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Nina Beguš

@ninabegus.bsky.social
1.2K followers 627 following 644 posts

UC Berkeley & InterpretAI Editor of the Artificial Humanities series www.ninabegus.com

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Reposted by Nina Beguš
David Smith @dasmiq.bsky.social · 2h
We can put a 10ft human skeleton in the front yard of anyone who wants one. Why don’t we have the supply chain to put a T. rex or triceratops skeleton on every corner?
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 3h
Delivering dinosaurs for exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science. Arthur Pollock, 1984
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 3h
I walked into the classroom to pick up my son from a violin lesson, and there he was doing armpit farts.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 18h
This one is for @mattseybold.bsky.social! Courtesy of my silly 6yo.
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Richard Jean So @richardjeanso.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Cool post-doc opp for recent graduates in computer science & AI from Schmidt Sciences; broad range of AI topics that intersect with comp social sci. & humanities, esp. problems with alignment, interpretability, and knowledge production. Great foundation to work with: jobs.lever.co/schmidt-enti...
jobs.lever.co
jobs - Fellow in Residence
Summary Schmidt Sciences invites recent PhD graduates in AI and computer science to apply for a 12-18 month fellows-in-residence program, with the possibility of extension to 24 months. Fellows would ...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
From now on, "First Encounters with AI" are delivered for all preorders: press.umich.edu/Books/F/Firs... Feel free to use UMWEB30 discount code. Since this is a trade book, it won't be open access. There will be an e-book closer to the official publication date in mid-November.
press.umich.edu
First Encounters with AI | Nina Beguš
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no long...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Kid ceramics.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
“In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of mathematician George Boole.”
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Vojnich is perfect for AI to crack, but here we are.
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Sometime during the pandemic, I interviewed a guy over zoom. He drank an energy drink and lit a cigarette. I will never forget him.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I appreciate the editor who put the submission deadline into my calendar. Nice, thoughtful gesture!
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
All academic writing should be open access. Especially since libraries are not buying physical books anymore.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Andrej Tomažin's "Heroes, Lackeys and Artificial Intelligence" (2018) presents a literary jury discussing literature confronted with AI great wit and depth. I wish the translation was out by now. Hopefully soon!
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Had to get it off my chest! substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
Post-Semantic Literature or How to Finally Kill the Text and Not the Author (2022)
Pseudo-academic musings on literary prizes
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Grads take note! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32791
academicjobsonline.org
Cornell University, College of Arts and Sciences Fellowships
Job #AJO32791, Postdoctoral Associate, AI in Social Sciences & Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences Fellowships, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Russ Luzetski @rabit.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Another intriguing podcast! I started listening to provoke thoughts for my #TTRPG / #DnD campaigns, but episodes like this are so much more...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Liminality is the most productive way of AI exploration (IMO), and Pierre Hugyhe is the king of liminality. Thanks to @ranjodhdhaliwal.com for snapping these at Fondation Beyeler!
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
FYI my 2024 syllabi for Artificial Humanities and History of Information are available online. ArtHum follows the book, while the History of Information course offers a historical overview of information technologies and their challenges, starting with writing. www.ninabegus.com/talks-teaching
ninabegus.com
Nina Begus - Talks & Teaching
Upcoming Talks August 19 Tiat August 26 Guest lecture UCSC September 10-12 Latent Spaces of Culture September 24 Ethics of Narration, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Media, Sapienza University of...
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Imaginary Worlds @emolinsky.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
With all the talk about AI these days, it’s hard not to think of movies like The Matrix or Her. But it’s possible that sci-fi isn’t the best prism to understand AI right now. We explore why ancient myths have a lot to say about chatfishing, deathbots and an AI apocalypse.
imaginaryworldspodcast.org
Is Mythology the Key to Understand AI? — Imaginary Worlds
Episode 312
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
At least this was my experience with artificial humanities. It's repeating with scientists today. They're raising an alarm that the world is not ready to hear.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Science and AI is a hot topic among academics. But not outside of the academia and some parts of the industry. The problem an expert is working on seems urgent and evident to them, but the world is often not yet ready to her about it. You're likely too early.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Coming out: Encounters with AI and First Encounters with AI ☺️
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Oops. Haven't we all done it at first?
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Scholarship runs on internal motivation. Industry runs on external motivation.
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What is college if knowledge, teaching, and advising are available from machines? One model has answers to many challenges that AI is posing today: residential education where students learn from each other to be bold, original, and uniquely human while living, eating and socializing together.
begus.substack.com
The future is in residential education
The most transformative education happens when students learn uniquely human skills over meals and tea time
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Center for Digital Humanities @princetoncdh.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Coming up on 10/6! @leifw.bsky.social discusses the epistemic order that LLMs are currently spreading throughout our culture, from policy to science to writing. More info & RSVP (requested) @ the link! Presented in partnership with CDH, Media+Modernity, and @princeton.edu Humanities Initiative.
cdh.princeton.edu
How to Reason with Words: Models, Metaphors, Metaphysics
How to Reason with Words: Models, Metaphors, Metaphysics
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
