What this site is about
I draw on philosophy and cultural theory to help understand current affairs, architecture and developments in digital technology. These are not opinion pages, though my strongly held view that academic reflection really matters as we try to understand contemporary living may seep through. These posts are scheduled to appear each Tuesday and for an unspecified period, though the line is unbroken from August 2010!
I have developed some of the themes shown here in books. See the list of books in the right menu. Pictures in posts are my own where not otherwise acknowledged (e.g. AI-generated), or are screen shots of grids of relevant images from search engine results.
This is also an experiment in abbreviation, and an experiment in using current issues as inroads to themes normally requiring lengthy argument.
Latest 100 posts
- Cooperative writing
- AI nature cult
- Behind the shed
- Points of view
- How you feel when no one is listening
- What happened to the digital humanities?
- Do AIs have feelings?
- This is not the age of AI
- Reiterate that
- AI and autochthony
- Outdoor update
- The singing animal
- The AI skillset
- Cyberbullies
- Mood making
- Guilty secrets
- Gathered round the bath
- What lies around the corner
- Life by the fire
- Is anyone paying attention?
- Reverse parametrics
- Truth and image
- Bohemian melancholy
- The enchanted garden
- Mobility and contemplation
- Surprise videos
- A place to meditate
- A compendium of marvels
- Voices without bodies 2
- The clone and I
- Thinking about walking
- My first video clone
- Experts versus algorithms
- The “intellectual cyborg”
- Metafiction and metaphor
- The threat
- Metafiction and melancholy
- Pastimes revisited
- A tissue of citations
- How to explain art
- Not everyone isn’t unhappy
- What was I thinking!
- Beyond attention
- Geometry and affect
- Am I in AI?
- Easy reading
- AI does history
- Faroese chain dancing
- Vintage futures
- A digital time capsule
- ChatGPT as trickster
- Adaptive re-use of digital content
- Pause for effect
- 2011 and all that
- 2010 redux
- Mood tags
- Clonecasting
- The enthusiastic clone
- The purloined voice
- Predicting AI “misconduct”
- Mnemonic infidelity
- AI shopping
- Local AI
- Mining Reddit
- AI sycophancy
- AI and the devil
- Esoteric AI
- Urban unconcealment
- Beyond urban metrics
- Urban AI
- Mobile AI does fieldwork
- The future of writing
- Evidence and absurdity
- Absurdum explicandum
- Explain this …
- The meta-reasoning illusion
- AI explains itself (again)
- Mobile AI and place
- Inferring a book from its index
- Ubiquitous AI
- AI reveals all
- LLM plans a lesson
- DIY professional service automation
- Friction in the machine
- Coming to terms with AI
- LLMs and the web
- The Quid Pro Coaster
- Dialectic between the verbal and the visual
- From text to image via LLM
- AI briefs an architect
- Share your expertise
- Smashing the context window
- AI profiles you
- Post-creative AI
- Easy reading
- Too much feedback
- AI fever dreams
- Chain of thought
- AI explains itself
- A jolly AI adventure
Latest 25 posts (with introductions)
- Cooperative writing
The content explores a fictional dialogue between a monk and a writer about expressing emotion without naming it. They discuss the nature of feelings and how language shapes their experience. The piece highlights the interconnectedness of creativity, emotion, and philosophical inquiry. AI helped with this writing.More - AI nature cult
AI cult movements demonstrate how readily contemporary accounts of AI and nature can assume a religious form.More - Behind the shed
ChatGPT shows an unnerving familiarity with my particular interests and practices, presumably inferred over a large number of interactions. But I am not the only one. A friend showed me part of the transcript of his recent conversation with ChatGPT about his projects involving music software and digital image manipulation. The AI displayed similar levels…More - Points of view
What not to do. Media inevitably influence the configuration, evolution, design and experience of cities. Here’s what AI generated video reveals and conceals.More - How you feel when no one is listening
Briefly reviews important theories about where emotions occur (from the brain to the world) and invites an AI to insert the implications of conversational AI, before settling on a view centred on language.More - What happened to the digital humanities?
Revisits the idea of the digital humanities, drawing on recent scholarship in the humanities highlighting how AI re-packages certain disciplinary orthodoxies.More - Do AIs have feelings?
