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ChatGPT and its magical metaphors

Last week, a new issue of Technoscienza, an Italian journal of Science and Technology Studies, landed in my inbox. It had a very intriguing cover, co-created between Sergio Minniti and ChatGPT — a portrait drawn by ChatGPT using ASCII. But that was the least of it. After Sergio had prompted ChatGPT to create this stunning …

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Playing with AI/Playing with fire

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 …

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Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again

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 …

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AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors

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 …

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Large language models, meaning and maths

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 …

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Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology

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 …

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Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic

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 …

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How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI

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 …

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AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?

AI Safety is the new black. It is everywhere. As Alex Hern wrote from the Seoul AI safety summit on Tuesday “The hot AI summer is upon us” and with it the hot AI safety summer…. When you look at this timeline for “AI safety” on the news database Nexis, you can see that the …

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From contamination to collapse: On the trail of a new AI metaphor

I wrote my first ever post about AI and ChatGPT on 6 January 2023. Amongst other things, I talked about the danger of ‘knowledge pollution’. I wanted to highlight the dangers of a gradual corruption of our knowledge base. Knowledge pollution ChatGPT and many other bots or AIs like it are based on large language …

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