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