I’m catching up with Yuval Harari’s latest book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. He alerts readers to the challenge posed by the spread of opaque algorithms that are increasingly responsible for deciding on our behalf: bank credit, purchase choices, health, governance. In the face of this obfuscation…More
Author Archives: Richard Coyne
The cultural, social and spatial implications of computers and pervasive digital media spark my interest ... enjoy architecture, writing, designing, philosophy, coding and media mashups.
A jolly AI adventure
I asked ChatGPT to rewrite some of my glossary entries in the style of Enid Blyton. I said, “Please provide a rewrite of the following glossary entries, but in the upbeat style of Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series featuring Jack, Philip, Dinah and Lucy-Ann, together with Jack’s intelligent and talkative parrot Kiki.” Always ready for a…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 in the apocalypse
Reza Negarestani wrote Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. See my post The twist of the pen. The ChatGPT training corpus seems to have picked up his interesting, apocalyptic writing style . Here are some “straight” AI glossary terms I am compiling, each followed by ChatGPT’s attempt to reconstruct them in the style of Cyclonopedia. Feed…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
Curate your AI
Working against time constraints an author draws on productivity tools to speed the writing process. Back in the day, desktop word processing changed the game for most of us. I wrote my PhD and first book with MacWrite on a Mac Classic. Before that I probably used something like a Brother desktop computer, and before…More
Choose your critic
My last post looked at the potential of a large language model such as ChatGPT to operate as a critic. Developing further on that theme, it occurred to me that such a review may not always be in step with the author’s target readership. So, I presented ChatGPT with a 4,000 word book chapter titled…More
AI as critic
I listened recently to a radio program in which a collection of prominent entrepreneurs discussed some of the key examples this year of overhyped marketing. As an aside, one of the participants mentioned the disturbing error rate in ChatGPT’s responses to questions of fact, e.g. name ten distinguished alumni of the Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge? It’s…More
Meaning and attention
Understanding and misunderstandings in conversation often stem from emphasis. People tailor their responses based on where their conversational partners place emphasis. Attention distributions play a crucial role in inflecting responses in dialogue. Emphasis influences what comes next in a conversation, shaping the interaction between speaker and listener. Text-only conversational exchanges rely on context without additional cues. Attention, as demonstrated by LLMs, significantly affects the platform’s text generation capabilities and conversation continuation.More