Some smartphones incorporate AI features. I recently acquired the latest iPhone that now supports “Apple Intelligence.” The operations are not yet seamless, but that development encouraged me to think about how conversational AI might inform my experience of a place. After all, location aware mobile phones track position, journeys, weather conditions, images and sounds of…More
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
Inferring a book from its index
I’m busy creating the index for my current Routledge book: AI and Language in the Urban Context: Conversational Artificial Intelligence in Cities. As yet I have had little success in deploying AI to create an index for me. ChatGPT will however create a book proposal from an index. It seems that ChatGPT called on assistance…More
Ubiquitous AI
“You know, we always wanted this vision of AI that is too cheap to meter. And having a really good free tier and all these things, it just makes AI sort of everywhere.” That’s a comment by AI engineer Sean (Swix) Wang on a recent Last Week in AI Podcast discussing how Google and other…More
AI reveals all
ME: “People seem to like me. They think I’m funny.” STUDENT: “I don’t know about that. But you look funny.” I’ll continue with the rare indulgence provided by conversational AI. It seems a writer can court AI, via NotebookLM, for personal analysis, as well as compliments, with a level of attention unmatched by scrutiny from…More
LLM plans a lesson
Google has developed a suite of AI learning tools based on their Gemini conversational LLM platform: “Grasp new topics and deepen your understanding with a conversational learning companion that adapts to your unique curiosity and learning goals.” These are explained at https://learning.google and some are available for trial. We might expect such systems to be…More
DIY professional service automation
Any of us may need non-routine specialist expertise on occasion, whether for legal contracts, disputes, claims, rental agreements, property purchases, employment conditions, pension arrangements, tax liabilities, inheritance, wills, probate, insurance options and claims, conditions of engagement, investment advice, warranties and guarantees, instruction manuals, planning guidance, building warrants, permissions, or statements about rights and regulations. A…More
Friction in the machine
I prompted Google’s NotebookLM with a request to draft a blog post on “romancing the artificial,” with content derived from my own writing uploaded to the platform, See previous post. It suggested that the sources offer a “nuanced perspective” on the topic, particularly as it relates to information technology. This phenomenon, characterized by a fascination…More
Coming to terms with AI
I uploaded a collection of my own books and a few articles to Google’s NotebookLM, which deploys RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) techniques to interrogate any corpus. I entered the books in chronological order, as I was interested in how my ideas and themes might have changed over the period of their writing (3 decades!). I prompted…More
LLMs and the web
Early web browsers (e.g. Mosaic in the 1990s and its successors) relied on centralised servers that pre-processed (“crawled”) web pages to identify key terms, words and groups of word. The servers would then add these terms to an index optimised for quick lookup, linking the terms to the URLs of the pages in which these…More
The Quid Pro Coaster
Designers, writers, and illustrators in general are skilled at drawing inspiration from just about any source. As I have shown in previous posts, LLMs seem capable of something similar, especially with source texts that are colourful, include spatial cues, characters, situations and accounts of interesting experiences. But how do they handle dull, prosaic, non-spatial texts,…More