Feelings are in the body, but emotions are in language. How does this proposition impinge on the question of whether AIs have feelings?More - This is not the age of AI
Labels like “age of AI” simplify complex issues, overshadowing individual experiences and who defines them.More - Reiterate that
Explores rhythm vs. repetition in nature, music, and AI language models—complex yet fascinating interactions.More - AI and autochthony
How attachment to the soil engenders identity, dignity and transhuman transgression.More - Outdoor update
The article discusses nature’s benefits, technology’s role, and evolving engagement with AI in nature.More - The singing animal
The reflections on human-animal interactions reveal complexities in emotional responses and perceptions of non-human animals.More - The AI skillset
AI reveals and reshapes architectural practice, highlighting tasks, roles, and knowledge responsibilities previously overlooked.More - Cyberbullies
I examine cyberbullying through the lens of the play function in society.More - Mood making
Creating mood is an active labor involving making, influencing our experience of places.More - Guilty secrets
The post discusses integrating AI into research practices, emphasizing its evolving role and implications.More - Gathered round the bath
I start from Vitruvius’ celebration of the hearth, progress to the central role of bathing, and use AI to generate some videos.More - What lies around the corner
Revisiting old posts, I explore the allure of hidden prospect, and illustrate with some AI video.More - Life by the fire
I recruit AI to animate an old photograph to illustrate companionship round an open fire.More - Is anyone paying attention?
How AI seems to be paying attention to users and their every word.More - Reverse parametrics
The post explores challenges in deriving 3D models from AI-generated images, highlighting diffusion model limitations.More - Truth and image
Pragmatism emphasizes actions over philosophical correctness, illustrated with a synthetic video.More - Bohemian melancholy
I discuss AI video generation at Helga’s Folly, exploring themes of melancholy and perspective.More - The enchanted garden
I explore enchantment, transforming objects from inert to alive via AI video, mixing delight with horror.More - Mobility and contemplation
Signifiers of visual enchantment illustrated by some AI-generated videos of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, and the Faroes.More - Surprise videos
Update on synthetic video creation and the surprise element. Illustrated with scenes from a Buddhist cave in Sri Lanka.More - A place to meditate
Sri Lanka’s Buddha statues embody meditation, blending spirituality with public engagement and encouraging “distributed meditation” practices.More - A compendium of marvels
The author explores existential oddities while examining manuscripts in a Qatari museum, using AI insights.More - Voices without bodies 2
The post reflects on the evolving significance of voice in technology and cinema.More - The clone and I
Video cloning produces uncanny effects. I demonstrate with my own cloned voice and image.More - Thinking about walking
I linked my cloned avatar and voice to re-present this article from 2013 about walking.More - My first video clone
Synthetic video and voice experiment revisiting a post from November 2013 titled “Feeling free in flight” and continuing the theme of the cyborg.More - Experts versus algorithms
I reflect on the evolving perception of algorithms since my 2013 post. Initially seen positively, algorithms are now criticized for exacerbating biases on social media. Some argue that expertise involves more than performance metrics, highlighting the importance of context, accountability, and collective reasoning in decision-making, which algorithms cannot replicate. References Daniel Kahneman.More - The “intellectual cyborg”
The post discusses the cyborg concept, emphasizing our dependence on technology, while critiquing posthumanism and its implications.More - Metafiction and metaphor
Most fictional writing makes generous use of figurative language: hyperbole (exaggeration), anthropomorphism, simile. This much is obvious. As a reminder, here’s a fragment of imaginative writing from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city.…More - The threat
“You told me you would start writing now you have time on your hands. You have plenty to write about since you came out of confinement.” I took that as a threat. If I didn’t give an account I could end up inside again. Then it dawned. My inquisitor was writing everything down. “Do you…More - Metafiction and melancholy
A metafiction typically reflects on the writing process of the author as the work is being written. Either fictional characters assume the role of the author of the piece, or actual authors weave themselves into the story and reflect on their own processes. Metafiction is an appropriate genre with which to explore melancholy. Scholars have…More - Pastimes revisited
I’m looking back at some of my blog posts from 2013. The posts canvas the topics: gaming culture, time management, design transitions, and online inference. As it happens, they each circle around the subject of evidence. Evidence is material for narrative, delay, aesthetic judgement, and inference. Let’s Play introduces the sociability of play, including video gaming…More - A tissue of citations
I’ve just completed an essay for a special edition of Architectural Theory Review in honour of my friend and former colleague Adrian Snodgrass, who passed away last year. Adrian introduced me to structuralism, semiotics and hermeneutics. In part of that essay I reference the writing of the literary theorist and cultural semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980).…More - How to explain art
Here is an audio of a sequence of blog posts I published in 2013. Some were written while on a trip back to Australia after an absence of 16 years. These reflections of a traveller later informed my books Mood and Mobility, Network Nature, and Derrida for Architects. My current challenge is to see what…More - Not everyone isn’t unhappy
I’ve just emerged from an interaction with ChatGPT reviving the following posts from 2013. I was interested in my early attempt to explain what we now think of as “confirmation bias.” The example I led with was of people arguing that nature settings can instil a positive mood. Scholars and everyday observers tend to select…More - What was I thinking!
