đź’ˇNerd Alert: I have a new pre-print up, called "The Market in the Model." It was written as a preliminary outline of my PhD dissertation, which means it's dense, and this presents a stripped-down version of it. I have a new paper! Here'
đź’ˇNerd Rating: Not nerdy but probably boring, as it is an attempt to respond thoughtfully to a social media conversation that I found challenging to address on BlueSky's very limited reply functions. A few weeks ago, after a very successful "noisy systems" conference in Rome, I
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. đź’ˇNerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it&
Thinking Through Temporal Mode Collapse đź’ˇNerd Rating: 3/5. It's about why video models stop. There's technical talk, but also pretty videos to look at, so it's a wash. I've been doing a series of experiments: taking diffusion-based image glitches and
On the Valorization of Technical Authority đź’ˇNerd Alert: 1/5. Readable, but also mostly venting about weird encounters at a conference in San Francisco. The academic AI critic is often either bored or angry. Bored because everyone keeps saying the same things, or angry because all the same things need
For designers, who will choose for themselves and for the rest of us. 💡Nerd Rating: 3/5. Remarks prepared for the "From Interface to Agency: A New Discourse for Design and AI" forum on design practices for emerging technology at UC Berkeley, which this year focused on Design
đź’ˇNerd Rating 3.75/5: This post is about a late-19th-century debate in academic mathematics, but it's plainly written and relevant to LLMs. What is a model, anyway? Doing math used to involve touch. We used plaster and wooden models, weird cubist-looking sculptural objects you
You might not agree, but there’s a growing consensus, even among reluctant users, that LLMs feel different. I don’t think it undermines critique to ask about the stakes of those feelings — and of this new goal of “agential AI.” In my latest piece for Tech Policy Press, I
"Noise is the central image of Eryk Salvaggio’s Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm. Its sources are varied but familiar: instructional films, found footage from commercials, the detritus and AI-generated slop forced into a dialogue with the noise that infuses every shot. Brief moments of
Can a ChatBot break up with you? It turns out it is happening en masse this weekend, as OpenAI deprecates its companionship-friendly ChatGPT "4o" model. This week: a mix tape.
Claims of “intelligence” in AI focus on function: if AI behaves as-if it has a mind, it’s “intelligent.” But behavior is a useless framework when these models are designed explicitly to pass these behavioral tests. Instead, labeling – and debating whether to label – these language machines as AI or
Seriously: Machines Do Not Need to Think to Be Thought About đź’ˇAs I am immersed in PhD research I am at risk of becoming increasingly dense and nerdy. So I am adding a "nerd rating" to posts from now on, evaluating my estimation of how niche a post