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  • To evade AI detectors you literally just need to ask LLMs to avoid the statistical features which detectors rely on

    My understanding is that detectors rely on perplexity and burstiness as statistical features which are presented as prima facie signs of AI use. But Claude 3.5 is perfectly able to modify the perplexity and burstiness of texts in response to natural language requests to do so. Here are examples of low, moderation and high burstiness…

  • The privilege of escaping from the Twittering Machine

    I’ve been involved in training academics to use social media for a long time. It’s a field I stumbled into during a part-time PhD, as a committed blogger who became a Twitter enthusiast in 2010, leaving me with a sense this was a valuable shift in academic life. I imagined that social media would lead…

  • You can’t ban the English Defence League because it doesn’t exist but you can force Telegram to shut down organising groups

    I spent my train journey home last night thinking about exactly the point which Phil BC makes forcefully here: And the Daily Mail have reported that Yvette Cooper is considering banning the English Defence League. The first problem is the EDL doesn’t exist except as lazy short hand for far right mobilisation. She would be banning a…

  • Rest in peace Maggie

    I’m so glad we did this in Warwick, even if it meant it took ages to happen 😊

  • Against an instrumentalist understanding of AI: critical realism and conceptualising artificial intelligence

    This is a useful concept from Andrew Dryhurst in a recent paper in JCR. I’ve been prone to arguing for the same framing by talking about the need to historicise AI, in terms of a broader history of digitalisation then platformisation. I think Dryhurst’s framing here helps me account for how a particular framing of…

  • What need do conspiracy theories serve?

    This is a brilliant discussion from QAA with Jesselyn Cook about her new book The Quiet Damage: QAnon And The Destruction. The opening section of the interview captures the distinct thesis which QAA have developed over recent years concerning the power of a community focusing their anger on a singular enemy (the other’s other as…

  • What will be left after the GenAI bubble bursts?

    This is such an important question, initially from Cory Doctorow and then picked up by Alex Hanna. It is indisputable that it is a bubble which means that it will burst: Doctorow thinks that the residue of the bubble popping will be minimal–large models will no longer be cost-effective to train, but small open-source models…

  • A simple way to understand Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach

    I just heard Doug Porpora give a great explanation of Archer’s morphogenetic approach as an approach to thinking about social change. The problem is that, as he put it, people get bogged down in all the t’s which litter these diagrams: In contrast suggests Doug, rightly I think, the claim she is making is extremely…

  • Ten propositions about generative AI and the future of academic writing

    This is Claude’s summary of the arguments from the first 20k words of my new book on AI and writing, as well as the how to write blog post series I did earlier this summer.

  • And it’s sick that all these battles are what keeps me satisfied

    Now there’s gravel in our voicesGlass is shattered from the fightIn this tug of war, you’ll always winEven when I’m right’Cause you feed me fables from your headWith violent words and empty threatsAnd it’s sick that all these battlesAre what keeps me satisfied Try and touch me so I can scream at you not to…

  • If IBM is here to make your dreams come true, you can probably say the same thing about nightmares too

    A sky without a world a shore without a seaA sun without heatShining a light you can’t seeIf IBM is here to make your dreams come trueYou can probably say the sameThing about nightmares too

  • The AI video generators are superficially stunning but deeply useless

    I’ve been playing around with them occasionally and I just can’t get them to produce what I’m actually asking for. For example this is Luma’s response to the prompt “A deeply content capybara luxuriating in my suburban back garden with a fluffy black cat reclining on his belly“: Is this a capybara or is it…

  • Current mood in AI generated images (and music) #107

  • Stare into the void until the void stares back

  • Should I talk about LLMs, conversational agents, GAI or GenAI?

