ChatGPT now supports image upload, which means that I can chat about pictures, a step change in its application to architecture and design. Here’s my first such conversation, with chatGPT responses shown as quotes. The platform has information about my interests in urbanism and AI via the Custom Instructions settings. So responses reference my interests.…More
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Attention is everything
Attention is a key element in cognition. At our most thoughtful we direct attention to features in our environment that are most important to us at that moment. Attention can wander, of course, we daydream, and we can pay attention to inexistent things, memories and objects of the imagination. A lecturer will come to the…More
Chatting with an AI about urban inexistence
“Intentional inexistence” is a philosophical term adopted by the nineteenth century philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) to indicate the commonplace human capacity to imagine things. We may suppose that inexistence refers to things that don’t exist (nonexistent things) or that are under demolition, but that presumes too much — or too little. As explained by Linda…More
Cryptographic index
To introduce cryptography as a theme in my Media and Culture class I provided each student with a customised string of code containing the name of an AI-themed film. The key to decode the secret message was the student’s unique 7 digit university identification number. If the encrypted string is uaroulojz and the student key…More
Wittgenstein’s secret place
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wrote diary entries in code. I’ve been reading Dinda Gorleé’s book Wittgenstein’s Secret Diaries: Semiotic Writing in Cryptography. There are several touch points with architecture and place. Wittgenstein had trained as a mechanical engineer, and undertook a serious foray into architecture when he designed his sister’s house, which followed the…More
How to make a case out of a post
“A case presents an experience or situation that makes at least one point or teaches one lesson,” said Janet Kolodner in a book on automated case-based reasoning during the ascendancy of artificial intelligence in 1993 (554). Cases abound online in news reports and blogs ready to be mined by big data analytic algorithms. In the mean time here’s…More