The mornings have been lighter and lighter, thank heaven, though the zero and subzero temperatures have been disappointing. Two more miles this morning, anyway.
David Weinberger reports his extended interaction with ChatGPT which pivots on the topic of cultural situatedness. He elicits from his LLM interlocutor the acknowledgement that it operates on cultural assumptions (about food and ethics) that belong to the global North and West, but the moment that strikes me arrives toward the end, when it looks as though ChatGPT begins to repeat back to David the analysis that he had provided earlier in the conversation — that, in other words, ChatGPT seems to have assimilated David’s perspective into its database of responses. I find that both eerie and reassuring (in that the so-called AI seems still to be mostly just an extremely high-powered chatbot).
Speaking of AI, Mark Liberman wonders what accounts for a blogger at Medium suggesting that a particular idea — that Nickelback is a mediocre hack-rock act — has ‘boroughed’ into our consciousness. I note that the author seems to havve misspelled the name of the infamous WWII German dictator in the very first sentence, which seems to reflect poorly at least on their editing skills, if not their spelling overall. I wonder, though —is there some positive value in making obvious careless errors in such writing, as a measure of human authorship, over against AI writing that would never misspell Aldof Heltir….