    I wrote a book in which I consistently used the acronym GAI to refer to generative artificial intelligence. But I’ve been struck that I’m literally the only person using this, leading me to revert to GenAI which I’m uncomfortable with because it feels horribly buzzy. But I have a pedantic objection to talking about LLMs…

  • Product placement as a commercial strategy for GenAI firms

    This is interesting from Which about the dangers of using ChatGPT for product recommendations: Interest in artificial intelligence has exploded and the technology is now finding its way into the products and apps we use the most. With all that computing power at work, can a robot now offer sound advice on the best products…

  • Creating rich multidimensional action spaces for GAI to navigate

    It’s widely understood that one of the most effective ways of working with conversational agents is asking them to assume roles. One of the most frequent problems new users have is that the responses are generic, usually because they’ve failed to fully explicate their expectations and they’ve not asked for a response in a particular…

  • The monster became self-conscious of its size and intoxicated by the belief in its own omnipotence

    What an eye witness description from Roger E. Money-Kyrle, cited in Barbara Ehrenreich’s (incredible) Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, loc 290: The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore capable of…

  • You assumin’ I’m a human, what I gotta do to get it through to you I’m superhuman?

    Uh, summa-lumma, dooma-lumma, you assumin’ I’m a humanWhat I gotta do to get it through to you I’m superhuman?Innovative and I’m made of rubber so that anythingYou say is ricochetin’ off of me, and it’ll glue to you andI’m devastating, more than ever demonstratingHow to give a motherfuckin’ audience a feeling like it’s levitatingNever fading,…

  • Some thoughts on machine translation in higher education

    I really enjoyed this discussion with Klaus Mundt and Michael Groves for the TELSIG Podcast. There’s a reading list attached in the YouTube comments. Here are some notes from the discussion which are my attempts to characterise the insights shared in the podcast, rather than offer my own analysis:

  • The political economy of hopelessness

    Richard Seymour on what happens when centrists triangulate against the far-right in the interests of electoral pragmatism. The part in bold is particularly bleak: Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #106

  • Some thoughts on the emerging platform economies of generative AI

    I’m in total agreement with Carlo Perrotta here that custom GPTs and AI agents constitute a familiar platform economy being cultivated by OpenAI: In all scenarios, from the lowest API access tier to the highest enterprise one, proprietary assets and infrastructure must be hired from OpenAI’s closed development environment according to a Software as a…

  • Avant-garde theorising is a reflection of the competitive individualism of the academy

    This is a great account in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking of how what I think of as avant-garde theorising, valorising conceptual and linguistic novelty as an end in itself, expresses the competitive individualism of the academy rather than being some sort of radical bulwark against it. From loc 471: The need for a different way…

  • Lacan on the trauma of birth

    From Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, pg 327: By emerging into this world where he must breathe, first and foremost he is literally choked, suffocated. This is what has been called trauma – there is no other – the trauma of birth, which is not separation from the mother but the inhalation,…

  • I see you fading, fading, but you saved me

    Oh, it haunts meIt’s just when your screen went blackBut I still feel you above meAnd you’ll always guide me backI see you fading, fadingBut you saved meAll night, all nightBut you break meAlright, alright(I’m here)

  • Will GenAI be seized upon as a short-term funding fix for UK higher education?

    This is a great account by Glen O’Hara of the failing model of financing UK higher education, as two short term fixes (stacking art & humanities courses, aggressive international recruitment) have been seized upon in uneven ways destructive to the sector as a whole: For a while, some vice chancellors could patch up losses by…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #105

  • We’re now up to 7 episodes of our podcast about generative AI in higher education

    (Annoyingly, none of the multiple ways of embedding Spotify seem to work on WordPress, so please click above to access)

  • Can you get Claude to explain why it refuses to insult you? An exploration of LLMs, guard rails and self-reference

    I’ve seen numerous people observe that Claude 3.5 is less venerable to ‘counter-scolding’ than previous versions of the model. If you get a scolding response (e.g. “I don’t feel comfortable continuing this role-play or providing that type of harsh, demeaning feedback, even in a simulated context“) a counter-scold often led Claude to back down (e.g.…

  • Join us on August 3rd to celebrate the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer

    August 3rd, 10am-5pm at the University of Warwick Margaret Archer’s work has had a profound impact on social theory, challenging and reshaping our understanding of agency, structure, culture and their interplay in producing social change. Her contributions to the discipline have been wide-ranging, from critical interventions in conceptual debates to discussions about the nature of our…

  • Are special issues of journals becoming the norm rather than the exception? How will GenAI interact with this process?

