The Mirage of AI Hallucinations

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A photograph of mirages in a desert under a hazy sky showing some distant outcroppings reflected in what looks like water beyond a rocky foreground.

Photo credit: “Mirages in the Sahara Desert” by Meg Gilbert is licensed via CC BY-SA.

On 9 July 2024, I gave a talk to the Portland, Oregon Product Tank based on my collaboration with Anna Mills on the terminology and metaphors we use to describe artificial intelligence (AI) outputs when they don’t match our expectations of shared reality. You can view the slides from the presentation and coming soon, a … Read more

Jupyter BOAT

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Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on some water on top of page ornamentation with an image of the planet Jupiter in the sky.

Collage of "Hubble Spies Spooky Shadow on Jupiter's Giant Eye (color)" by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, licensed via CC BY 2.0 and a detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I’m now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a list of basic information about a collection of works.

Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT) 1.0 (now 1.4)

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Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on water on top of some page ornamentation.

Detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured license/attribution statements.

Putting the “Umph” in AI’s Triumph of Theory

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A tidal seascape of dark forks stuck in the sand with distant clouds.

Tidal Forks by Nate Angell generated using DALL-E with the prompt "a sea of forks being bent by tidal flows in the style of Dalí", shared via CC BY 4.0.

“In a just world, every article about GPT-4 would nod toward Barthes and Foucault.” — Ted Underwood, The Empirical Triumph of Theory I’m late to the party, I know, but I recently became aware of Ted Underwood and his truly awesome work. I couldn’t resist reading when I saw his post The Empirical Triumph of … Read more

Welcome to the #AInthropocene

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A giant robotic limb made of crumbling stone dominates the left side of an image, while in the background, a shadowy human figure standing facing away in rocky landscape, looks out on a moon or asteroid caught hurtling over distant light blue water.

"The AInthropocene" by Nate Angell was created using the DALL-E 2 generative AI service with the prompt "Picture a future geologic age in which humans and artificial intelligence coexist and collaborate to shape the Earth and its ecosystems in ways that were previously unimaginable" and is dedicated to the public domain via CC0.

Inspired while reading Tressie McMillan Cottom’s 20 Dec 2022 NY Times post, “Human This Christmas“, I tweeted about the “AInthropocene”, which I thought would be an already existent portmanteau word that combines the idea of the Anthropocene geologic age with the “AI” abbreviation for artificial intelligence — putting the “AIn’t” in the Anthropocene if you … Read more