My kid’s school ensuring none of its students become humanities PhDs

A student asked GPT if its summaries of a class text were distorted. It replied “If distortion is inevitable in communication, then maybe my “blurriness” isn’t just a flaw—it’s a mirror held up to how humans process and reshape information every day.”

Now in Portuguese translation, and open access, an essay Francesco Casetti and I wrote on "Screens": periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/territoriose...

"In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes." --Theodor Adorno

why do I have to acknowledge if I used an LLM in preparing the text but my colleagues don't have to note when their spouses and research assistants helped with research and writing ?

The concept of "slop" is going to fit neatly into the space that "mass culture" occupied in 20c theory. It expresses a fear that culture has become liquid, abject, homogenous, replicating and spreading itself like a slime mold.

When I try to make sense of the kind of language produced by large language models (LLMs) I think of Saussure's passing remark that language is a "a machine that will always run no matter the damages that may be inflicted upon it."

HOTTE LOCAL SINGLES NEAR UNTO THEE ARE YNTERESTID YN VERNACULAR REWRITINGES OF THE TROY LEGEND, HENDECASYLLABIQUE VERSE, LIGHT FALCONRY, HERBALISM. JOYNE *COURTR* THE BEST APP FOR COURTLYE LOVE.

Love this review, and glad to see it also bring in @bernarddionysius.bsky.social, whose _Code_ deeply shaped my thinking about the history of cultural theory. If you put these two books together, I think it makes a very coherent story about where theory came from and why we need it right now.

My review of the excellent Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by @bernarddionysius.bsky.social is out now in the new and very exciting @histsocialscience.bsky.social! Available open access here~~ muse.jhu.edu/article/952248

The new OpenAI model announced today is quite wild. It is essentially Google's Deep Research idea with multistep reasoning, web search, *and* the o3 model underneath (as far as I know). It sometimes takes a half hour to answer. Let me show you an example. 1/x

is this genre theory? I think it might be!

A while back I did a performance of my 'Drift as a planetary phenomenon' for the excellent Panel on Planetary Thinking at the University of Gießen (www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties...). They've now released the video (40 mins). www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YWo...

I was filling out a social security form in Swedish. I had to check one of two boxes. Google Translate renders the two options as (a) I am a decent (b) I am a cretin

I haven't gotten much out of this website. Is there something I should do to make it more interesting?

I like this line by Bob Dylan from the Rolling Thunder Revue movie: “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.”

‘I’ is a linguistic convention to facilitate communication and should not be interpreted as a sign of self-awareness or consciousness. --ChatGPT

A structuralist analysis of the bong, as differential ordering of the binaries fire and water, earth and air—and the functional role of the universal taboo on drinking the bong water.

wrote and recorded some new lectures on LLMs

The best concert I've seen in the last 20 or so years was KRS-One in Berlin, around 2014 or 2015, in a small club in Berlin. His charisma, elegance, poise, power, rhythm, timing, musical sensibility was off the charts -- like James Brown at the Apollo. If you get a chance, go see him.

Foucault v Twitter: those who have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so the sound of their disapproval may be heard

one of the best books in media studies this year! a tour de force in blue humanities

I can’t find Beatrice Fazi on here yet, but until she gets here, her pretty dazzling new paper on synthesis in #generativeAI www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...

Hubert Dreyfus on what Heidegger suggested as an alternative to life in the thrall of modern technology: "Heidegger holds that we must learn to appreciate...practices such as friendship, backpacking into the wilderness, and drinking the local wine with friends." #EcoHeidegger #CrunchyBeing

Proud to have slipped a "Weekend at Bernie's" reference into my essay on AI. Criticism would benefit from fewer invocations of puppets, marionettes, and epiphenomena, to allow for more lively shootouts to great comedic corpses.

"Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep." --Michel Foucault

Hier kann man die Einleitung zum von Moritz Hiller und mir herausgegebenen Sonderband von Text+Kritik mit dem Titel "Das Subjekt des Schreibens: Über Große Sprachmodelle" lesen: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Twitter is like the USA, Bluesky is like Sweden

recorded some lectures on LLMs and the encounter of limits

"the structure of [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason should be thought of in terms of various materials falling into a machine where they are then processed; and that what then emerges as the result of this processing is my knowledge." -Adorno (quoted in Bates, "Artificial History")

A lot of academic criticism reminds me of Adorno's remark about Kafka's The Castle: "No sooner has the surveyor driven the bothersome assistants from his room in the inn than they climb back through the window….The hero is too tired to drive them away again."

Claude Lévi-Strauss on the claim that the absence of a word in a culture speaks volumes about its epistemology: "In every language...discourse and syntax supply indispensable means of supplementing deficiencies of vocabulary....In fact, the delimitation of concepts is different in every language"