictionary
I am compiling a sensible glossary of AI terminology. I gave each to ChatGPT with the prompt: Please rewrite these glossary items in the style of Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary. I follow my own wording with ChatGPT’s response. Agent: An autonomous entity capable of taking data from its environment and performing actions to achieve specific…More
Must AI speak?
AI is subject to critique from many quarters. See posts Generalised AI as existential threat, and Learn to talk to your AI. We don’t need to draw on philosopher Jacques Derrida to articulate the limits and challenges of AI, but here I want to identify a Derridean-style argument that impinges on my thinking about AI-based…More
AI scripts a debate about urban glare
I’m testing the ability of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, to conduct AI to AI conversations that in some way parallel how two people might work through a problem together. I’ve discovered that it’s not necessary to contrive a condition where two AIs talk to each other as in my previous post, or where…More
Semantic geocoding
In the previous post I examined the what3words proprietary geolocation/geocoding tool. With that system the 3 words are pre-assigned randomly from a lexicon of acceptable words. There are good reasons for detaching the 3 words from the content of the grid squares. If the 3 words referred to the content of the squares then map…More