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
I found some of your life: someone found a memory card from a camera in a taxi, and is posting a photo a day, narrating as though he’s the photographer. Ethically really iffy (would you like it if it was your photos?) but such a cool idea!
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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.
Scott
Interesting — one of the local radio stations here is reading one page of a “found Boardwalk diary” each day. Could be the latest wave in reality media.
Anne
It reminds me of a film or documentary someone once made. I can’t recall any details except it was about finding someone’s address book in the street and then phoning all the contacts listed therein to build up a picture of one person’s life.
Sindre
Sadly, it’s now shut down
Jill
Ah. That would be because it was Slashdotted and it didn’t really prove too hard to find the owner of the photos. Who presumably DIDN’T want them on the internet. Neither would I.
nick
Clearly the right way to do this project would have been to take the photos yourself, pretend you found them, post them one at a time with “made up” comments as if you found them, and wait for the firestorm of controversy over the ethical and legal dimensions of your artwork to erupt. And then, as they would say on Slashdot, profit!
Matt Locke
The address book project mentioned above is by the fantastic french artist Sophie Calle. Called ‘l’homme au carnet’ it appeared as a series of interviews published daily in the french newspaper ‘le monde’. She approached people listed in the address book she found in the street, then published the interviews, building up an intriguing composite picture of the man who owned the book (some people were surprised they were in there, as they hardly knew him. Others were ex-friends and lovers).
Eventually, the man recognised himself (or heard of the project from friends) and called on le monde to stop it and make reparations. In a typically french compromise, Calle offered to expose herself in the same way she had exposed him, by printing naked pictures taken of her during her brief time as a burlesque dancer, in the same newspaper. The man accepted the proposal, and the pictures formed the final element of the project.
The best resource for Calle’s work is ‘did you see me?’ a collection of her work, incuding l’homme au carnet’, or ‘double game’, a collaboration with paul auster. Paul Auster used ‘l’homme…’, and others by sophie calle, for the oeuvre of a fictional character called ‘maria’ in his book ‘leviathan’. He also invented a few new works, so Calle created a new project to perform these invented works, closing the circle between the oeuvre of Calle herself and her fictional ‘double’ Maria.
Jill
Thanks Matt! Reading a fuller description I realise I *have* heard of this, but I’d forgotten the details and the names. I wonder whether the creator of Ifoundyourlife considered offering nude pics of himself in return for the breach of privacy?