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
Tag Archives: urbanism
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 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
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
Choose your critic
My last post looked at the potential of a large language model such as ChatGPT to operate as a critic. Developing further on that theme, it occurred to me that such a review may not always be in step with the author’s target readership. So, I presented ChatGPT with a 4,000 word book chapter titled…More
Meaning and attention
Understanding and misunderstandings in conversation often stem from emphasis. People tailor their responses based on where their conversational partners place emphasis. Attention distributions play a crucial role in inflecting responses in dialogue. Emphasis influences what comes next in a conversation, shaping the interaction between speaker and listener. Text-only conversational exchanges rely on context without additional cues. Attention, as demonstrated by LLMs, significantly affects the platform’s text generation capabilities and conversation continuation.More
Extending large language models
I’m in the process of identifying parallels between urban semiotics and large language models (LLMs), arguing that core facets of language competence parallel aspects of urban life, experiences and processes. We can identify eight core functions that contribute to the success of the Transformer model of LLMs, as deployed in ChatGPT and other chatbot platforms.…More
Attending to the city
In the book Network Nature, I explored how people attune themselves to the natural world — or at least, how we attune to that part of our spatial experience that we are inclined to describe as “natural.” We also attune to artifice, such as urban environments. Cities present a spectrum of stimuli that shape our…More