David O. Russell’s I <3 Huckabees (2004), inspired in part by the scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Robert Thurman (father of Uma Thurman), explores a number of philosophical and political concepts. One cli...

There is a $1 million bounty for the first person providing a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? is an inversion of a right-wing conspiracy, in which the prominence of the Frankfurt School is explained as the result of a plot to destroy truly revolutionary ...

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”

FIFA's semi-automated refereeing system promises neutrality but brims with bias. It's widely despised yet embraced by elites. It is, in other words, a lot like AI.

Societies carry existing violences and discriminations into the technological apparatuses they produce. Never mind how we use those machines, we are complicit. In this post, I suggest introducing stud...

Societies carry existing violences and discriminations into the technological apparatuses they produce. Never mind how we use those machines, we are complicit. In this post, I suggest introducing stud...

AI cheating leads to "a failed society," professor says.

I use the following clip from the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “The Anonymous Donor” (May 2007) to discuss psychological and ethical egoism, and the role of motivation in moral action. Larry David is ...

A legal expert on digital surveillance answers questions from Bolts readers about how police track your personal data, and what public officials could be doing to restrict it.

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of t...