Archive for Artificial intelligence

Superstition industry in the PRC: buzzwords as belief

May 22, 2025 @ 11:24 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and religion

Another superlative article from our Czech colleagues:

China’s Superstition Boom in a Godless State
In post-pandemic China, superstition has surged into a booming industry, as youth turn to crystals, fortune-telling, and AI oracles in search of hope and meaning.
By Ansel Li, Sinopsis (5/13/25)

Introduction

It is one of history’s more striking ironies: the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist, Marxist-Leninist regime that has long sought to suppress all forms of organized religion, now finds itself caught in a tidal wave of superstition. Post-pandemic, what began as a trickle has become a torrent—an uncontrolled spread of fortune-telling, lucky crystals, and spiritual nonsense, growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith and spread further by a hyper-connected internet society.

This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.

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Bionic brains

May 20, 2025 @ 8:15 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Biology of language, Cognitive science

China Develops Robots to Implant Chips into Human Brain

A Chinese technology news website reported that the CyberSense flexible microelectrode implantation robot, developed by the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has passed the preliminary acceptance stage for Shenzhen’s major scientific infrastructure project on “Brain Mapping and Brain Simulation.” The robot is designed to implant flexible microelectrodes – thinner and softer than a strand of hair – into the cerebral cortex of experimental animals, providing crucial support for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuroscience research.

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Grammatical intuition of ChatGPT

May 19, 2025 @ 7:03 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Evolution of language, Grammar

Grammaticality Representation in ChatGPT as Compared to Linguists and Laypeople, Zhuang Qiu, Xufeng Duan & Zhenguang G. Cai, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 617 (May 6, 2025). 

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various linguistic tasks. However, it remains uncertain whether LLMs have developed human-like fine-grained grammatical intuition. This preregistered study (link concealed to ensure anonymity) presents the first large-scale investigation of ChatGPT’s grammatical intuition, building upon a previous study that collected laypeople’s grammatical judgments on 148 linguistic phenomena that linguists judged to be grammatical, ungrammatical, or marginally grammatical (Sprouse et al., 2013). Our primary focus was to compare ChatGPT with both laypeople and linguists in the judgment of these linguistic constructions. In Experiment 1, ChatGPT assigned ratings to sentences based on a given reference sentence. Experiment 2 involved rating sentences on a 7-point scale, and Experiment 3 asked ChatGPT to choose the more grammatical sentence from a pair. Overall, our findings demonstrate convergence rates ranging from 73% to 95% between ChatGPT and linguists, with an overall point-estimate of 89%. Significant correlations were also found between ChatGPT and laypeople across all tasks, though the correlation strength varied by task. We attribute these results to the psychometric nature of the judgment tasks and the differences in language processing styles between humans and LLMs.

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Jianwei Xun: Fake philosopher

May 17, 2025 @ 8:04 pm· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and philosophy

Jianwei Xun, the supposed philosopher behind the hypnocracy theory, does not exist and is a product of artificial intelligence
A collaboration between an essayist and two AI platforms produced a book that reflects on new forms of manipulation

Raúl Limón, EL PAÍS (4/7/25)

The entire proposition behind this scheme is so preposterous and diabolical that I am rendered virtually speechless.

The French city of Cannes hosted a roundtable discussion on February 14 called “The Metamorphosis of Democracy – How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Governance and Redefining Our Policy.”

The debate was covered in an article by EL PAÍS after Gianluca Misuraca, Vice President of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures, introduced the concept of “hypnocracy” — a new form of manipulation outlined in a book by Jianwei Xun called Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. However, this Hong Kong philosopher does not exist, as revealed by Sabina Minardi, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.

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Learning a Korean word from scratch, with a note on AI

May 16, 2025 @ 5:56 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language teaching and learning, Lexicon and lexicography

While attending an international conference on the application of AI to the study of the Silk Road and its history, at which most of the papers were delivered in Korean, I was struck by the frequent occurrence of one distinctive word:  hajiman.  For some speakers, it almost seemed like a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 ("catchphrase").  I had no idea what it meant, but its frequency led me to believe that it must be some sort of function word.  However, the fact that it is three syllables long militated against such a conclusion.  Also its sentence / phrase final position (though not always) made me think that it wasn't just a simple function word.

I kept trying to extract hajiman's purpose / meaning from its position and intonation (usually not emphasized, almost like an afterthought).

When, during coffee / tea breaks I asked some Korean colleagues about it, their reply — "Oh, hajiman" (with an offhand smile) only added to the word's mystique.

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Replicate evolve the image…

May 9, 2025 @ 5:22 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence

From r/chatgpt:

I tried the "Create the exact replica of this image, don't change a thing" 101 times, but with Dwayne Johnson
byu/Foreign_Builder_2238 inChatGPT

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AI generated vocal model: Chinese popular ballad, Sandee Chan

March 30, 2025 @ 7:08 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and music

[This is a guest post by AntC]

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Words for "library" in Sanskrit: the future of information science

March 19, 2025 @ 5:11 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Bibliography, Etymology, Information technology, Translation

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

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Linguistics bibliography roundup

March 9, 2025 @ 6:47 am· Filed by under Accents, Artificial intelligence, Bibliography, Bilingualism, Cognitive science, Communication, Evolution of language, Grammar, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and genetics, Language and history, Language and religion, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody, Vocabulary, Words words words

Something for everyone

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Another elephant in the room

March 1, 2025 @ 1:00 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence

From r/ChatGPT:


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ChatGPT cat wound healing conversation

February 27, 2025 @ 8:18 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and animals, Language and medicine

VHM:  This is a dialog held between ChatGPT and TK, who printed it out and sent it to me.

The unretouched dialog, which lasted about 20 minutes, is very long.  If you don't have time to read all of it, please look at the last paragraph of this post, where I give my takeaway assessment of the implications it holds for AI.

===================================================

TK:  It's truly amazing what ChatGPT does. I believe this is worth your time reading this conversation I had with it. Because not only is the topic and material interesting on its own, but also it will really give you a flavor and insight into how the AI known as ChatGPT functions.
 
Some people are claiming newer AIs are better but I can't see how this could be improved…. Only if the interface included sight and displayed images.
 
Note, I used voice dictation extensively in this conversation.
 
+++++++++++++++
 

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AI Overview jokes

February 26, 2025 @ 7:09 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence

There's recently been a minor social- and mass-media fad for weird "AI Overview" answers from Google. The results are a moving target, either because of back-end fixes or because of the inherently stochastic nature of LLM results, but some of them are funny while they last. One query that still works this morning is a request for "elements that end in um but not ium", which sometimes answers

and sometimes answers


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ChatGPT does ASMR in Chinese

February 22, 2025 @ 12:08 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Translation

This morning, I received the following interesting message from Adam C.:

Back in 2019 you wrote a Language Log post about the word ASMR being ported to Japanese, and as I research the phenomenon itself I frequently encounter the same English version in videos by Japanese and Korean speakers. (Russians, unsurprisingly, use ACMP.)
 
So imagine my surprise at encountering the term 自主性感官經絡反應 on the Chinese ASMR Wikipedia page, which I understand is written in traditional characters. (I imagine the Taiwanese have taken over editing most of the Chinese Wikipedia because it's blocked on the mainland?)
 
Is there some sort of etymology for 自主性感官經絡反應, or is there anything else interesting about the phrase?

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