New article in AI & Society
Pleased to make this contribution to a special issue of AI & Society: AI Technology as Human Interaction –Linguistic and Cultural Framings of AI as Communicative Infrastructure. Here I’m looking at what language is when treated as an object of study in NLP and LLMs. ‘Python is ready to have a conversation with you’: the reproduction of an ontology of language in natural language processing educational material. 
The whole notion that AI will overtake humanity is based on a false premise
Full article here (warning: paywall)
Schwartz Reisman Institute Graduate Fellow
I’m pleased to report that I am now a Schwartz Reisman Institute Graduate Fellow for the 2024-2025 year. Eager to continue the conversation with such distinguished scholars! More about the announcement here: https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/news/sri-announces-2024-fellowship-recipients
Spring 2025: Humans of AI: Understanding the People Behind the Machines
Update: Lots of people are coming to the realization that generative AI has been oversold and is massively under-delivering. So, I’m going to double-down on the anthropological angle for my new book.
- Who are some of the people working on AI technologies, from AI chips to Large Language Models?
- What are the cultural norms that structure the AI community?
- What are the rituals that give meaning to their work?
- What are the strategies of communication used to get this technology built?
- What kind of language is used in this world?
So, a new name for the book: Humans of AI: Understanding the People Behind the Machines.
Remember: it’s not magic; it’s people that make AI function.
LLM Reads with the Human Feedback Foundation
In our quest to understand the current wave of activity in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in particular Large Language Models (LLM), we are happy to launch our second season of talks.
We invite the first authors from some seminal LLM papers to talk through their paper, explore any common misconceptions they’ve encountered, and lead a discussion on how things have changed since the paper came out.
ALTERNATE TUESDAYS STARTING MARCH 5, 12:00-1:00 PM EST on Zoom
RSVP on EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/llm-reading-group-march-5-19-april-2-16-30-may-14-tickets-851921368747?aff=oddtdtcreator
- March 5 The Linear Representation Hypothesis and the Geometry of Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03658 with Kiho Park (Google Brain
- March 19 Who Are the Publics Engaging in AI? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09636625231219853 with Renee Sieber (McGill University)
- April 2 Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01301 with Matt Dahl (Yale), Verun Magesh; Mirac Suzgun (Stanford)
- April 16 Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06619 with Marzieh Fadaee, Ahmet Ustun (Cohere For AI)
- April 30 How Well Can LLMs Negotiate? Negotiation Arena Platform and Analysis https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05863 with Federico Bianchi (Stanford)
- May 14 Detecting LLM Generated Text in Computing Education: A Comparative Study for ChatGPT Cases: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07411 with Michael Liut (University of Toronto)
Join us on Discord for recordings of past sessions, discussions and future session ideas: https://discord.gg/a8auUyKAgB
In partnership with the Human Feedback Foundation: https://humanfeedback.io/