It’s Conference Season

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

Will AI really ‘change everything’?

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.

Technolinguistics in Practice: Socially Situating Language in AI Systems

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