ChatGPT Breakup Mixtape
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.
What Language Models Can Do Without Thought
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
Unreasonable Effectiveness
Seriously: Machines Do Not Need to Think to Be Thought About 💡As 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
Some Things I Did in 2025
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
What I Read About AI in 2025
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
From Interactive to Interpassive
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
What Was ChatGPT?
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
Keeping Secrets From The Numbers
Presenting my latest and final album as The Organizing Committee. The new record, "Keeping Secrets From the Numbers," is available today on Bandcamp, and will be streaming on most platforms (aside from Spotify) in the coming weeks. It will be the last record as The Organizing Committee. When
Thoughts on Hinton
On Consciousness in Programs Geoffrey Hinton recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on backpropagation, a foundational piece of research that contributed to the emergence of contemporary artificial intelligence systems – particularly generative AI systems such as Large Language Models. I recently served as a panelist at the "Who&
Colors and Numbers
I don't identify as neurodivergent, per se, though I’m what’s called a synesthete, which sounds like I am trying to be fancy. Synesthesia is a bit of a superpower – music seems to be much cooler for me than for most other people. On the flip side
Trespassing into Language
I'm Actually At Capacity Right Now I have to apologize for nearly any invocation of Slavoj Zizek or Jacques Lacan, so fair warning. But I want to highlight a point made by Yuxuan Zhang in a paper on the LLM "Unconscious," where he draws on a
What Machines Don't Know
Imagining Language Without Imagination It's important to acknowledge that Large Language Models are complex. There's an oversimplified binary in online chatter between the dismissive characterization of LLMs as "next-word predictors" by many anti-AI proponents, and the pro-AI advocates who act as if the model