by Joseph Wilson | Jul 9, 2023 | Uncategorized |
I’ll be at these conferences/events this Spring/Summer. Come and say hi!
Toronto Machine Learning Summit, June 13-14, Carlu
Absolutely Interdisciplinary, June 20-22, Munk Centre for Global Affairs & Public Policy
Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence, June 22, Roy Thompson Hall
Collision 2023, June 26-29, Enercare Centre
The Undebate: Societal Impact of AI, June 28, Glenn Gould Theatre
Association for Computational Linguistics, July 9-14, Westin Harbour Castle
Coming up…
American Anthropological Association, Nov 15-19, Toronto
NeurIPS 2023, Dec 10-16, New Orleans
by Joseph Wilson | Jul 9, 2023 | Uncategorized |
The pre-print for a paper I delivered last year as part of the project “Virtual Particles” (A1) of the Research Unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider” at CERN.
Click here for more.
by Joseph Wilson | Jun 6, 2023 | Uncategorized |
I wrote what I thought was a useful corrective to never-ending deluge of AI hype (originally I wrote “bullshit” but they didn’t want to print that in the Globe for some reason). The vast majority of the apps built on top of GPTx and other LLMs have one purpose: to create marketing copy/emails/product reviews/blogs… also known as spam.
Read the full article here.
I also spoke on Edmonton’s CHED with Chelsea Bird about hype and how people can be more critical of the claims of Big Tech regarding AI’s super-human powers.
Audio Player
by Joseph Wilson | May 2, 2023 | Uncategorized |
Looking forward to joining other social scientists and linguists at the University of Siegen in May to present:
“What Python Can’t Do: Language Ideologies in Programming Courses for Natural Language Processing”
[snip]:
Many of the applications that are used in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are written in a computer language called Python. Python has become one of the fastest growing programming languages and knowledge of it can be considered a valuable form of social capital (Bourdieu 1977). The structure of Python, explicitly introduced as a language itself, reinforces a language ideology that sees language as a semantic, referential, and universal system (Jablonski n.d.; Lovrenčic et al. 2009; Danova 2017). This contrasts with the position taken by most linguistic anthropologists that sees language as primarily pragmatic, indexical, and highly localized in its ability to convey meaning (Silverstein 1976; 1979; Gal and Irvine 2019; Nakassis 2018; Eckert 2008). “
Images created by ChatGPT and Dall-E
by Joseph Wilson | Dec 15, 2022 | Uncategorized |
This is a quick PechaKucha I put together for the EASA’s Why the World Needs Anthropologists conference in Berlin in September.
I seek to answer the question ‘why does every generation of adults think their teenagers are the worst?’ Spoiler alert: it’s a process of semiotic drift.
by Joseph Wilson | Oct 12, 2022 | Uncategorized |
My latest for Sapiens.org:
“…from the perspective of linguistic anthropology, novel-writing cars and chatbots designed for “natural language processing” simply do not command language at all. Instead, they perform a small subset of language competency—a fact that is often forgotten when the technology media focuses on sensational claims of AI sentience. Language, as it lives and breathes, is far more complicated.”
Read the full article here.
In practice, language is often far more complicated and layered than the written word can capture.