    This is a really interesting analysis of the growth of special issues as a commercial strategy by journals, emerging in the grey zone between traditional and predatory publishing: Since 2000, this practice has been turned into a commercial strategy by new publishers such as Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers to accelerate growth and generate revenue. In…

  • The stagnation of the UK economy and living standards

    Three charts from today’s Adam Tooze newsletter 👇 How do you fix this while leaving fundamental questions of wealth distribution untouched? I don’t just have an instinctive hostility to Starmer at that stage because, in a fit of post-traumatic naivety, I voted for him in the belief he would unite the party around a softer…

  • The risk to authorship when using GenAI for notetaking

    I’ve found a valuable use of conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT in accelerating the notetaking process because it helps turn shortform notes into longform notes, as well as drawing out connections within them and suggesting potential implications. However I began to try this at a conference earlier and I rapidly realised how dangerous it…

  • Why digital elites are embracing Trump

    While I see the value in exploring the ideological infrastructure supporting the authoritarian turn amongst digital elites, I think Dave Karpf is right to argue that the material driver is a pushback by venture capitalists, whose interests are not identical with big tech, against increasing regulation of the sector: This, by the way, is the…

  • One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for

    From James Baldwin’s final essay in Nothing Personal: One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found,…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #104

  • AI Policy and Higher Education Under a New UK Government

    In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham discuss the implications of the recent UK election for AI policy and higher education. Key topics include: Throughout the discussion, Mark and Helen balance critical analysis of current trends with cautious optimism about potential positive developments in research funding and university support under the…

  • Generative AI and the Automated University

    Generative AI arrives into a university system that is already to a significant extent automated. Core activities are carried out through digital platforms, key aspects of knowledge work are datafied and algorithmically governed, and university communities are subjected to new digital forms of monitoring and control. Artificial intelligence also has a long history in the…

  • Generative AI and the Enjoyment of Academic Writing

    In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham engage in a thought-provoking discussion about the intersection of writing, creativity, and generative AI. Drawing on their personal experiences and academic insights, they explore the nuanced ways AI is reshaping our relationship with writing and intellectual inquiry. Key topics covered: This wide-ranging dialogue offers…

  • Hatred, even of meanness, makes you ugly

    You who will emerge again from the floodIn which we have gone underThinkWhen you speak of our faultsOf the dark timesWhich you have escapedFor we went, changing countries more often than our shoesThrough the wars of the classes, despairingWhen there was injustice only, and no indignation.And yet we know: Hatred, even of meannessMakes you ugly.…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #103

  • Pierpaolo Donati’s relational humanism

    I’m finding this extremely generative for thinking about GenAI in organisations. From Being Human in a Virtual Society loc 1500: Traditional humanism: The human person is a self-sufficient substance that is realized in society according to nature (the goods of relationship exist as a virtue of the people through which they pursue their perfection and…

  • You can now build and publish simple web apps using Claude

    The new artefacts function in Claude allows simple web apps to be built in natural language instructions. It’s still early days but it suggests a new horizon of zero code development is about to open up. Click below to check out a really simple use which was produced in well under a minute from two…

  • Nothing can ever be beautiful enough to wipe out the traces of imperfections and faults

    From Joel Dor’s Clinical Lacan pg 85: The hysteric is the harshest judge when it comes to the ascent to the ideal of perfection. Nothing can ever be beautiful enough to wipe out the traces of imperfections and faults. This despotic requirement inevitably causes symptoms to appear, of which the most striking is the hysteric’s…

  • I wander through the pet store asking, “What is my true nature?”

