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
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