By Gordon Hull There’s an emerging literature on Large Language Models (LLMs, like ChatGPT) that basically argues that they undermine a bunch of our existing assumptions about how language works.  As I argued in a paper a year and a half ago, there’s an underlying Cartesianism in a lot of our reflections on AI, which…

The NSF had attempted to reduce indirect costs (F&A) on all future grants to 15%, in a somewhat more coherent version of the NIH's effort to do so for all ongoing and future grants.   A federal court today enjoined the rate cut, vacating the new rule, finding that "National Science Foundation’s 15% Indirect Cost Rate…

I wish I’d come up with that title, but it actually belongs to a new study led by Natalia Kosmyna of the MIT Media Labs.  The study integrates brain imaging with questions and behavioral data to explore what happens when people write essays using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  I haven’t absorbed it all…

In a recent paper, Brett Frischmann and Paul Ohm introduce the idea of “governance seams,” which are frictions and inefficiencies that can be designed into technological systems for policy ends.  In this regard, “Governance seams maintain separation and mediate interactions among components of sociotechnical systems and between different parties and contexts” (1117).  Their first example…

I desperately and truly wish that I'd made this up.  Alas, the Verge reports: "Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports…

Here I want to complete my review of federal legal precedents for the Supreme Court’s sudden invocation of “injury in fact” language to understand judicial standing in its 1970 Data Processing decision (recall the earlier installments: first, second, third. The first one explains the issue; if you want to escape my rummaging through the archive,…

I want to take a break from judicial standing doctrine to note a recent and helpful paper by Emily Sullivan and Atoosa Kasirzadeh about explainable AI.  Explainable AI is a research agenda – there’s a lot of papers and techniques (for a current lit review, see here) – that is designed to get at a…

Last time, I set out the question of judicial standing and the abrupt switch by the Supreme Court in 1970 to the requirement that plaintiffs show an “injury in fact” to obtain standing.  Here I want to look at the historical development of that term. The earliest use of the phrase “injury in fact” in…

By Gordon Hull I’ve been using (part 1, part 2) a new paper by Fabian Offert, Paul Kim, and Qiaoyu Cai to think more about Derrida’s use of iterability as a way in to thinking about transformer-based large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  Here I want to wind that up with some thoughts on Derrida…

By Gordon Hull Last time, I looked a new paper by Fabian Offert, Paul Kim, and Qiaoyu Cai and applied it to a reworking of some of my earlier remarks on Derrida’s use of iterability in transformer-based large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  In particular, I tried to draw out some of the implications of…