The clicks that the animals make share at least one property with human language

CETI scientists have discovered vowel and diphthong-like patterns in sperm whale communication! Read: bit.ly/3WSn9rc By: @begus.bsky.social, Ronald Sprouse, Andrej Leban, Miles Silva & Shane Gero. @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social, @umich.edu, @carleton.ca, @csail.mit.edu Animation: Meghan Fenske

What it means to be human in the age of AI and biotechnology? Take a look at the English translation of my speech from the Science Day celebration in Slovenia: medium.com/@begus.nina/...

I'm getting these markers from Santa

How will deeply analog, traditional institutions, such as Juilliard, adapt to AI? May I suggest:

Slovenia is celebrating the Day of Science together with Martinmas…. which is why the President is on the left💡, and I’m on the right🍷? We’ll talk about science in the age of AI and reels - our poster itself was reelified. Thank you to 300+ who registered!

Great talk…

Our research downstreams into pedagogy! My talk on Language, AI, and Education has been featured by Texas Language Center. I present pedagogical approaches to creative writing, technical and qualitative interpretability techniques, and narrative capacities of LLMs. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Ql...

Fun fact: Did you know that your 2nd grader is tested onreading nonce words?

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

Our research downstreams into pedagogy! My talk on Language, AI, and Education has been featured by Texas Language Center. I present pedagogical approaches to creative writing, technical and qualitative interpretability techniques, and narrative capacities of LLMs. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Ql...

New arrival! @ninabegus.bsky.social

Pascal's triable

Language can be tricky to parse without context. For instance, the sentence “Rowan fed his pet chicken” is ambiguous. Is the chicken Rowan’s pet or his pet’s meal? Some AI models can recognize the syntactic differences between these two possible meanings.

Recursion, the linguistic ability to embed phrases within phrases, is perhaps the defining characteristic of the human mind. It also shows up in nature. www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-first-a...

Across history, linguists have insisted that language sets humans apart from other species. But a new study demonstrating AI’s startlingly complex “metalinguistic” skills threatens to throw mankind’s exclusivity out the window. www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-first-a...

Excited to launch my book Artificial Humanities in a conversation with Ted Chiang and James Yu at the Commonwealth Club! Fiction is the new laboratory for testing, evaluating, and developing AI. www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2025-...

Spent a day at this wonderful initiative by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University and supported by Mellon Foundation! Feel free to reach out to the leadership if you have ideas on how to help their mission or how they can help your research efforts. publicinterestcorpus.org

Are you hosting a workshop or conference series that would like to publish peer-reviewed proceedings or other materials in the Anthology of Computers and the Humanities? Reach out to Taylor Arnold @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for more details!

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that. So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more. Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort! bit.ly/ach-anthology

Excited to launch my book Artificial Humanities in a conversation with Ted Chiang and James Yu at the Commonwealth Club! Fiction is the new laboratory for testing, evaluating, and developing AI. www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2025-...

This Data Through Design program looks really cool. You can submit a proposal to make an art exhibition with data from NYC's open data portal. They give $900 stipends. Proposals are due November 2. datathroughdesign.com/2026

Spent a day at this wonderful initiative by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University and supported by Mellon Foundation! Feel free to reach out to the leadership if you have ideas on how to help their mission or how they can help your research efforts. publicinterestcorpus.org

On Fictions and Frames in Cal Alumni Association: bit.ly/4ndI6re

This Thursday we’re hosting Xuenan Cao talking about How LLMs Extrapolate. Starting Berkeley time 4.10 pm at Stephens Hall 470 cstms.berkeley.edu/how-llms-ext...

Halloween prep

Artificial Humanities word cloud Not only gives away the contents but also the process of writing the book during the summer :) Book’s partly up on Google Books: books.google.com/books?id=Iqm... Open access available from Nov 25 on

Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered." culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones. Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs. A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language? Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

“Every language is a world” can now be translated into endless new constructed languages. Conlangcrafter is an LLM pipeline that generates new languages and their grammars. A language with only vowels? Languages with common triple center embedding? An impossible language?

Information density in languages

Somehow forgot to mention we also got a grant to study cultural latent spaces in collaboration with French scholars Antonio Somaini and Alexandre Gefen. We’ll make sure to advertise the many public events - the exhibition, the panel, the volume - in the next two years!

Excited to learn that @hannesbajohr.de and I got the Peder Sather grant to study AI and narration in collaboration with The Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, led by Jill Walker Rettberg. Our goal is to bridge humanities and CS approaches to AI and narration.

A PhD position in Stockholm addressing one of the biggest challenges in today’s technology are AI’s energy demands.

it’s delightful to be receiving this book when i’m wrestling with another essay about close reading because opening to virtually any page of this book and reading some or all of is a guaranteed win, clarifying and inspiring!

Preorder: www.amazon.com/Artificial-H...

AI is reaching the level of complexity where quantitative evaluations are often not feasible anymore. The Artificial Humanities book outlines how humanistic methodology can be used to approach and evaluate AI today. The decade of the humanities is here! @ninabegus.bsky.social

Landing in… Bergen. Maybe. Probably.

Somehow forgot to mention we also got a grant to study cultural latent spaces in collaboration with French scholars Antonio Somaini and Alexandre Gefen. We’ll make sure to advertise the many public events - the exhibition, the panel, the volume - in the next two years!

Excited to learn that @hannesbajohr.de and I got the Peder Sather grant to study AI and narration in collaboration with The Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, led by Jill Walker Rettberg. Our goal is to bridge humanities and CS approaches to AI and narration.

My avid reader, at almost 10 years-old: “Big boring book.” They’ve pretty much grown together!

Ready for the mahjong craze

Good morning in chimpanzee

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

10 years after the initial idea, Artificial Humanities is here! Thanks so much to all who have preordered it. I hope you enjoy reading it and find this research approach as generative as I do. More to come!

A rough schedule of upcoming events. Not too tight, would be happy to add more