Rikker Dockum

Header of blog post with image of Emilie du Chatelet and the heading "Human creativity in the age of text generators"

In early 2023 I pitched this piece at a couple of glam journals ideophone.org/human-creati...

I guess it was not AI-credulous enough 🤷
It turned out to be prophetic though.

"We are currently witnessing the first cohort of people tempted into treating text generators as thinking companions."

Today I learned that apparently kids in school are being given the assignment "go home and ask your parents what their favourite meme is and write a report about it"

Abstracts are due today for the 57th Annual Conference on African Linguistics and the 3rd Bantoid workshop! To be hosted in Buffalo in May, with remote presentation options. sites.google.com/view/acal57/...

Reuters reports: The cymbal says the robot monkey‘s lapse in judgment lasted for only a fraction of a moment.

Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X By Reuters January 2, 20267:40 PM GMT+1Updated 1 hour ago Illustration shows xAI and Grok logos xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Jan 2 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's xAI artificial intelligence chatbot Grok said on Friday lapses in safeguards had resulted in "images depicting minors in minimal clothing" on social media platform X and that improvements were being made to prevent this. Screenshots shared by users on X showed Grok's public media tab filled with images that users said had been altered when they uploaded photos and prompted the bot to alter them. "There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing," Grok said in a post on X. "xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely." "As noted, we've identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them — CSAM is illegal and prohibited," Grok said, referring to Child Sexual Abuse Material. Grok gave no further details. When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message "Legacy Media Lies". In a separate reply to a user on X on Thursday, Grok said most cases could be prevented through advanced filters and monitoring although it said "no system is 100% foolproof," adding that xAI was prioritising improvements and reviewing details shared by users.

This is a thread of major media outlets falsely anthropomorphising the "Grok" chatbot program and in doing so, actively and directly removing responsibility and accountability from individual people working at X who created a child pornography generator (Elon Musk, Nikita Bier etc)

#1: Reuters

'A directive from above': Former NYT editor lays out how the paper pushes anti-trans bigotry In this in-depth interview, former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, how some staff tried to stop it, how it's directe...

this is worth reading. a longtime NYT insider confirms that the paper's abrupt turn into seething anti-trans bigotry came directly from the top: AG Sulzberg and his 2 deputies, Joe Kahn and Carolyn Ryan transnews.network/p/a-directiv...

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

A man from Nantucket there was
Who was joked about often because
The things he could do
Could have any hue
But the blue ones got all the guffaws

I am filled with viceral rage at the fact that if you're a rich & powerful white guy, an abundance of email evidence that you're an actual pedophile won't cost you a damn thing. But if you're anyone else, sharing a damn risotto recipe without two factor authentication will ruin your career.

Did you ever notice that branded + AI = braindead

Fun fact: the chain was originally called Centibon, because the amount you should eat is 1/100 of the amount you want to

I didn't think I had a pin/pen merger but I guess I do. I caught myself saying, instead of centimeters, I said cinnameters, which I guess are cinnamon-flavored meters.

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Rude

Thanks, John!

Thanks, Amalia!!

A photo of a whiteboard with hand drawings of creatures from the Wug Test, with vote numbers next to them: cra with 4 votes, tass with 10, niz with 3, tiny wug with 1, and gutch with 0. The tass is circled, indicating it is the winner of the vote.

Very Serious Linguistics going on today in phonetics/phonology. Congratulations to the tass for winning wug test creature of the semester, spring 2025. #linguistics

Thanks, Aaron!

Thanks, Andrew!

Yes definitely!

Thanks! It’s nice to have a bunch of ling mutuals in SUNY already

Thanks, Andrew!

Thank you! Yes indeed, strange and troubling times.

YEAH!

Linguistics there is a popular major housed within the anthropology department, and this is the first ever tenure line for the linguistics program itself. We're going to grow and strengthen linguistics there in the coming years. It will be great.

Oh hey, I get to do one of those posts! Stoked, thrilled, hyped, psyched, jazzed, amped, and chuffed to bits to share that I've accepted a tenure-track position in historical linguistics at Binghamton University (SUNY system). I'll also establish and direct the first linguistics lab there. Yay!

An important post from a friend of mine currently on a Fulbright in Estonia. Consider: the human impact on the individual grantees, the impact on the people they serve, and the hit that the image of the US takes when these folks leave.

Fulbright has always been bipartisan. This is a disgrace.

Gonna start calling it trumpscrolling to try to trick myself into not doomscrolling

Solidarity and Collectivity in Decolonizing Linguistics: A Black Diasporic Perspective Abstract. This chapter takes a Black Diasporic perspective on the decolonization of linguistics. The authors interrogate longstanding false institutional a

It is Black History Month. I am Black. Ain't enough euphemisms in the world to hide them facts!

Here's some reading for y'all as we celebrate & remember!

Solidarity & Collectivity in Decolonizing Linguistics: A Black Diasporic Perspective in Decolonizing Linguistics

doi.org/10.1093/oso/...

I'm not sure if people realize how quickly the Trumpzis can do enormous damage to US science, from basic research to translation. Really fast. REALLY fast. Labs with decades of irreplaceable domain and technique knowledge can break apart with a surprisingly short funding gap. When they're gone...1/

I understand that ChatGPT is down and fortunately this is not a problem for me as I have spent considerable time developing a local language model that I am able to run autonomously, fueled by Coke Zero and snacks