One of 700 pages of Accent in Hittite. By Alwin Kloekhorst.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
See more on the link and please feel free to reach out with any questions. I'd be happy to share the book proposal form. www.exeterpress.co.uk/collections/...
exeterpress.co.uk
Artificial Humanities
Series editor: Nina Beguš, University of California, Berkeley, USAEditorial advisory board members:Stanley Qiufan Chen, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong KongRanjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University o...
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Gabriel Hankins @gabrielh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Surrealism is the concrete aesthetic language for our moment
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My coping mechanism in the age of AI: write more Proto-Indo-European papers. Here’s a story on the origin of PIE mobility. I argue that in Pre-PIE, a rule operated that whereby heavy syllables attracted stress from the root to the ending. I focus on root nouns and verbs.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Jean-Pierre Serre turned a 100 years old! Here's what he said many years ago about learning math. It still holds, even in the time when the machine does math better than us. Math is closer to the pursuit of art. This is what the recent Leiden Declaration on AI and Math defended.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
10yo: “Back in my day we didn’t have audio book. We only had real books.”
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metahaven @metahaven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Great point @begus.bsky.social. As @robert-booth.bsky.social writes about puzzling Joycean lingo now uttered by agential AI, "Latent Spacecraft" (with @ninabegus.bsky.social) researched both "Finnegans Wake" as a written-out latent space and artificial neural networks as babbling engines
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Yes, Joyce was exploring the prior layers of language. Here's a project that lets you explore those prior stages: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Glad to se that the industry is coming to the same conclusion! @metahaven.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social @robert-booth.bsky.social
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metahaven @metahaven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The term “latent space realism” is inspired by the concept of “wave function realism,” which has been used in quantum mechanics to address the question whether the configuration space of Schrödinger's wave function amounts to something physically real
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
metahaven @metahaven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans," with the brilliant @ninabegus.bsky.social, @begus.bsky.social & Riccardo Petrini, is still major for us. An artificial neural network's vector space becomes navigable. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce's novel, gets read as a latent space
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A new book series just dropped!
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
STEM exodus from the academy into the industry may bring the university into its pre-industrial form, where one does humanities, classical analysis, and basic science for the sake of knowledge.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Siblings are finally united! What is writing and reading in the time of AI? Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Sheila Heti, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, and other amazing writers reflect and offer new possibilities. @uofmpress.bsky.social
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Asimov's Laws of Robotics were a narrative plot for the robots to fail and don't translate into ethics. We propose a new set of laws:
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Everyone can access the paper and the models online: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Model 1: a speech-GAN model that learned on 8 words of English latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/concatenatio... Model 2: a speech model that learned on Finnegans Wake only latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/finnegan/
latentspacecraft.antikythera.org
Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans.
Latent Spacecraft combines computational linguistics, neuroscience, and literary analysis to investigate latent space, i.e. the hidden internal structure that enables both humans and machines to produ...
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Preorder here: press.umich.edu/Books/F/Firs...
press.umich.edu
First Encounters with AI | Nina Beguš
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no long...
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"Our modern ridicule, however, stems from a profound misunderstanding of the practice of copying." Ken Liu on what cannot be replaced by LLM imitation in current writing, an excerpt from "First Encounters with AI": lareviewofbooks.org/article/ken-liu…
the cover of First Encounters with AI
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Siblings are finally united! What is writing and reading in the time of AI? Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Sheila Heti, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, and other amazing writers reflect and offer new possibilities. @uofmpress.bsky.social
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
how creativity works
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Everyone can access the paper and the models online: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Model 1: a speech-GAN model that learned on 8 words of English latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/concatenatio... Model 2: a speech model that learned on Finnegans Wake only latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/finnegan/
latentspacecraft.antikythera.org
Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans.
Latent Spacecraft combines computational linguistics, neuroscience, and literary analysis to investigate latent space, i.e. the hidden internal structure that enables both humans and machines to produ...
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Reposted by Nina Beguš
Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
What does the history of copying machines teach us? That we should leave copying to machines and focus on interpretation, intent, and meaning - our human powers.
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Asimov's Laws of Robotics were a narrative plot for the robots to fail and don't translate into ethics. We propose a new set of laws:
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
In the Daily Cal today on the use of AI in public communications. With @emilymbender.bsky.social and @richjaro.bsky.social www.dailycal.org/everyone-use...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
When a paper becomes a piece of art. We’re exhibiting our Latent Spacecraft GAN models with @metahaven.bsky.social @begus.bsky.social at the Hidden Layers exhibition. Come see the artworks at the Worth Ryder Gallery in Berkeley. The opening reception is today, 9/3, and we run until 10/3.
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