Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations

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

Photo credit: “Mirage” by bobrayner, here cropped, is licensed via CC BY.

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.

What Is AIn Author?

Reading Eryk Salvaggio’s 12 Jan 2025 post “Data Prior to Language: If the author is dead, why isn’t the LLM?” I was immediately drawn into this compelling exploration of the current context of synthetic meaning making with what I like to call ✨ “sparkling intelligence” ✨ in relation to the ideas surrounding Roland Barthes’ influential … Read more

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

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

Rant on PoMo

An anthropomorphized hammerhead shark in a carpenter's outfit, hammering in nails on an unfinished building using his head.

man this guy is totally nailing it right now from the BoJack Celebrity Tumble Site, ~2016.

I’m posting a complete, slightly edited version of a 31-part Twitter thread I posted on 18 July 2019 so there’s a record of what I wrote in one place where people can read, comment on, and annotate it. I invite you to do all that below. I’ve edited it here slightly only in order to correct typos in the original, to expand abbreviations that were necessary just to make it fit in tweets, to add links for context, and to reduce somewhat the intensity of my ranty swearing (this is a family blog after all).

Everyone should take what follows recognizing its original genre: the late-night Twitter rant. It’s certainly not a great introduction to the complex ideas and bodies of work it references. It simplifies a lot of what I hope is my more nuanced thinking about these topics. Its rhetoric is a bit incendiary and could even feel insulting to you, the reader. I bet you are a better person than the imaginary audience of my original rant. Certainly the mini-argument I make at the end about why this flawed idea circulates in the USA is incomplete, and maybe even totally wrong. I do hope the rant can serve as an easy-to-digest argument against what I think is a common, but flawed idea about “postmodernism” and its role in shaping contemporary culture. And maybe we can add some depth to it through annotation and further conversation.

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Mothering Digital

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”). Held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated networked computer systems they were developing, including the mouse, hypertext, and real-time collaborative editing. The MOAD has become a notorious event in computer and internet history, both presaging and shaping the digital technology environment we live in now.

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