Jan 21, 2023

ChatGPT Dominance

Dec 12, 2022

AI, software, and governance

In a recent article covering the FTX collapse, the New York Times described large language models (LLMs) as “an increasingly powerful breed of A.I. that can write tweets, emails and blog posts and even generate computer programs.” There is a lot that we could pick apart in this definition (e.g., what makes LLMs part of a “breed”, what distinguishes the ability to write an email as opposed to a blog post, etc.), but for the moment I’d like to focus on the term “A.I.” (henceforth “AI”). Referring to LLMs as an example of AI is certainly not atypical. Indeed, it increasingly seems like LLMs have become one of the modern canonical examples of this concept. But why is it that we think of these systems as members of this category? And how much rhetorical work is being done by referring to LLMs as a type of “AI”, as opposed to “models”, “programs”, “systems”, or other similar categories?

Sep 23, 2022

Hacking LLM bots

For anyone who missed it, a Twitter account named @mkualquiera recently deployed what seems like a kind of adversarial attack in the wild on a large language model (LLM)-based Twitter bot. I’ll link to the key post below, but it’s worth providing a bit of context, as it wasn’t immediately clear to me what was going on when I first saw the tweet.

Jul 3, 2022

Report from FAccT 2022

The fifth iteration of FAccT (the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) was held earlier this month (June 21–24) in Seoul, South Korea. More than just a hybrid conference, this was actually a full in-person conference, combined with a full on-line conference. These happened in parallel, with virtual sessions starting before and continuing after the in-person component each day. Around 500 people attended in person, with another 500 participating remotely.

May 14, 2022

Counting Deaths

Although morbid, it’s fascinating to read a recent article in the NYT about efforts in Sierra Leone to use “electronic autopsies” in a large scale attempt at counting deaths. According to the article, this undertaking is part of a broader effort at data collection, including questions on age, religion, marital status, etc. The novelty, it seems, is in trying to be thorough with respect to what people have died of (including extensive questions about symptoms), even though this information is being collected potentially long after the fact.

Apr 25, 2022

Modular Domain Adaptation

Despite their limitations, off-the-shelf models are still quite widely used by computational social science researchers for measuring various properties of text, including both lexicons, like LIWC, and cloud-based APIs, like Perspective API. The approach of using an off-the-shelf model has some definite advantages, including standardization and reproducibility, but such models may not be reliable when applied to a domain that differs from the ones on which they were developed…

Mar 12, 2022

Stability and Change

One of the biggest frustrations with software is that things are constantly changing. From operating systems to apps to web interfaces, things rarely remain the same for very long, especially for users of Windows or MacOS.

Mar 6, 2022

Confidence in Science

Feb 19, 2022

AI Dermatology: Part 2

​In the last post, I discussed the possible broader implications of Google’s recent foray into making an AI dermatology tool. In this follow up post, I want to focus on the research behind the product announcement, bringing a slightly critical eye.

Feb 5, 2022

AI Dermatology: Part 1