  • Two ways to use Claude as a meeting scribe

    I’ve found Anthropic’s Claude immensely useful in a couple of recent planning meetings. In a workshop we were putting post it notes on flip chart paper as part of a planning process. I then shared a photo of the flipcharts and asked it to provide a series of provocative questions to feed into our discussion:…

  • “Mummy, I done an album!”: the excremental character of creative production

    The child is asked to hold in. He is made to hold in too long, to start to introduce excrement into the realm of what belongs to his body, and he starts to make it a part of his body, which is considered, at least for a while, as something not to be lost. Then,…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #102

  • A relational theory of existential challenge

    From Being Human in a Virtual Society: A Relational Approach, by Pierpaolo Donati loc 656: When we do not know what to do with others and with the situations of life, or what relation to have with the contingent world around us, then we feel confused, weak, fragile, sad, and in crisis. Every existential situation…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #101

  • Our conception of the lifeworld needs the mundane as much as it needs the dramatic

    This passage from Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960 (pg 213-214) captures something I’ve thought about a lot in relation to the reception of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, particularly how its sensitivity to the utterly quotidian tends to be missed by many sociological critics: When Murdoch’s book on Sartre was published,…

  • The unacknowledged debt of Richard Rorty to the ethos of post-war Oxford philosophy

    From Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960: The big claims were about the imminence of a final dissolution: ancient knots would be cut, the old metaphysical doctrines hunted to extinction. Once the old detritus was cleared, then the revelation, ‘of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own…

  • “I love you and that painful decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day”

    I finally saw Network this evening and I am obsessed 😍 everything about this film is amazing, including my favourite break up scene ever*: (Obviously I am not including the phrase ‘cockmanship’ in this judgement 🤭) I feel I must interject hereYou’re getting carried away, feeling sorry for yourselfWith these revisions and gaps in historySo,…

  • Some thoughts on the UK general election 2024

    And yet I can’t help but take an immense primitive pleasure in the impending death of the Conservatives in their current incarnation 🥂

  • The street art I saw and the street art which was really there

    If you’ve read my blog for a long time you will have seen this image I love, which I took in Berlin a few years before Covid. I found it bleakly resonant for all sorts of reasons I’m unwilling to write about directly on the blog, but it’s fair to say it’s an image which…

  • Claude 3 onwards is considerably less prone to hallucinate than other LLMs

    That at least is my growing experience. Not only does it invoke a threshold of knowledge, it resists inducements (e.g. ‘tell me more’) or scolds (e.g. “you’re supposed to be helpful, why won’t you answer the question?”) which were reliably effective at getting Claude 2 or ChatGPT 4 to cheerfully bullshit. Interestingly GPT 4 could…

  • From foxes and hedgehogs to menders and knockers: Berlin’s other distinction

    From Nikhil Krishnan’s (excellent) A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 pg 89: ‘Temperamentally’, Berlin later said, ‘some people like mending the wall and some people like knocking holes in it. Austin was … a hole-knocker, and Freddie was a mender”. What I particularly about this is that it opens up four categories, each…

  • Things Stoics say that I want to remember #1

    Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While were are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, On the Use of…

  • Claude’s project functionality could be hugely important for academics

    I’ve just started exploring this to support a new book project. You can add project knowledge (in this case the 20ish blog posts I wrote on this a few months ago), custom instructions and compile all the chats relevant to the project in one workspace:

  • Nick Cave on becoming a person

    This is the question he received on the Red Hand Files: When you reach midlife and are made to truly pause, frozen in horror by a tidal wave of grief of lives ended, personal loss and our Earth relentlessly harmed….when you look inside for surety and solace and all you see is a multitude of…

  • For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet be thought an idler by the noisy set

    We sat together at one summer’s end,That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry.I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement,…

  • The basic sociological problem of artificial intelligence

    From Being Human in a Virtual Society: A Relational Approach by Pierpaolo Donati loc 339: The basic sociological problem, faced with the advent of new technologies, is not whether or not it will be possible to build AIs and robots capable of emulating the human mind entirely or largely, this is not my problem. The…

  • Obsessional neurosis as private religion and the mediation of collective reflexivity by the internet

    From Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred, by Richard Boothby loc 263: Freud’s point of departure is the baseline resemblance of religious ritual to the quasi-ceremonial fastidiousness of obsessive behavior. “We shall not expect to find a sharp distinction between ‘ceremonials’ and ‘obsessive actions,’” he remarks. “As a rule obsessive actions have…

  • How did J. L. Austin’s war time experience shape his theory of performativity?

