Recent ucsbenglish_oapdeposits items

AI and the University as a Service

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI and the University as a Service

: Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry

Fri, 6 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

: Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry

The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Borges and AI

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Borges and AI

How to Do Things with Deep Learning Code

Thu, 7 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The premise of this article is that a basic understanding of the composition and functioning of large language models is critically urgent. To that end, we extract a representational map of OpenAI’s GPT-2 with what we articulate as two classes of deep learning code, that which pertains to the model and that which underwrites applications built around the model. We then verify this map through case studies of two popular GPT-2 applications: the text adventure game, AI Dungeon, and the language art project, This Word Does Not Exist. Such an exercise allows us to test the potential of Critical Code Studies when the object of study is deep learning code and to demonstrate the validity of code as an analytical focus for researchers in the subfields of Critical Artificial Intelligence and Critical Machine Learning Studies. More broadly, however, our work draws attention to the means by which ordinary users might interact with, and even direct, the behavior of deep learning systems,...

Code.surface || Code.depth

Thu, 7 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay begins by identifying a central idea in the critical discourse on code art and code poetry: code is a deep structure that instantiates a surface. The AP Project’s Jonathan Kemp and Martin Howse, for example, explain that their work makes “manifest underlying systematics,” that can make the digital “physical, audible and visible through geological computing.” In what sense, if at all, can we trace a computing operation down to a foundation, bottom, or core? Why do we maintain this cultural imaginary of code and how has it come into being? Moreover, how have the metaphors of software engineering – particularly the notion of structured layers and multitier architectures – been put to artistic use? The thematizing of layers, surfaces, and spatial metaphors has become quite intricate in new media writing practices, as I will demonstrate in a reading of “Lascaux.Symbol.ic,” one of Ted Warnell’s Poems by Nari, and recent projects by John Cayley, including Overboard and Translation....

Rocket Theory

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What this chapter offers is not another history of accelerationism as philosophy or coterie, but rather a tracing out of accelerationism as it has become co-opted and memetically entered into popular discourse as political affect and cultural condition. What is the significance of this memeification, and why, beyond the obvious literalization, does this take the form of the rocket? We take account of the way in which a political philosophy committed to pushing capitalism to its breaking point and beyond ironically finds itself deployed for capitalistic, even hyper-capitalistic, ends. What we are calling “rocket theory” is not simply a play on an idiom but also proposes a theoretically informed way of thinking through the convergence of oppositional forces as manifest in accelerationist politics, or anti-politics, in our moment.

RED DOT SIGHT

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RED DOT SIGHT

"In the wake of Ovid's unicorn"

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

"In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.” The by-now notorious prompt for OpenAI’s GPT-2 software was, after ten attempts, followed by the announcement that “the scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn.” The discovery of course was not that of evolutionary biology but rather computer science, not silver-white unicorns, but an unsupervised language model so uncannily successful that it too might have seemed chimerical—an associative link reinforced by OpenAI’s decision to withhold the trained model from the public, for fear of malicious misuse. How should we teach natural language processing, which is to say human reading and writing, after GPT-2? What, quite plainly, should be the response of language instructors to the exponential developments in the field...

"Does AI Have a Future?"

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

"Does AI Have a Future?"

Playing With Unicorns: AI Dungeon and Citizen NLP

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

AI Dungeon 2 is an indie text adventure game that caught traction within the gaming and hobbyist machine learning communities for its promise of “infinite” customizable adventures, which are generated and narrated by GPT-2, OpenAI’s 1.5 billion parameter language model. Samples of gameplay illustrate AID’s remarkable linguistic competence and domain knowledge, as well as its capacity for what can only be described as wackiness. More striking are AID’s innovative gameplay mechanics, which reimagine how we interact with large language models. Game play entails a procedural and incremental process of engaging with GPT-2 that opens up the possibility of developing a holistic and interdisciplinary framework for meaningful qualitative evaluation of language models that does not have commercial use as its necessary endgame. With respect to both evaluation and writing itself, AID situates human players inextricably “in the loop” as necessary partners with autonomous systems. Our article...

The Asemic at the End of the World

Thu, 3 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation prepared for the Modern Language Association Annual Convention in January 2017

Out of Control

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Out of Control

50% Laughter, 50% Despair: A Dialogue with Jarett Kobek.

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

50% Laughter, 50% Despair: A Dialogue with Jarett Kobek.

Delete Your Accounts

Thu, 6 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Delete Your Accounts

Writing the Vote: Suffrage, Gender and Politics

Thu, 6 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Writing the Vote: Suffrage, Gender and Politics

Mediating women's suffrage literature