Ken’s Blog

One measure of the gradual advance of media technology is how we think about the phrase “virtual representation”. There was a time when a book was thought of as a virtual representation of reality — fictional or otherwise.

Then we stopped thinking about books so much, and we started thinking about photographs as virtual representations. Eventually photos became too familiar to think about too much, and we started to think about movies and then television as virtual representations.

A while back, long after we stopped thinking of movies or TV as novelties, we started applying the idea of “virtual representation” to computer simulations of reality — fictional or otherwise. But now we are about to move on to the next phase.

The resynthesis of words or images performed by ChatGPT or Bard or MidJourney or DALL-E is the current focus. “But wait,” people think, encountering those programs for the first time. “They are just a kind of virtual representation, not the real thing.”

Which you could also say about books.

Every day is so intense
A random series of events
Does it all make any sense?
Frankly I am on the fence

Nearly every time I see a Powerpoint presentation, it is filled with bar charts. Bar charts seem to be the lingua franca of conveying information to a group in presentation form.

Clearly bar charts appealing to both presenter and audience. They convey essential information in a bold graphical form, they show trends in a way that is easy for the eye to follow, and they abstract away details the neither presenter nor audience cares about in the moment.

There will come a time when the visual equivalent of ChatGPT or Bard will make bar charts for us on the spot. We will be discussing some topic, and one person will say “You know, there’s been an increase in … over the last decade,” or “The number of women enrolling at MIT recently, compared with the number of women at NYU, has been …”

At that moment, a bar chart can optionally pop up in the view of both people, presumably mediated by our smart glasses. We probably won’t even think much about it, other than to wonder how anybody ever explained anybody before we all had conversational bar charts.

I was surprised at the highly negative reaction to the factual errors in Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It should not have come as a surprise at all.

Those of us who have been playing with ChatGPT know that it has at best an indifferent attitude toward whether its highly confident answers are correct or not.

What Google is demonstrating with Bard was that they are at the same place as their competition in the development of chatbots for Web search. We already knew that much work needs to be done to marry the verbal facility of chatbots with the degree of trust that we place in search engines.

Yes, it’s a work in progress, this effort to infuse chatbot answers with true provenance. But it’s a really fascinating work in progress, isn’t it?

Yesterday I showed a demo to a colleague, in which I spoke to my web browser, and the text that I was speaking showed up in a 3D scene. He was astonished. His exact words were “That’s amazing!”

A few minutes later I pointed out to him that both he and I do this all the time on our phones. We talk into them, and our speech gets converted immediately into text.

“Oh, right,” he said. Until then he hadn’t made the connection. Seeing text show up in a 3D scene in a web browser in response to somebody talking at their computer was out of context, and therefore somehow startling.

I wonder how often this happens to us in our lives. Something that in one context would seem perfectly prosaic, in a different context appears, at least at first, to be amazing.

I am sure that it won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that I wrote this post by talking into my phone. Nothing really amazing about that these days.

Like many people around the world, I am completely horrified by the earthquake this morning in Turkey and Syria. Many thousands of people have lost their lives.

I don’t think it appropriate to write about anything else today. Let us just give our thoughts and prayers, and help if we can, on this day of terrible tragedy.

This morning I learned from my cousin about backronyms. I had never heard the word “backronym” before today, but I realize that I’ve been making them for years.

Backronyms are cleverly knitted redefinitions, often noteworthy yet manufactured.

When a word that wasn’t an acronym becomes an acronym, it’s because somebody turned it into a backronym. And now that I know what they are called, I am definitely going to keep making them.

The great things about parades is that they are interactive.
Movies just can’t compete.

i am blogging for you in mid-flight
which fills me with total delight
      in fact i’m all smiles
      that i’ve flown twenty miles
since the moment i started to write

I’ve been organizing a group project at NYU. The project is really fun, but nothing ends up being as simple as it should be.

The problem, I think, is that every project involves people. And whenever people are involved, things that should be simple become complicated. I believe this is because the dynamics between human beings is always odd and non-linear in ways that you never see coming.

I once came up with a riddle to explain this phenomenon to myself. It goes like this:

      Q: What’s the definition of politics?
      A: Two people in a room.