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 turn over in
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 sharp
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 AGI
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
In this post I'm highlighting some of my writing, artworks and talks from 2025. If you've been following, I hope you find something worth revisiting. If not, I hope you find something worth checking out. And if you find something of interest, please share it! One
From AGI to Workslop It's time for our annual tradition: a very long list of pieces written about AI this year that have stuck with me, for better or for worse. I've sorted them in alphabetical order by keyword. I acknowledge some weak spots here, chiefly
Where AI Art Meets Cognitive Offloading There is the joke about AI: we wanted robots to do our dishes so we could have time to make art, but we got robots that make art while we do the dishes. We can unpack this joke a bit: somebody is making the
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history. But that specific