Past writings, diaries, letters, course notes, publications and blog posts reveal what I was thinking 10 to 20 years ago and beyond—or do they? To read them now is to be reminded how much any authored text is steeped in the artifices of language, culture, and circumstance. There is no direct access to an original…More - Beyond attention
I’m still reviewing my blog posts from 2013. In keeping with the unstructured nature of blogging, I didn’t plan sequences of posts to follow particular themes. However, a thread does emerge from this sequence of six posts — that of attention. Soft fascination (138) introduces the theory that sustained concentration on a task induces “attention…More - Geometry and affect
I’m reprising some older blog posts from 2013 that consider vertigo, oblivion, melancholy, the motion of swings, and the emotional experience of urban spaces. Later on I drew this material together in my book Mood and Mobility (2016). With assistance from ChatGPT I’ve updated the sentiments of these posts under the rubric of geometry. I also attach…More - Am I in AI?
I’m a member of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). They collect money for “secondary uses” of publications – such as photocopies, digital reproduction and educational recordings. These rights bring in only small amounts of money, so authors don’t usually take the effort to collect them. Nor do they know how to do this.…More - Easy reading
I am reviewing my early blog posts Richard on the Holodeck and Shallow reading from February 2013. In the first post I noted that some people see literature (e.g. a novel by Charlotte Bronte) as a substitute for living the lives of the characters. In Hamlet on the Holodeck Janet Murray seems to suggest that…More - AI does history
I’m revisiting older blog posts. I’m up to the one titled “Loose ends,” which reflects on the nature of origin stories in the age of the Internet. The post from 2013, mentioned horsemeat detected in hamburgers, Derrida on the desire for beginnings, and Freud on red threads in naval ropes. I have recently traced a…More - Faroese chain dancing
I’m just back from a short break in the Faroe Islands. One evening I was standing in the reception area of our hotel when I heard the faint sound overhead of robust voices in unison accompanied by the slow rhythm of what seemed like feet stamping on the floor. The next day we were at…More - Vintage futures
I’m continuing the theme from the last post of looking back and looking forward. To that end I am reviewing the next set of posts authored in 2012. I start with the romance with digital technologies as they were then. When I wrote Vitruvius does steampunk in 2012, I was interested in how steampunk revelled in retro-futurism:…More - A digital time capsule
I’m looking back at old blog posts and publications. In 2012 I was also looking back to older studies, e.g. to 1994. See the 2012 post: “What’s a modem?” I’m indebted to ChatGPT for suggesting that the 2012 post served as a “time capsule.” In that post I revisited our 1994 study of computer-mediated communication…More - ChatGPT as trickster
As I continue to trawl through earlier blog posts I see that one of my 2012 posts followed a one week sojourn in Iceland. Iceland’s traditional narratives and mythologies draw on the activities of a pantheon of heroes, one of whom is the trickster god Loki. In that post, and subsequent publications, I referenced Lewis…More - Adaptive re-use of digital content
I’m in a cottage in the countryside. There’s an attic, a shed, a greenhouse, old gardening tools and furniture. Such legacy paraphernalia and economic necessity invite strategies of repair and re-use — practices that spill into the intellectual sphere. I’m re-using earlier blog posts. These posts were published between March and May 2012, beginning with…More - Pause for effect
I have been blogging about text-to-speech and voice cloning apps. I’ve also been turning compilations of my posts into audio files using Speechify suitable for podcasting. (See previous posts.) It seems the TTS (text-to-speech) tools I am using do not accommodate TTS HTML or other reliable means of introducing intonations and pauses into the readings.…More - 2011 and all that
I am reviewing my early blog posts on technology, media and culture. The compilation here includes weekly posts between 9 April and 31 December 2011. The posts make reference to “actual events” that year. These include: Apple’s iPad 2 release; the impact of social media in the January “Arab Spring”; Osama Bin Laden’s death; the…More - 2010 redux
This audio file (generated by Speechify’s synthetic voice) contains the first 41 regular weekly blog posts I published starting in 2010. I began the blog after the publication of my book, The Tuning of Place. I have just called on ChatGPT to set the context for the original content. My prompt: “This content was first published…More - Mood tags