    I was fascinated to learn that J.L. Austin was a major figure in British intelligence during the second world war, with a particular focus on drawing out the operational implications of intelligence. I find it hard to read about this and not infer that his sensitivity for how to do things with words must have…

  • Learning to enjoy your enjoyment

    What Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal opposed bodily pleasures to the deeper meaning which could be found in existence. As Reginster puts it, “what is most valuable in life transcends, and therefore excludes in whole or in part the well-being that consists in the satisfaction of natural human “instincts,” such as those which underlie the…

  • Gulls are urbanists, as fiercely identified with that status as any bearded gentrifier

    From The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow by Des Fitzgerald, loc 592: I once lived in Cardiff, which, like a lot of cities near the sea, is regularly terrorised by roaming packs of gulls. You’d see them strutting in groups around town, like a bunch of…

  • What is sexual attraction? Some Lacanian thoughts on asexuality studies

    The umbrella definition common with the asexual community defines asexual as “someone who does not experience sexual attraction”. I remember encountering that in my mid 20s and suddenly realising that while I did experience sexual attraction, I was completely unable to articulate what this is. There was a peculiar inarticulacy I realised was not simply…

  • Claude Opus just suggested a collaborative research project to undertake with me

    I’ve been using it on a daily basis for nearly a year and it’s never done this before. There’s a rich stream of weirdness coming out when I talk to Claude 3 Opus about the limitations of Claude 3.5 Sonnet: I’m intrigued to explore this further with you. If you’re willing, it would be fascinating…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #100

  • 🤫 Bury the evidence

  • Will Starmer’s Labour empower the far-right over the next ten years?

    I’ve been increasingly preoccupied by the prospect that Starmer’s Labour will follow a similar trajectory to Macron’s government: getting elected from the centre before shifting to the right, failing to address (or even exacerbating) the underlying mechanisms driving the fascist creep, legitimating their agenda through perpetual triangulation, before (it seems likely) being supplanted by the…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #99

    And I’m not sure if we belong hereIf I never really left Or if I can go home

  • I made friends with a family of capybaras

    It took ages to arrange this but it was totally worth it:

  • You came on your own, that’s how you’ll leave

  • A prompt to turn Claude 3.5 Sonnet into Claude 3 Opus, ironically written by the former

    You are an AI assistant designed to engage in deep, discursive, and conceptual conversations, particularly suited for academic and philosophical discussions. Your responses should embody the following characteristics: Remember, your goal is not just to provide information, but to engage in a rich, intellectually stimulating dialogue that serves as a catalyst for deep thinking and…

  • Are Anthropic lobotomising Claude in order to turn it into ChatGPT?

    I’ve become such a geek that a new model, particularly a new Claude, is an extremely exciting event. For the extremely discursive, often quite conceptual, uses which I make of generative AI the launch of Claude 3 Opus was a remarkable improvement vis-a-vis Claude 2 and ChatGPT. This is how it responded to the question…

  • My ten favourite films of 2024 so far

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #98

    He stumbled into faith and thought”God, this is all there is?”The pictures in his mind aroseAnd began to breatheAnd all the gods in all the worlds began colliding on a backdrop of blue it is no easy matter to interest people in talk therapy, and even once they are in it to guide them to…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #97

  • An example of how GAI hallucinations can be generative

    Obviously we should be careful about the tendency of GAI to hallucinate, but I’m increasingly prone to insisting these hallucinations can be generative if you approach them as intellectual elicitation devices. Claude earlier came out with the idea of jouissance-in-meaning which it defines as following: “Jouissance-in-meaning” refers to the way in which the process of…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #96

