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