Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese.
I guess I’m carving out a space focused on AI metaphors. First it was working with Anna Mills to suggest “mirage” rather than “hallucination” as a metaphor for when AI gets it wrong. Now I’m fixated on this thing we keep hearing about the importance of keeping humans “in the loop” with AI. We need ... Read more
There is a deep disorder in the discourse of generative artificial intelligence, aka AI — or what I like to call sparkling intelligence, because everyone is using ✨✨✨ emojis and icons to signify AI. All joking aside, the disorder in AI discourse is the way everyone keeps talking about hallucinations when AI makes mistakes, leading us to anthropomorphize AI and imagine that AI both experiences…
Reading Eryk Salvaggio’s 12 Jan 2025 post “Data Prior to Language: If the author is dead, why isn’t the LLM?” I was immediately drawn into this compelling exploration of the current context of synthetic meaning making with what I like to call ✨ “sparkling intelligence” ✨ in relation to the ideas surrounding Roland Barthes’ influential ... Read more
On 9 July 2024, I gave a talk to the Portland, Oregon Product Tank based on my collaboration with Anna Mills on the terminology and metaphors we use to describe artificial intelligence (AI) outputs when they don’t match our expectations of shared reality. You can view the slides from the presentation and coming soon, a ... Read more
You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I'm now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a…
When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured…
“In a just world, every article about GPT-4 would nod toward Barthes and Foucault.” — Ted Underwood, The Empirical Triumph of Theory I’m late to the party, I know, but I recently became aware of Ted Underwood and his truly awesome work. I couldn’t resist reading when I saw his post The Empirical Triumph of ... Read more
Inspired while reading Tressie McMillan Cottom’s 20 Dec 2022 NY Times post, “Human This Christmas“, I tweeted about the “AInthropocene”, which I thought would be an already existent portmanteau word that combines the idea of the Anthropocene geologic age with the “AI” abbreviation for artificial intelligence — putting the “AIn’t” in the Anthropocene if you ... Read more
Today two US holidays coincide: Juneteenth — long a commemoration of the 19th-century emancipation of enslaved African Americans that was not made an official US federal holiday until last year in 2021 — and Father’s Day — a more recent celebration started in the early 20th century, though recognized as a US federal holiday in ... Read more
In 2018, our extended family played this game on New Year’s Eve and in 2021, we did it again, so I guess it’s a tradition now. Eat Poop You Cat, which some in our family call “The Drawing Game” is a variation of the game some call “Telephone”, where a message is passed from person ... Read more