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. 
Full article here (warning: paywall)
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
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.
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.
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.
RSVP on EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/llm-reading-group-march-5-19-april-2-16-30-may-14-tickets-851921368747?aff=oddtdtcreator
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/
Join Aya French Ambassador, Joseph Wilson, as he explores the cultural dimensions and human implications of the Aya project through his unique perspective as an anthropologist. This talk was given as part of Celebrate Aya, Together – a livestream event to celebrate the release of Aya in February 2024. Learn more about Aya at https://cohere.com/research/aya
