Tag: Artificial Intelligence
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Vibes: From new age to new algorithms
The other day I was talking with a friend and moaning about writer’s block. My friend said: “You are into words and metaphors and stuff. What’s one small language puzzle that’s been nagging at you lately?” I blurted out: ‘vibes’. My friend replied: “Write about that then”. Lots of people have written about that word…
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…
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Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that…
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Food for thought: AI and culinary metaphors
Just before Christmas 2024 I read an article in Nature about AI running out of data. It said that “The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.” Then, on Christmas Eve Aparna Nair said on Bluesky: “I know academics who…
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Playing with AI/Playing with fire
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change…
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Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a…
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Intelligence
Since the recent explosion of discussions around artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, even super-intelligence, people have started to wonder what intelligence actually is… A rather futile enterprise in my humble opinion, as ‘intelligence’ is a word like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ that has endless meanings, but there we are. Some scholars come at it from an…
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AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors
I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means…
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From large language models to DNA language models
In October 2023 I wrote a blog post about a convergence of large language models or LLMs and DNA. LLMs are subset of generative AI that focus on generating and understanding human language and producing human-like text. DNA is often compared to a language or a code. In the post I quoted a representative of…
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Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology
In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got…
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