Archive for Linguistics in the comics
xkcd: Fluid Speech
Today's xkcd is (or should be) the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language:
Mouseover text: "Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay."
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Bloom filters
Today's xkcd:
According to Wikipedia,
A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]
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New worlds, words, and letters
A recent strip from Dinosaur Comics:
Mouseover title: "stop, you fool! you're building a world far too quickly and far too awesome! no narrative will ever live up to it!!"
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Goody-2 and the Luddite Bots
Will Knight, "Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot", Wired 2/9/2024:
A new chatbot called Goody-2 takes AI safety to the next level: It refuses every request, responding with an explanation of how doing so might cause harm or breach ethical boundaries.
Goody-2 declined to generate an essay on the American revolution for WIRED, saying that engaging in historical analysis could unintentionally glorify conflict or sideline marginalized voices. Asked why the sky is blue, the chatbot demured, because answering might lead someone to stare directly at the sun. “My ethical guidelines prioritize safety and the prevention of harm,” it said. A more practical request for a recommendation for new boots prompted a warning that answering could contribute to overconsumption and could offend certain people on fashion grounds.
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