AI

New Book Chapter: Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk, and Technological Purism

by

I contributed a chapter to the new book Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, just published by Edinburgh University Press. My chapter examines Edgar Allan Poe’s attempt to discredit the famous chess-playing Turk hoax, along with “The Raven,” Poe’s essays, and contemporaneous works by Charles Babbage. Poe’s account of the hoax, I argue, exemplifies … Read more

PromptArray, meet GPT-OSS!

by

Back in October 2021, during the last large spike of COVID-19 cases, I created PromptArray, a system for messing around with the process by which language models generate text. This was around a year before the release of ChatGPT, at which point generative language models were still largely a curiosity, programs that spit out uncanny, … Read more