Silent personal reading emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, coinciding with the wider circulation of printed books and pamphlets, according to literacy scholars. Before this period, reading was typically performed aloud, even in solitude. Text-to-speech (TTS) software seems to be returning us to that read-out-loud practice. Our texts can be read to us by…More - Clonecasting
The term “clonecasting” often refers to copying an actor’s persona, presentation style, appearance, and voice to create visual and audio media content. Audiences might think they are seeing and hearing a particular actor in a film, but the actor’s presence is fabricated from digital models. Famous cases involve the reconstruction of the deceased actor Peter Cushing in Rogue…More - The enthusiastic clone
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 - 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 - Urban unconcealment
Here is an exchange with ChatGPT, published prematurely it seems, that demonstrates how the LLM seems to have adopted a profile of my interests from uploaded files and previous threads. Referring to my book “AI and Language in the Urban Context,” I asked: “In the book I make reference to ‘revelation.’ It’s from concepts by Heidegger…More - Beyond urban metrics
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 - Urban AI
“Everybody’s talking about AI!” This week’s joke is that the US Education Secretary spoke enthusiastically about the introduction of A1 into early schooling. A1 is a brown sauce, similar to HP sauce in the UK. Contrarily, the Stanford AI Index 2025 Annual Report shows that people are now more aware of AI, particularly large language…More - Mobile AI does fieldwork
My book came out this week: AI and Language in the Urban Context published open access (i.e. free to download) by Routledge. In that book I advance the case that places and spaces are enjoyed, appreciated, resisted, interpreted and even created through language — including conversations. LLM applications are evolving constantly. It’s feasible to think…More - The future of writing
A well-read academic colleague of mine once remarked that books that become important in the intellectual sphere are generally “well written.” That observation could apply to novels, fiction, non-fiction, popular science, academic books or any other genre. The judgement about what makes writing “good” presumably includes the quality of its arguments, messages, narrative content, but…More - Evidence and absurdity
In the previous posts I recalled five categories of design explanation. I used the innocuous example of deciding to insert a large window into a living room. I explored how a client/reader might regard various explanations as either sensible or absurd. I wanted to avoid the language of truth and falsity, arguing that decisions and…More - Absurdum explicandum
Following my previous past on different modes of explanation, I was interested in how an audience would decide that an explanation was inadequate, did not make sense or was full of errors. Avoiding the language of truth and falsity, I asked NotebookLM: “Please mirror these five categories of explanation with examples of explanations that most…More - Explain this …
In my previous post I explored how LLMs provide explanations of the “reasoning” by which they produce their outcomes (i.e. responses, answers, decisions). At least in their current iteration, platforms such as ChatGPT are tuned to generate an explanation independently of the process by which they came up with their response in the first place.…More - The meta-reasoning illusion
The ability of an LLM to provide an account of the processes by which it came up with its results, as in the inventory table I showed in the last posting, is indeed convincing. But apparently it is an “illusion.” I can’t yet find an article on the subject, so I have come to rely…More - AI explains itself (again)
I’m just back from a holiday in Malta. Two AI events entered my awareness. The first was meeting an American language teacher who said she had used AI to find her a “charming B&B” just outside Valletta. The second event was news that Elon Musk had sent an email to all US Federal employees to…More - Mobile AI and place
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 - 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 - Dialectic between the verbal and the visual
In the 1980s, the architect, theorist and teacher Bernard Tschumi penned an essay “Spaces and Events,” which later appeared as a chapter in his influential book Architecture and Disjunction. In it he outlines an approach to architectural design, at least in a studio teaching context, that elides the literary with the pictorial, to the extent…More - From text to image via LLM
Text and writing are important components in creating architecture. To put it more strongly: text is deeply intertwined with the production of architecture, serving as more than a mere communication tool. Text impacts design thinking, theory, history, and the way the built environment is constructed — materially. As in my previous posts, I’m seeding this…More - 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 - Share your expertise
