My first blog post appeared in 2010 and followed the publication of my book The Tuning of Place. I titled the post “Tuning as …” The Christmas eve that followed I produced a post “Silent Night.” Here is an excerpt from Silent Night in audio format. It runs for 2 minutes: That’s not me speaking,…More
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
The purloined voice
I’ve been busy pruning an overgrown laurel hedge. Apparently, the previous owner cultivated the entire leafy barrier from a single twig he had surreptitiously snipped from a hedge in a garden centre. His careful propagation from that twig—growing, dividing, and replanting—constitutes cloning. A quick AI-assisted search reveals that the verb “to clone” derives from the…More
Predicting AI “misconduct”
A recent headline in the Higher Education section of The Guardian said “Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI.” I could see that coming! It is as if some headlines (taglines, tweets and chyrons) are ready and waiting for a report, evidence base, study or authorised opinion to make them real. To help…More
Mnemonic infidelity
Training a large language model (LLM) starts with dividing a very large corpus of texts into basic units, i.e., recurring tokens (such as symbols and parts of words), and calculating the relative positions of tokens in the texts. These relationships are processed in a neural network to create very large numerical vectors that represent patterns…More
AI shopping
You know that a technology has gone mainstream when it starts to affect the consumer side of the retail trade. I first heard the term “AI shopping” on the BBC Radio consumer programme You and Yours: “Now, a growing body of evidence shows around a third of us are using AI to find products, plan…More
Local AI
Large language models (LLMs) are called “large” as they are trained on very large volumes of text data, about 570 Gb for ChatGPT 4.0’s base model (prior to fine tuning). It sounds like a lot, but my iPhone 16 Pro has a storage capacity of about 500 Gb. Other smartphone models have twice that. So…More
Mining Reddit
Reddit is a platform that supports themed community discussion forums called subreddits. I recently joined one of the over 100,000 active subreddits. It goes by the name “r/artificialintelligence.” Reddit is very popular, with over 95 million active daily users who post, reply and comment anonymously using aliases. Typically, a user of Reddit will post a…More
AI sycophancy
Everyone loves a compliment. Courtesy, politeness and good manners entered recently into the AI discourse via two threads. First is the apparent cost of non-essential words. In discussing the costs associated with the widespread adoption of conversational AI Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, remarked lightheartedly that “please” and “thank you” typed into a prompt increase…More
AI and the devil
There are good reasons to avoid the use of Ouija boards and other paraphernalia of supposed spirit communication. Apart from their associations with fraud and deception, some people see such devices and practices as “evil.” AI skeptics draw attention to the risks of bias, error, changes to work practices, putting people out of work, and…More
Esoteric AI
Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the World-Wide Web took hold in the 1990s. Multi-channel text-based data communications transitioned to a singular access medium, the “browser,” for linked display, interaction and communication of text, graphics, sound and video content. As well as facilitating the dissemination of professional, educative, ordered and “rational” content, the world-wide web fostered an…More