Overview I enjoyed this post by codepoetics , investigating the hunch that a number of ideas in Continental Philosophy actually read like precursors to our experience of LLMs. For example, Derrida's concept of différance - where meaning is generated through the endless interplay of signifiers, rather than a stable link between signifier and signified - feels akin to the probabilistic interplay of…
“I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra I In the silence between self and world, a dialogue starts where words are not yet formed. The material sleeps, its hidden voice silent until we awaken it—our voice, and yet, not ours. We journey through a landscape of mirrors that not only reflect, but…
It was with great interest that I picked up Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher's "The Conservation Revolution" from the library. Subtitled “Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene” and coming in at around 200 pages, it looked like just the book I’ve been looking for: compact, readable, and full of new ideas. Suffice it to say, I was not disappointed. Their biggest achievement is…
Just the other night, I was musing over my unsatisfactory efforts in language learning. Then a moment of inspiration struck: why not put ChatGPT to the task of mimicking a language companion? I put it to the test with Swedish, a language in which my proficiency only extends to the most rudimentary phrases. Lo and behold, after a bit of trial and error, I found the experience to be quite the…
ChatGPT is pretty good at writing prose and, to a greater or lesser extent, can imitate different writing styles. So I wondered if it could write The Masque of the Red Death in a kind of modernist, stream-of-consciousness style. The answer is maybe, but not this time. The result is not too much like Woolf's or Joyce's prose, but it is very readable and is probably more accessible than the…
Virginia Woolf’s writing is not only poetic, but also wonderfully visual. At times her masterly fusion of language and visual imagery transcends mere language to become an alchemy of ideas. Take this example in The Waves when Bernard has a sudden epiphany about time: 'And time,' said Bernard, 'lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time,…
Like so many, lockdown and the pandemic has afforded me new reasons to explore my local environment, the City as well as Nature. It is an activity I loved pursuing when I first arrived, but it fell by the wayside as I pursued career goals and life became, well, busy. Together with my partner - who is often the first to suggest it! - I soon found myself walking and cycling many miles in and around…
I’ve had Iain Sinclair’s “Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire” on my shelf for a few years now, finally picking it up to read late last year. As you can tell, it took a while. As a Hackney resident myself, I was very excited to delve into it. Yet it didn’t quite live up to its billing for me. In a phrase: too much anecdote, too little history. But I did finish it after all, so that can't be the full…
I finished reading China Miéville's Perdido Street Station yesterday. It’s a tome of a book, at 867 pages, which I bought last winter at Foyle’s after scouring the scifi shelves for a while and concluding that, well, it really is one of the more eminent recent books (in terms of awards etc.). I felt excited at the time, but given the size, didn’t attempt it immediately. I’d already read…
Some of the GPT-2 based tools available publicly can generate decent examples with the right prompt. However I wanted to see whether a finetuned model might do a little better. I collected a corpus of traditional poetry from PoetryDB , together with this corpus . After finetuning and taking samples at various different stages, my impression is that a finetuned model (in this case the GPT 2 medium…
Introduction On May 28, 2020 a paper describing GPT-3 , a new state-of-the-art language model Artificial Intelligence (AI), dropped on Arxiv. On June 11, 2020 OpenAI, the developers of GPT-3, invited users to request access to the GPT-3 API in Beta. In the following weeks, and up until the present, those who gained access have been sharing their findings, and others have been commenting and…
After the fun I had with the BERT Summariser and short stories , I decided to turn the trick to poetry. If anything the results are even better. Here are five examples, starting with The Wasteland , which perfectly illustrates BERT's ability to find continuity. The Wasteland , by T.S. Eliot I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory…
As a creative writer I'm always on the lookout for new developments in NLP and language modelling. With the advent of the new Age of Machine Learning there was a lot of promise that creative breakthroughs might be around the corner. There was an early burst with the work of people like Ross Goodwin 's Sunspring in 2016, and Botnik Studios ' Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large…
Neuroqueer (n): an individual whose identity has in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering Neurotypical (n) : a label for people who are non-autistic Preface In the second of this two-part blog post series about texts on autism, I explore the contours and concepts on offer in Melanie Yergeau's "Authoring Autism" . But rather than offering an analytical reading, I…
Neurodiversity as a social and political movement is something that's only come to my attention fairly recently, through the lens of autism. Even six months ago I thought of autism in much the way that it was popularised in Rain Man and Little Man Tate: as a specific type of giftedness. The term Asperger's and the phrase 'on the spectrum' has entered the popular lexicon, but is stil often used in…
!WARNING: SPOILERS! After This Our Exile won numerous film awards, including Best Film at both the Golden Horse and Hong Kong film awards in 2006. It is a touching, often tragic film. A family falls apart when a father indulges his character flaws at the cost of his family. He gambles and borrows, losing money and failing to repay his debts. His wife (Lin) realises he won't change his ways change…
"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", a book on race relations first published in 1997, has opened my eyes about the nature of racism and what we can do about it. I can't really do the book justice in a blog post, but I would like to highlight some of the points that have made an impression on me. By way of quick introduction, the author Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, is a…
similarity.py performs rudimentary detection of textual style and content. Basically it uses the predictive capability of the pytorch-char-rnn autoencoder to check the likelihood of a character in a provided input text against character sequences in an existing trained model (trained on some other text). The average of likelihoods across the provided input text is calculated to provide a broad…
Summary Syntax Char RNN attempts to enhance naive Char RNN by encoding syntactic context along with character information. The result is an algorithm that, in selected cases, learns faster and delivers more interesting results than naive Char RNN. The relevant cases appear to be those that allow for more accurate parsing of the text. This blog post describes the general idea, some findings, and a…
2016. There may never be another year during which I read so many of the Great Classic Novels for the first time. Let me list them: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Ulysses by James Joyce, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I also chucked in a few of the great plays for…
Let's wipe away 2016, but first, let's set the record straight. Was it really such a bad year? Such a sad year? Yes! It's not just the celebrities who passed away - although that had a lot to do with it. Think about it: a terrible war in Syria, thousands upon thousands of refugees, threats of terrorism, and the sense that politics was slowly turning on its head: first Brexit, then Trump. With…
In this hyperstrange post-Brexit world I suddenly have many questions, and few answers. The landscape seems to change every day. One thing, however, is clear and that is that a lot more people are talking about politics in the UK than I've ever seen. It is my belief that, if good is to come of the referendum outcome, we must use the political consciousness that has been raised in its aftermath as…
Since approaching Freud's Unconscious via Lacan in recent times, I have come to appreciate the power and flexibility of an Unconscious that is "structured like a language", and in which the "exteriority of the symbolic" makes the Unconscious also transindividual. Although a direct comparison from any one point in time in either's men's careers is always provisional, due to their ever-evolving…
Like many readers old enough to remember the 80s, I have fond memories of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books, as well as their more sophisticated cousins, adventure gamebooks like "The Way of the Tiger" and "Lone Wolf" . So when I recently looked into interactive fiction again I had high hopes that the genre had really been brought into the 21st century. I wasn't entirely…
Shakespeare is widely regarded as the world's leading playwright in English, and perhaps any language. Such is his influence that phrases and ideas coined by him at the turn of the 17th century still live on in our colloquial speech today. Romeo and Juliet is shorthand for passionate, ill-fated love, and quotable lines from his works permeate our treasure trove of idioms and phrases. What is…