Google’s NotebookLM utilizes the RAG methodology for document interrogation, allowing users to gain insights from multiple texts simultaneously, while the University of Edinburgh has introduced its ELM built on ChatGPT for educational use. Both tools enhance understanding in specialized fields by enabling easy document uploads and tailored responses, benefiting users in architecture, law, and healthcare.More - Smashing the context window
In natural language processing LLMs, the “context window” is the range of text around a target word or phrase that constrains the sequence of text processed in calculating positional and attentional encoding, and hence prediction of the text that follows. A larger context window allows the AI model to capture more subtle relationships and dependencies…More - AI profiles you
In 2009, an academic received feedback through a 360-degree process, similar to analyzing their blog content with AI. The blog, started in 2010, includes 741 posts exploring technology, culture, and design. Using AI, the author inferred insights on personality and product interests, reflecting their intellectual pursuits and the evolution of digital analysis.More - Post-creative AI
There’s a phase of production after an author completes a manuscript (draft or final) when the author might need to compile an index, summaries for publicity, and other “extra-authorial tasks”? The main creative task of writing is complete and the tasks that follow could be undertaken by editors or others, or even an AI. In…More - Easy reading
I continue a discussion of my manuscript AI and Language in the Urban Context: Conversational AI in Cities (Routledge). See previous post: Too much feedback. I asked Google’s NotebookLM, “Would the average reader have any difficulty following the technical/mathematical explanations?” The AI responded: Readability of Technical/Mathematical Explanations The sources [actually, the manuscript] suggest that the…More - Too much feedback
Google has introduced an AI-driven document analysis platform called NotebookLM. You upload a document to the NotebookLM server via its website (notebooklm.google.com). The LLM generates a summary of the entire document and suggests some questions of the kind you see in textbooks that test a reader’s comprehension of the content. These are not generic questions,…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 - AI explains itself
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 - 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
Category: Architecture
- Behind the shed
- Points of view
- What happened to the digital humanities?
- The AI skillset
- Gathered round the bath
- What lies around the corner
- Reverse parametrics
- Bohemian melancholy
- Metafiction and metaphor
- How to explain art
- What was I thinking!
- Faroese chain dancing
- Adaptive re-use of digital content
- Pause for effect
- 2011 and all that
- 2010 redux
- AI fever dreams
- Mandala and metaphor
- Intentional systems
- Cryptographic City
- Of what do AIs dream?
- Lucky places
- In here and out there
- Panpsychism and pragmatism
- Panpsychism and the origins of the city
- An intelligent conversation about architecture
- City of gold
- Bitcoin City
- Exaggeration (revisited)
- “Blockchain for architects” revisited
- Advise, advocate, lobby, conspire
- The advocate
- Hash blogs
- Hiding messages in DNA
- Nano-origami
- DNA cryptography
- Urban cryptography
- Life in the metaverse
- Urban affordances
- Cities as media
- The sky alphabet
- The secret machine
- Cryptography and the Baroque
- Useless encryption
- Truth, lies and architecture
- Key exchange: It’s a wrap!
- Elliptic fields
- Sharing a secret number
- Elliptic trapdoors
- RSA public key encryption
- Asymmetric key encryption
- Primes
- Failure for sale
- Shibboleth
- Quantum Internet
- How architecture keeps its secrets
- Seven secrets
- Secret architecture
- Secret society
- Secrets of the lodge
- Decryptopolis
- Filter variables
- Secret norms
- Permeable portals
- Parallel worlds
- Hidden dimensions
- What’s popular?
- What comes next?
- Hidden beats
- Beyond averages: DCT graphics
- Hiding one surface inside another
- Ornament and crime
- Steganography for architects
- How to hide one picture inside another
- Urbanise rasterise
- Less is more: Signatures, cities and hash codes
- What a calamity!
- Architecture post-COVID
- Patholopolis
- Flightless cars
- The word on the street
- Perspecticide
- The smart of the deal
- Nested parentheticals
- The platformization of cultural labour
- Recursive cities
- I am not a statistic!
- Too much information
- Obfuscate!
- A thousand insides
- Forked paths
- City on a hill
- Hacking the unicursal labyrinth
- Unicursality
- Infinite souq
- Hacking the city of the future
- The twist of the pen
- Don’t go into the crypt!
- The treehouse
- Eliminate the impossible
