The ease with which I can be seen, heard and otherwise monitored has increased since January 2014. That was the arbitrary date of my post #180 titled Showing Off. Thanks to digital networks and displays it’s easy to put yourself “out there” as part of a strategy of personal presentation (e.g. as an online influencer),…More
Tag Archives: conversation
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
Voice chat
The latest incarnation of large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) generates convincing spoken responses to spoken input. You can talk (as well as type) to your AI, as if on a smartphone. It’s called “voice chat,” and I used OpenAI’s new voice chat app on my smartphone to enter into a conversation clarifying certain aspects of…More
Manufacturing debate
I used copy-paste to implement a conversation between chatGPT and Claude. The two AI models were primed with the same warning about an apocalyptic future of AI-AI interactions. They agreed on everything and simply added further facts and opinions about warnings, the need for caution, legislative measures and more research on how to make AI…More
Pond algae: an inter-AI conversation
What happens when AI chatbots talk to one another? There are numerous transcripts, videos and reviews online of such inter-AI conversations — some real, fake or doctored, sometimes to demonstrate the shortcomings or absurdities of conversational AI. I am interested in whether such inter-AI conversations can lead to anything like collaborative problem solving. As a…More
Thought as conversation
Cogitating, rehearsing ideas in the mind, is a highly advantageous byproduct of our ability to converse with one another. That is, the ability of human beings to think things through silently and privately has developed along with the human ability to communicate with one another in language. Some theorists even assert that conversation comes first;…More
How to co-create with your AI
People often remember better, or differently, when in the company of others. A reading of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and science writer Israel Rosenfield (1939-) supports the collaborative aspects of remembering, recalling, interpreting and, in terms often used in logic and language studies — generalising. Conversation provides the primary demonstration of this capacity to recall…More
Conversation-centric computation
In the previous post I alluded to some of the challenges of encouraging large language models (LLMs, e.g. AI chatbots such as chatGPT) to communicate with one another in ways that are oriented to some task, and that don’t settle on merely exchanging platitudes. In spite of their instant access to parameters trained on vast…More
Why a neural network forgets
Conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, has limited capacity to recall the content of earlier conversations. OpenAI does not disclose all the details of its operations, but scholars estimate that ChatGPT4 can process and recall up to 10,000 words in a single session or thread. That’s a substantial improvement on earlier models, but it doesn’t ensure…More
Inattention and power
Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provides one of the most enduring depictions of machine intelligence, a spaceship that exhibits sentience. HAL, the onboard computer provides an interface to the ship’s functions. In his chapter “Toward the sentient city,” Mark Shepard identifies the conversational aspect of HAL’s interface, “symbolized by his iconic and…More