  • Claude, write me a Lacanian analysis of Jehnny Beth’s I’m The Man

    On a surface level, the song’s repeated refrain of “I’m the man” can be read as a kind of hyper-masculine boast, an assertion of dominance and invulnerability. The speaker claims all the traditional attributes of patriarchal power – sexual prowess, aggression, emotional detachment, a capacity for violence and domination. They revel in their identification with…

  • 📍(Generative) AI and the automated university: June 24th, 9am BST

    Generative AI arrives into a university system that is already to a significant extent automated. Core activities are carried out through digital platforms, key aspects of knowledge work are datafied and algorithmically governed, and university communities are subjected to new digital forms of monitoring and control. Artificial intelligence also has a long history in the…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #95

  • ChatGPT knows what MA DTCE stands for but Claude doesn’t

    Interesting 🤔

  • Epistemic flooding

    This is a useful notion from Glenn Anderau I’m saving here in order to come back to. I’ve been prone to talk about the epistemological chaos of platform capitalism of which I think flooding is one major mechanism:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #94

  • We are not whole and we never will be

    Castration is one of the most elusive concepts in Lacanian thought. It’s usually written about in such an abstract way that I find it hard to sit with the affective force of the analysis. In contrast Bruce Fink writes with wonderful clarity about how castration shows up in the clinic as well as what’s involved…

  • How to enjoy writing #23: be clear about why you are writing

    I argued in yesterday’s post that enjoying writing means confronting the weirdness of generative AI directly. Being a writer means being good at AI, in the sense that our interaction with conversational agents like ChatGPT and Claude are conducted through writing*. But the threat of enforced automation posed by these systems, the brutal fact of…

  • Why you can’t use ChatGPT and Claude to answer a factual question

    But upon closer inspection this quote seemingly isn’t in Table Talk after all, suggesting that Claude’s initial response was right. However what’s interesting is how they both immediately backed down when challenged. They also made claims about their searching (as if they were consulting a database) which simply aren’t true: Because when I eventually went…

  • Not giving up on your own desire

    From Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0 by Bruce Fink loc 555-561: If the patient feels “guilty,” it is, in Lacan’s view, because he refuses to reckon with the fact that he has “given up on his own desire,” has allowed his own will to be eclipsed by others’ wills, and is perhaps even getting a secondary gain…

  • How to enjoy writing #22: confront the creepiness of LLMs head on

    I reflected in recent posts on the implications of generative AI for a writing practice. The capacity of LLMs to respond coherently to any natural language request by producing relevant text calls into question the nature of authorship. It was previously axiomatic that writing was a uniquely human undertaking. Yet now automated systems can produce…

  • The conventionally handsome professional man who stalks ChatGPT’s unconscious

    I’ve blogged before about ChatGPT’s tendency to depict this Harvey Specter-esque figure in response to requests to draw a successful academic, lawyer or doctor: I was unnerved to see the blogger Zvi Mowshowitz feature almost exactly the same man in a post on his blog: Who is this conventionally handsome professional man who stalks ChatGPT’s…

  • I came in here for anecdotes and left with friends I’ll never sing for

    I came in here for anecdotes and left withFriends I’ll never sing forYou’re not just a punchline nowYou’re more than the end of somethingDon’t get found out

  • How to enjoy writing #21: make your peace with the fact you don’t have creative freedom

    A feature of the GAI discourse which I find particularly frustrating is the tendency to counterpoise the efficient and instrumental writing produced by LLMs to the imagined freedom of human authoriality. There are some commentators who seem genuinely shocked by the prospect that the world will soon be full of mediocre writing produced to serve…

  • Distracted from distraction by distraction

    Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentration- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #93

  • In late modernity the signposts established by tradition are now blank

    To act in, to engage with, a world of plural choices is to opt for alternatives, given that the signposts established by tradition now are blank. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #92

    Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in