Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
EsDictionary - The EsDeeKid Translator
Language models are multiverse generators
"Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form part of the truth."
lore.farm — Collectivized Canon for Fictional Worlds
Create fictional worlds and build a shared canon with your community from across the ATmosphere. Includes support for Bluesky, Branchline, and more!
How storytelling can help articulate emotions that evolve as the climate changes
Creative works can represent emotions emerging so fast that our brains can’t quite catch up with them.
Symbolic Manipulation: an Anthropological Perspective
The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will ex…
The Flâneur and Turtle on-a-leash: Exploring Flânerie as a Metaphorical Approach to Harmonizing Human-AI Interaction for Playful Placemaking
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
MAiD, ableism, cognitive accessibility, and more
This one took a bit to write. The first piece is long (1,600+ words), and intense. But it needed to be said. I'll be interested to hear what you think. You...
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain constant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions, regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
In my work at Clay I recently wrote an internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers, and I’m sharing it here. It’s my hope that one day better AI tools might be able to help us think, but until then I fear that using AI to write does the exact opposite.
Esotericism in One Piece: Navigating Magic, Symbolism and Spirituality
Introduction Idea Presentation
Why Can’t Programmers... Program?
I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s
Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was…