Jake Browning
Dead Eyes and Pointless Prose: On Ted Chiang's Art Piece
Ted Chiang's pieces tend to cause a stir whenever they come out, mostly because he is such a fantastic writer and thinker. But the pieces...
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Jake Browning
- Sep 4
- 7 min
Copyright and Generative AI
The recent wave of cases concerning generative AI, such as Silverman v OpenAI, have not gone well. From a legal perspective, this isn't...
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Jake Browning
- May 20
- 6 min
Underpopulation, Overpopulation, and Other Screwy Debates
There is an increasing anxiety about underpopulation, one that mirrors the anxiety about overpopulation in decades past. But debates...
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Jake Browning
- Apr 17
- 3 min
Critical Comment on "The Psychology of Misinformation"
The Psychology of Misinformation, by Roozenbeek and van der Linden, is an excellent book. Short, balanced, readable. The authors are also...
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Jake Browning
- Jan 19
- 5 min
Why isn't Multimodality Making Language Models Smarter?
Philosophy has something called the "symbol grounding" problem. The basic question is whether the words and sentences of language need to...
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Jake Browning
- Jan 12
- 5 min
The Pre-History of Misinformation Studies (or "Why Misinformation Studies is Problematic")
Every once in awhile, someone reinvents a wheel. This is especially common in academia, since there is just so many papers in so many...
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Jake Browning
- Dec 22, 2023
- 4 min
AI Doom and the Insurance Argument
In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, it is discovered that an alien civilization is on its way to Earth, intent on conquering the...
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Jake Browning
- Dec 13, 2023
- 3 min
Gemini, Grok, and the Crowded Field of Language Models
Tourists on a guided program in Europe often come up with a simple complaint about the area, summed up as ABC: Another Bloody Church....
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Jake Browning
- Dec 13, 2023
- 4 min
Language Models and the "Inevitable" Flood of Misinformation
If there has been a constant trope since GPT-2 it is that large language models (LLM) will soon flood the internet with misinformation....
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Jake Browning
- Nov 6, 2023
- 8 min
Our Overly Managed Social Media Ecosystems
The current proliferation of Twitter-wannabes--and their failure--suggests people learned the wrong lessons from the rise of first-gen...
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Jake Browning
- Oct 29, 2023
- 11 min
Musings on the Language of Thought Hypothesis
Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum recently published a robust defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH)....
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Jake Browning
- Oct 29, 2023
- 7 min
Falsification, Paradigm Selection, and Integrated Information Theory
A strange response to integrated information theory (IIT) being labeled a pseudoscience is the claim that "scientists only know Karl...
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Jake Browning
- Oct 26, 2023
- 4 min
Generative AI is Boring
Now that the dust has settled and the hype has died down (except on Twitter), we can give a verdict: generative AI is boring. We already...
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Jake Browning
- Oct 21, 2023
- 5 min
Integrated Information Theory and the Dispute over the Airpump
After "the letter" arguing Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a pseudoscience, many people responded by condemning the letter writers...
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Jake Browning
- Oct 18, 2023
- 3 min
A Blinkered Take on Technology and Capitalism
Manifestos are silly things by nature. A glance at the manifestos of the 20th century reminds us that you need to have an immense ego to...
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Jake Browning
- Oct 12, 2023
- 7 min
Artificial General Intelligence isn't Here Yet
The impressive success of current "Foundation" or "Frontier" models, such as GPT-4 and Bard, has led some to claim that we are on our way...
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Jake Browning
- Sep 20, 2023
- 4 min
A (Hopefully) Final Comment on Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
There's an old story (possibly apocryphal) about a scholar who went to a university and presented a paper on telepathy. The study had...
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Jake Browning
- Sep 18, 2023
- 8 min
"Consciousness Winter" wasn't that cold--and the "spring" generated more heat than light
There is a story that goes, "in the 20th century, you couldn't talk about consciousness. Before Edelman, Crick, and Koch, it was a bad...
1,634 views3 comments
Jake Browning
- Sep 18, 2023
- 3 min
If Language Models are alien intelligences, then they're a failure
Many people at the moment are excitedly declaring that large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Bard, are "alien intelligences."...
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Jake Browning
- Jul 7, 2023
- 10 min
What is at stake in contemporary debates about innateness
It is often hard to figure out what, if anything, is at stake in these discussions of innateness. All the nativists are big on learning...
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