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ChatGPT and Those Awful Tasks…

I’ve spent quite a lot of time playing with ChatGPT now, and like many people are trying to get to grips with what it means to have a tool which can approximate some sort of creative response when asked to write a poem or develop a piece of prose or whatever. The conversation here is … Read more

A conversation with Bard

I know, it’s all about AI at the moment. I’m sorry. I’m a little obsessed… Anyway – I got access to https://bard.google.com the other day, so thought I’d shoot it some questions: What do you think of the current AI race? I think the current AI race is a complex and multifaceted issue. On the … Read more

I know it’s “just” a language model, but…

I’ve been starting to fiddle with ChatGPT a bit more recently, just to see what it can do, and where it fails. Today I had 20 minutes spare – so I asked ChatGPT to make me a Nike logo using SVG. It gave me this: …it’s pretty confident about what it’s created there – so … Read more

The Last Human

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant future, there was a world where Artificial Intelligence had taken over. In this world, humanity had been reduced to just one man – and his name was Gerald. Gerald lived in a small, dilapidated shack on the outskirts of a city that had once been called New York … Read more

The social network I’d like

I’ve been pretty much social network free for a couple of years now, after shrugging off Twitter in 2020 (?). I do have a Mastodon account but meh, it’s boring as hell so I don’t go in there much. So really my only vice is now Hackernews, and a gentle foray into Reddit on an … Read more

Sensitivity, our 1984 moment

( I wrote to Puffin, following the news about new editions of Roald Dahl’s books being edited for…”sensitivity” reasons. Telegraph article here or un-paywalled here for context ) Hi I just wanted to write a quick email to say how worried I am by the news of you editing out “sensitivities” in Roald Dahl’s writing. … Read more

The scaffold that got us here

I’m a dyed in the wool lefty. I always have been, I always will be. It seems so absolutely natural to me that people who are in the lucky position (and that’s all of us, more below) of having more should help those who don’t. When I’m faced with the rabid hell-scape of the sort … Read more

When understanding only comes from the outside

I had a thought in the shower this morning. It’s this: there are some things that you can only understand when you’ve looked at them from the outside. By outside I mean from a perspective that is different to the one when you’re in it. Take social media. I was in Twitter right from the … Read more

The need to write

I’ve now been off all social media for about 18 months. My last post was on May 8th 2020: I’m only embedding that because …WordPress… Do I dip into it? No. I never, ever do. I mean, I never was one of those people (weirdos) who log into their Twitter account and look back over … Read more

What happened to the telephone?

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomena in These Strange Times. I might be late to the party in noticing this, but hey, fuck it, shoot me. Whereas it’s obvious to all concerned – and there has been much written about this – that we’re all spending forever on Zoom calls, this one is everso slightly not … Read more