Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
There’s an interesting and unusually poignant discussion over at Elouise’s about writing intensely personal blog posts. A suggestion I like is that once published (abstracted) feelings are no longer personal. Everyone feels them. That would be the difference between publishing what Jonathan calls truth and publishing facts.
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I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]
My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]
Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]
I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]
I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]
This LLM-generated paper demonstrates how LLMs fail to cite core scholarship on a topic but generate misaligned citations systematically.
jon
Jean Baudrillard has something similar to this in his discussion of the Lourds – a TV show which ran in the early 70s. I think it’s in Simulations. He talks about the erasure of the viewing frame so experience /feelings becomes shared.
Norman
The mind, potentially, is an amazingly malleable entity. The primary limits to what we permit it do come back to the extent to which we want to let it wander off in particular directions, or are willing to let it adopt any one of a wide range of particular “positions”.
Given, as we are, what no other species has, an intellectual awareness of ourselves, combined with the impossibility of ever understanding existence itself, it’s not surprising to find people interested in experimenting with “finding their personal meanings”, or trying to cross and recross the borders between what they see as “truth” and “reality”.