On the "Pain Axis" & how language confuses us about language models 💡This piece has being simultaneously published in Tech Policy Press. Can you torture a language model? This question is central to model welfare, a controversial piece of the effective altruism and AI industry discourse on consciousness.
This post offers up a close reading of a section of the Stochastic Parrots paper, to make sense of an increasingly contested analogy. The reading is my interpretation, which draws from the text in the 2021 paper by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and (S)Mitchell. This year, Bender and Mitchell
Latest on "Rogue AI" (from today and up until now...) One of the challenges of the current debates around AI is whose narratives we are forced to argue from. 1). The well-funded "AI safety" contingent (sometimes called "Doomers") which focuses on the harms
Stochastic Flocks & Cybersecurity 'Pandemonium' 💡This essay was drafted from my appearance on Mél Hogan's podcast, The Data Fix, discussing the OpenAI / Hugging Face hack. Embedded below or find it on your podcast services here. OpenAI put out its full technical report on the Hugging Face
When Accountability Goes Rogue 💡I recently spoke with Dr. Zena Assaad for her podcast, Responsible Bytes. Video is above, below is an essay adapted from the conversation. "The system from nowhere" is a way of talking about AI systems that excludes its origin as a consciously, human-designed
What happens when AI image models meet social media algorithms? What is the infrastructure of Slop? How does it get made, and how can we make sense of it? In this 15-minute video, I walk through the slop pipeline as an interconnected social-technical system, fusing generative AI and
Clarice Lispector, Translation, and Artificial Intelligence 💡Nerd Warning: 1/5 (Low). I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? Maybe I'll say them. – Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life To translate a work of literature is to select
💡Nerd 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'
💡Nerd 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. 💡Nerd 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 💡Nerd 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 💡Nerd 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