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 think my biggest problem with Flock is that it connects the aspects of my digital life too much. I removed my Flickr feed from my blog because I don’t want my students and colleagues and neighbours to find my photos. I use del.icio.us for links that I’m happy for the world to see – if it’s integrated with my browser, I’m going to need an option for private links as well.
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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.
This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]
JoseAngel
So, Jill, you’ve felt the shive of what I like to call the “Apocalypse of Total Communication”?
Have a look at this, another shiverer:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, aech straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (Opening words of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, 1926)
JoseAngel
Oops, “shiver”. °Shiver!
kawazu
that’s probably the sensitive point about all these new concepts of integrating things… As William Gibson used to write (guess it was in “idoru”, though I’m not sure…): looking at a network, we see that someone is “alive” merely by the fact that he/she is a vital node creating amounts and amounts of information for us to see what he/she is up to, how he/she feels, lives, thinks, works. and we get a pretty clear picture. we even know when someone, well, dies – that’s when this node in the network stops producing information. guess there need to be some more serious talks about secrecy, about privacy and “trusted” computing way beyond technologies like tcpa, drm and the like. people need to be able to trust the machines they use for their daily life…
Alexander
I agree especially with the last point, Jill — I couldn’t believe it that Flock really just offers the choice between publishing none of my favorite links and all of them. I’m not even using that many bookmarks, but this is a show-stopper.
Arne Olav
… you could always choose not to tag the favourites..? This will not put them on del.ico.us, and you could sort them as regular bookmarks, or collections.
I agree that Flock is incomplete, and that the integration of the different elements isn’t working optimally. But Flock is not even in beta yet. I think this a step in the right direction; I’d love an interface that would gather as much of my social stuff as possible; this is what I do when I’m online, I really don’t relate to the metaphors of surfing, crawling or navigating.