Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis
November 15, 2024
Last week, I had another adventure in AI land. This started by accident, as so many adventures do. It all came about because I read about an interesting symposium organised in Amsterdam by Anaïs Augé’s and Gudrun Reijnierse on “Public responses to the language of science communication: Uptake, acceptance, resistance”. As part of this symposium, …
Playing with AI/Playing with fire
October 11, 2024
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change …
Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
October 4, 2024
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a …
Intelligence
September 27, 2024
Since the recent explosion of discussions around artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, even super-intelligence, people have started to wonder what intelligence actually is… A rather futile enterprise in my humble opinion, as ‘intelligence’ is a word like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ that has endless meanings, but there we are. Some scholars come at it from an …
AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors
August 30, 2024
I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means …
From large language models to DNA language models
August 9, 2024
In October 2023 I wrote a blog post about a convergence of large language models or LLMs and DNA. LLMs are subset of generative AI that focus on generating and understanding human language and producing human-like text. DNA is often compared to a language or a code. In the post I quoted a representative of …
Large language models, meaning and maths
July 26, 2024
I was reading an article in The Guardian about two novels by Benjamin Labatut. One novel, published in 2020, is entitled When We Cease to Understand the World and deals with quantum mechanics and war. The second novel The Maniac, published in 2023 and just out in paperback, is about John von Neumann, which brings …
Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology
July 12, 2024
In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got …
Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic
June 28, 2024
I have written about metaphors for AIs and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, but I don’t know much about what one might call the mechanics of metaphor recognition, identification and interpretation inside LLMs. So, I wanted to find out and went down a rabbit hole – I never quite reached the bottom…. Metaphor and …
How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI
June 21, 2024
Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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