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
CNN: Women bought technology for $55 billion last year. Men for $44 billion. In the US, I assume.
Nearly three-quarters of women surveyed by the industry group complained about being ignored, patronized or offended by sales people when shopping for electronics. Forty percent of the women said they were treated better when accompanied by a man.
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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.
Sheila Webber
I can’t resist adding my experience when buying a laptop at a major UK chain (PC World) 6 months ago. In fact I was accompanied by my husband, but he kept quiet throughout the interaction with the sales people, and the only good thing they did was NOT address their remarks to him.
1) We looked at the laptops. One looked pretty good value for what it was (I’d been comparing prices on the net) and I was keen to get it there and then.
2) I told the assistant “I’d like that one” He went and fetched it.
3) We sat down and he took some details. He then started into a spiel telling me about insurance options in case the laptop went wrong and I cut him off before he could finish it, saying I wasn’t interested. He’d shown me onscreen what the prices were – several hundred pounds for three years – and they seemed to me excessive. The first year is covered anyway, and after that you start to think – if I’m paying 300 or 400 pounds, I could put that to a new computer. And the chances are that it WON’T go wrong in the first 3 years. The assistant gabbled through the rest of his spiel anyway and then left us for a moment.
3) He came back with his manager. The manager said that I shouldn’t dismiss the insurance options so lightly and started to go through them again, talking to me as if I knew nothing about computers, and must be refusing the insurance because I was ignorant. Again I said firmly that I wasn’t interested, I just wanted to pay for the laptop. At this point the manager made the classic remark that “If it goes wrong, it isn’t like fixing a dishwasher, you know”. Ironically, I don’t actually have a dishwasher, but I HAVE been using computers for (gulp) over 20 years now. At no point did anyone ask about my own level of expertise. At this point I was ready to say “Stuff your computer” but they did actually give up then, and I did want to get the computer that day, so I just paid and went. I assume they make their money out of frightening people into taking out overpriced insurance.
I enjoy your blog, by the way
Sheila
David
DOes this mean they bought more, or perhaps just paid more?
Jill
Oh good grief, I sure hope they actually got more as well… no, I would think it means they bought more. Or better.