“Model collapse”: the human centipede, when it gets long enough to eat its own tail

Grey Room invites you to a free, hour-long webinar on infrastructure as a site of political sovereignty and media-technical force, Tuesday, April 21st, 10:00 (PT) / 13:00 (ET) / 19:00 (CET) feat. Lisa Parks, Erhard Schüttpelz, Julia Velkova and Rosalind Morris. Signup at bit.ly/GreyRoomInfr...

Just published open access, a playful exercise I developed and ran with students: "The Cringe Test: student evaluations of intelligence with LLMs in a Turing Test adapted for classroom use" www.frontiersin.org/journals/edu...

Frontiers | GIFT-AI: The Cringe Test: student evaluations of intelligence with LLMs in a Turing Test adapted for classroom use

This article presents “The Cringe Test,” a classroom adaptation of the Turing Test (or imitation game) that stages dialogue with large language models (LLMs)...

frontiersin.org

My kid’s school ensuring none of its students become humanities PhDs

A student asked GPT if its summaries of a class text were distorted. It replied “If distortion is inevitable in communication, then maybe my “blurriness” isn’t just a flaw—it’s a mirror held up to how humans process and reshape information every day.”

Now in Portuguese translation, and open access, an essay Francesco Casetti and I wrote on "Screens": periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/territoriose...

"In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes." --Theodor Adorno

why do I have to acknowledge if I used an LLM in preparing the text but my colleagues don't have to note when their spouses and research assistants helped with research and writing ?

The concept of "slop" is going to fit neatly into the space that "mass culture" occupied in 20c theory. It expresses a fear that culture has become liquid, abject, homogenous, replicating and spreading itself like a slime mold.

When I try to make sense of the kind of language produced by large language models (LLMs) I think of Saussure's passing remark that language is a "a machine that will always run no matter the damages that may be inflicted upon it."

HOTTE LOCAL SINGLES NEAR UNTO THEE ARE YNTERESTID YN VERNACULAR REWRITINGES OF THE TROY LEGEND, HENDECASYLLABIQUE VERSE, LIGHT FALCONRY, HERBALISM. JOYNE *COURTR* THE BEST APP FOR COURTLYE LOVE.

Love this review, and glad to see it also bring in @bernarddionysius.bsky.social, whose _Code_ deeply shaped my thinking about the history of cultural theory. If you put these two books together, I think it makes a very coherent story about where theory came from and why we need it right now.

My review of the excellent Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by @bernarddionysius.bsky.social is out now in the new and very exciting @histsocialscience.bsky.social! Available open access here~~ muse.jhu.edu/article/952248

The new OpenAI model announced today is quite wild. It is essentially Google's Deep Research idea with multistep reasoning, web search, *and* the o3 model underneath (as far as I know). It sometimes takes a half hour to answer. Let me show you an example. 1/x

is this genre theory? I think it might be!

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 2y ago

“I think sometimes genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists, and I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about” - Beyoncé after winning Best Country Album for “Cowboy Carter”

A while back I did a performance of my 'Drift as a planetary phenomenon' for the excellent Panel on Planetary Thinking at the University of Gießen (www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties...). They've now released the video (40 mins). www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YWo...

Planetary Lecture Series #3 "Drift as a Planetary Phenomenon"

YouTube video by Panel on Planetary Thinking

youtube.com

I was filling out a social security form in Swedish. I had to check one of two boxes. Google Translate renders the two options as (a) I am a decent (b) I am a cretin

I haven't gotten much out of this website. Is there something I should do to make it more interesting?

I like this line by Bob Dylan from the Rolling Thunder Revue movie: “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.”

‘I’ is a linguistic convention to facilitate communication and should not be interpreted as a sign of self-awareness or consciousness. --ChatGPT

A structuralist analysis of the bong, as differential ordering of the binaries fire and water, earth and air—and the functional role of the universal taboo on drinking the bong water.

wrote and recorded some new lectures on LLMs

The best concert I've seen in the last 20 or so years was KRS-One in Berlin, around 2014 or 2015, in a small club in Berlin. His charisma, elegance, poise, power, rhythm, timing, musical sensibility was off the charts -- like James Brown at the Apollo. If you get a chance, go see him.

Foucault v Twitter: those who have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so the sound of their disapproval may be heard

one of the best books in media studies this year! a tour de force in blue humanities

Lisa Yin Han@thehanopticon.bsky.social · 2y ago

For those who don't know me, a quick intro to my work! This is Deepwater Alchemy, published this year via @uminnpress.bsky.social! You can grab a copy and hear me talk about it on The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social and the UMN Podcast under the extras here: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791594...

I can’t find Beatrice Fazi on here yet, but until she gets here, her pretty dazzling new paper on synthesis in #generativeAI www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...

The Computational Search for Unity: Synthesis in Generative AI - published on November 9, 2024

The outputs of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) are often called “synthetic” to imply that they are not natural but artificial. Against that use of the term, this article focuses on ...

pdcnet.org