The wait is (almost) over! @ghostdoc2026.bsky.social is coming to audiences on March 27th! Screenings and rentals are available via Kinema, and the film will stream free on PBS and YouTube this fall. Details at: notaidoc.com
Thank you for this, @evangreer.bsky.social !
Threw together a quick and dirty folk-punk basement studio version of my new anti-ICE protest song "Come Thru Us."
It's only on Bandcamp! Digital download is $5 and 100% of proceeds benefit LUCE: Immigrant Justice Network.
The main character syndrome is intense.
Check out the trailer for GHOST IN THE MACHINE, coming soon to PBS and your screen!
This feature documentary features 40 generous and brilliant AI experts, historians, philosophers, sociologists, journalists and thinkers discussing their work with @valerieveatch.bsky.social.
Thanks!
Wait no -- that's a fake link. That's not the actual subtitle of the book and why promote amazon anyway?
Our book is here:
thecon.ai
The book is called The AI Con, not The Generative AI Con, though.
I don't think I've seen snow on them before (this is late for snow here) but they are pretty cold-adapted, too.
Snow! On my cherry blossoms!
Some family friend gave me the good advice to peruse the course catalogue during the summer before my first year at UC Berkeley. I spotted and circled something called "Introduction to Language" and ended up enrolling to fulfill a dist. credit my second term.
Not infrequently, something I post is subjected to hostile quote tweets (or screencaps) leading to a wave of AI boosters discussing me/my work, or rather pretending to, since it never actually reflects understanding of what I do.
A short 🧵>>
I really wish that my colleagues in NLP who are getting all worked up about the one post from this thread that escaped containment had enough curiosity to look at the context it was from, this this part:
That is from @hypervisible.blacksky.app !
It definitely speaks to the value of #lingcomm projects like Lingthusiasm that make it easier for folks to find the field!
LINGUIST List, for their 2013 (or so) Fun(d) Drive asked me to tell this story in greater length. That survives here:
web.archive.org/web/20131011...
At the time, I'd thought that a major constructed of the first year of as many language courses as possible would be ideal. This was even better!
Some family friend gave me the good advice to peruse the course catalogue during the summer before my first year at UC Berkeley. I spotted and circled something called "Introduction to Language" and ended up enrolling to fulfill a dist. credit my second term.
Admittedly, the bsky algo makes it hard to get to this post from the one everyone is excited about, but still.
I really wish that my colleagues in NLP who are getting all worked up about the one post from this thread that escaped containment had enough curiosity to look at the context it was from, this this part:
... which is something because I haven't posted on Xitter since early Nov 2024.
So this is only happening because people are screenshotting my posts here (or on other platforms, I guess) for their on Xitter audience.
The number of folks who have taken my previous thread as an invitation to keep arguing with me... y'all are exhausting.
I don't, clearly. Regarding grammar engineering, relevance for me has to do with linguistic concerns. Regarding the societal impact of language technology, relevance is grounded in the prevalent harms, the systems that enable them, and the concerns of the people experiencing them.
In all of this the word "irrelevant" is especially interesting, because it presupposes some arbiter of relevance---and these tech bros seem to think I orient to the same arbiter as they do.
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The core issues---studying how to build reliable language technology, how to use computers to been understand how language works, how to evaluate language technology, and how to reason about how language technology sits in its social context---all remain.
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And more broadly, LLMs haven't made the field of computational linguistics irrelevant, even if so much of the tech landscape is trying replace better constructed/better evaluated/more reliable language technology with the synthetic text extruding machines.
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LLMs haven't made that irrelevant, because it has never been about automatically creating well-formed (but communicatively empty) text.
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I have never worked on "GOFAI" ("Good Old-Fashioned AI") because "AI" has never been a project I have been invested in. I work (among other things) on grammar engineering, as a means of using computational methods to better understand how languages work.
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They're all false of course, and tedious.
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The remarks are meant, I think, as an attempt to undermine my public scholarship a) about the actual harms being done in the production/sales/name of "AI" and b) pushing back against AI hype.
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