I guess I’m carving out a space focused on AI metaphors. First it was working with Anna Mills to suggest “mirage” rather than “hallucination” as a metaphor for when AI gets it wrong. Now I’m fixated on this thing we keep hearing about the importance of keeping humans “in the loop” with AI. We need to stop this kind of talk.
AI
Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations
There is a deep disorder in the discourse of generative artificial intelligence, aka AI — or what I like to call sparkling intelligence, because everyone is using ✨✨✨ emojis and icons to signify AI. All joking aside, the disorder in AI discourse is the way everyone keeps talking about hallucinations when AI makes mistakes, leading us to anthropomorphize AI and imagine that AI both experiences reality and sometimes loses it. Anyone who knows how AI really works knows that’s wrong.
The Mirage of AI Hallucinations
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
Putting the “Umph” in AI’s Triumph of Theory
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
"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