Artificial Intelligence
Technically-grounded AI musings with a humanistic slant
Has AI Changed the Meaning of Intelligence?
Ask me about the “I” in “AI” five years ago, or twenty-five years ago, and I would quote John McCarthy that, “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” Computers recognising text, faces, and objects from images once seemed impossible. Along came the right mathematics and training data, and now it is
“AI First” is a Tragicomic Mistake
The corporate spin on AI is making me sick. Look, I’m not saying this as a luddite or technophobe. I started my career at Berkeley in the ’90s, teaching programming languages to fellow students who had then-crazy dreams, like facial recognition and self-driving cars. As a poet and computational linguist, the first dream I realised
The Reason AI Amazes Us … Is Us
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” — B.F. Skinner In order to understand our current relationship to AI and where it might be headed, we must try to wrap our heads around some very big numbers. In doing so, though, we have a lot to learn about ourselves and
What AI Taught Me About Being Human
In Kyotowhen I hear the cuckoo singI long for Kyoto -Bashō I still remember the mixed feelings I had reading my first computer-generated haiku. It wasn’t Bashō, but it spoke to me somehow. This felt like a triumph, because I had written the software that wrote the poem, but also a bit confrontational, because I
The Hidden Cost of Cyborg Working
Generative AI is set to automate many intellectual activities–but at what cost to our brain?
The Essence of Instinct (Film-Poem Online)
The Essence of Instinct for Charles Darwin That summer you were alone with your thoughts, which is to say you were never alone. Nuage. Vapours. The Narwhal. Collecting iridescent bugs in your barely-visible net. Cataloguing, by sputtering candle the endless lists, ink darkening the corner of your mouth. Your armament of facts was nothing
The Decline of Goodness in Poetry
“You do not have to be good.” -Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” What kind of poetry will people be reading 100 years from now? It is impossible to predict for sure. Yet certain quantifiable trends in the poems published over the past hundred years give a definite indication of where poetry has been, and may give
What Can Computers Teach Us About Poetry?
The idea that analysing poetry with computers could teach us anything about the art is controversial. A recent survey I conducted of more than 300 tech-savvy poets confirmed that–while they generally agree that technology has been good for poetry in terms of fostering community, creating networking opportunities, and providing remote learning–they would rather computer scientists
Revolutionising Poetry with Technology (Survey Results)
First and foremost, thanks to the more than 300 people who took a minute or two out of their busy lives to respond to my brief survey. Clearly people want to record their opinions, and hear what others think, about poetry and technology. You can see the general report of survey results here. I have
Quantified Aesthetics?
Never before in human history has such potential existed for the large-scale digital analysis of text. Thanks to the Google search engine index of the world wide web, and the emerging Google Books project, which aims to index books, an enormous amount of text exists in indexed digital form, and this base is growing constantly.