A little last minute, but you can tune into @Northeastern’s @NUlabTMN spring conference on a critical topic, “Generative AI: Creative Potentials and Ethical Responsibilities,” in 30 minutes, at 9:45am EDT, all are welcome just register at this link
A little last minute, but you can tune into @Northeastern’s @NUlabTMN spring conference on a critical topic, “Generative AI: Creative Potentials and Ethical Responsibilities,” in 30 minutes, at 9:45am EDT, all are welcome just register at this link
Love the monogram of Jane Lumley (1537-1578), Renaissance scholar and translator blogs.bl.uk/digitised…
According to the Washington Post, my website, dancohen.org, ranks #181,339 out of 15 million websites that were crawled to create the training set for many AI text tools. 120K words from my blog/newsletter are evidently swimming around in those chatbots.
I wrote this piece for @TheAtlantic not to argue the finer points of copyright law, but to highlight that books exist in an ecosystem that should balance the needs of writers and readers, of publishers and libraries
Some commentary on my Atlantic article on the fight between libraries and publishers over ebooks, from @ayjay
For The Atlantic, I wrote about last week’s ruling in an important case that may shape the future of reading—and likely diminish the role of libraries in that future
Windshield was crystalline art this morning
New issue of my newsletter is out: “Can Engineered Writing Ever Be Great?” — Will tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) ever be able to create truly great and unique prose, rather than plausible-sounding mimicry?
Early sample of our 2021 Syrah was so good that we decided to get another 200 lbs of grapes from the same small vineyard in Oregon for a late winter crush this weekend.
🙄
In the healthy exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, Twitter’s unhealthy metrics of engagement should have been discarded as well.
Our kids just got home from college and we asked them to add anything to the shopping list that they needed and that wasn’t in the house
The 2022 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Whiteboard Writing goes to
An interview with Christine McVie from 1987, from our Archives and Special Collections
In my digital history class we used new AI tools to see how easy it would be to forge historical documents, e.g., to create fake photographs of D-Day, and the results were scary.
Last night we started this year’s winemaking with some very nice-looking Pinot Noir and Syrah grapes from the Columbia River Gorge.
An interesting study that uses a trained model to analyze Instagram posts from popular tourist sites in England, finding that “tourist photographs taken in western countries tend to avoid the presence of people” and “attempt to construct idealised images”
Checking out the beta over at post.news, where I am, unsurprisingly, @dancohen. (Thx @katzish/@karaswisher for the heads up.) Strikes me as having similar goals to @pressfwd, but for a general, rather than scholarly, audience.
“I am under the table in case you have extra food”
One-stop shopping in 2022: Amazon
One-stop shopping in 1973: that one block of LA serving all of your chess, fur coat, and tropical fish needs
fracti
For years now my “tweets” (if you are reading this on Twitter) have been syndicated from social.dancohen.org, which uses the excellent micro.blog. (Also mirrored on Mastodon.) Easy peasy lemon squeezy, c’mon over y’all.
writer: “AI, turn this outline into an essay”
~10-page essay appears~
reader: “AI, turn this essay into an outline”
“My children contributed nothing to this project and were not for them, I would certainly have finished it several years earlier. They are not even particularly interested…Nevertheless, I love them a lot more than this book, and I regret nothing.”—@lmullen in his acknowledgements
After a hiatus, I’m back with a new edition of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity: “Humane Ingenuity 45: What AI Tells Us About Art” — A discussion of text-to-image AI tools like DALL•E and Midjourney, with cameos by Herman Melville and Dolly Parton
