BBC Radio 4 – Word of Mouth, Chatbots 1

Like lots of other folk I’ve been reading plenty about Large Language Models, AI & Chatbots and playing with some of the toys.

I really liked Professor Bender’s approach and method. I also found this a very easy listen. My mind has tended to wander off when reading blogs post about AI. Very clear on the “not intelligent” and the risks associated with chatbots trained on large piles of language.

And specifically the things that they’re predicting is what would be a plausible next word given all the preceding words here and then again and then again and again.

And so that’s linguistically interesting that once you get to billions of words of text, there’s enough information in there just in the distribution of words to stick with things that are both grammatical and seemingly coherent.

So that’s a cool observation and it’s dangerous because we tend to react to grammatical, fluent, coherent, seeming text as authoritative and reliable and valuable.

So instead of talking about automatic speech recognition, I prefer to talk about automatic transcription because that describes what we’re using it for and doesn’t attribute any cognition to the system that is doing the task for us.2

 

  1. I subscribe to the RSS feed of this BBC radio program as a podcast, pity you can’t find the feed on the webpage.
  2. Ironically I used Aiko to get the text of the podcast for the quotes: “transcription is powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model running locally on your device”
Replied to a tweet by The Daily Stillness @livedtime (twitter.com)
#tds1856 Invisible to you, obvious to someone else

Looks like a fascinating read. I didn’t find an expert. I find I learn to notice with a hint. I’ve walking same bits of countryside for years. Recently I’ve got my eye in for lizards. I see more & more basking or wriggling in the grass. #tds1856

Common Lizard

Replied to a tweet by The Daily Stillness (@livedtime) (twitter.com)
#tds1850 Guesswork matters https://daily.stillweb.org/tds1850/

failure and hope are the very things that have propelled human progress to date

the loss of the random and serendipity are worrying too. #tds1850

Loved the linked photoset of kids playing, outdoors & sometimes, somewhat risky.

How does your daily engagement with different apps and websites look like? 

I’ve been musing on this one for a few days. A few years ago I wrote an AppleScript that would periodically do the F9 show all your windows and dump a screenshot. On Sunday afternoon I dug it out and ran it from just befoe 4pm until 11pm. I pulled these together in a gif.

I am not sure how much this tells me other than I have a lot of windows open most of the time. Luckly it does not show how many browser tab I am using…

coffee gatha

Write a Gatha Poem | The Daily Stillness

A while back I tried Idle Pleasure of the day: Wait for the tea to brew from The Daily Stillness and was quite horrified at how it turned out.

I’ve a pretty good routine for this: Grind coffee; while it buzzes I put water in the pot; I then add the coffee and put the pot on the stove; while it heats I prepare the cups; and pour when it bubbles.

It takes a while to boil and bubble up. I guess I usually look at my phone or read the paper, standing still that day i note that my attention is racing and I can hardly stand still, I shift from foot to foot to ‘keep busy’!

Since then I occasionally try and check my posture, relax and breath whicle the coffee is brewing, perhaps this gatha will help.

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Antique PBX

We found a lovely post that helped us reflect on life beyond the digital. Joel Dueck tells us about this item of furniture,

The secretary, a compartmentalized working-space, may be thought of as the RSS reader of the past.

from: The RSS reader of days gone by | The Daily Stillness

The linked post, is really only a paragraph but the idea in it is wonderful.Â

Today, I wrote a post on my 1999.io blog, read my RSS reader, tweeteted, answered tweets, found some  lovely stuff. I worked on a website and went back an forward many times on email.

The image of a bureau captures this delightfully. I imagine a webpage version that looks as organised as the image posted.

Image Credit: Antique PBX | Germany 2012 | Thomas Quine | Flickr Creative Commons — Attribution 2.0 Generic — CC BY 2.0