#4 Narrative and Number
Beginning with Shakespeare’s enigmatic stage direction, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’, this entry refers to the ‘mathematics’ of narrative; to the seemingly infinite (yet finite?) combinatorial rules of language. As preface to the set reading on Roland Barthes, the entry considers again the fate of the statistical turn for AI and natural language processing.
Read#3 Ut pictura poesis: Phoneme/Pixel
This entry offers two ‘exhibits’: the first is Elon Musk’s reference to ‘Wile E. Coyote stuff’ (in response to a question about adversarial attacks on a self-driving car); the other is Open AI’s DALL-E 2 system for creating images from natural language. Revealed is the enduring relationship between word and image.
Read#2 Shannon: Paper into Pixels
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. — Claude Shannon (1948)
Read#1: Atlas of AI
In a talk hosted by the Women in Data Science and AI project, part of The Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, Kate Crawford discusses her excellent book, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press. 2021) with Judy Wajcman.
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