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 […]
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 Whitwell Players production of Wind in the Willows on 19-21 September, 2025 was held in All Saints’ Church, St. Paul’s Walden Bury. The venue presented many challenges to the technical crew, including setting up lighting, sound, and stage equipment in a Norman stone building. Another challenge was to recreate the pastoral setting within a
Taking up the idea of protocols as engineered arguments, this talk explores the timeless algorithms that give poetry its power to evolve—from an ancient mnemonic device to a transformational way of being. Drawing on both theory and practice, in this one-hour exploration we will look at various examples of poetry’s rule-making and rule-breaking, and even
The Infinite Game of Poetry: Protocols for Living, Listening, and Transcending the Rules Read More »
“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
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
