Deep learning, image generation, and the rise of bias automation machines

DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. A widely circulated PR animation features meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation and generation. This post jumps from reflections on techbros to the erasure of human labour in Cosmopolitan’s rushed “first AI magazine cover”.

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Linguistic roots of connectionism

A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.

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A rant about Elsevier Pure

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this rant my notes for that occasion.

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