see you in a minute!

This Friday, come celebrate the online launch of our special issue on Language Machines in @journaloflinganth.bsky.social with @soclinganth.bsky.social

We are looking forward to a lively conversation with @bethmsemel.bsky.social, prosecco in hand :)

ah wonderful!

From talking tools to metahumans: social interaction, semiotic skill, and the authority of AI chatbots What does it take to turn a tool into a talking tool and that into an ultimate authority? Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in its diverse forms, such as large language models (LLMs), is cel...

another very fresh article that helps to explain the authority of AI via the anthro of religion is here by Webb Keane: doi.org/10.1111%2F14...

This Friday, come celebrate the online launch of our special issue on Language Machines in @journaloflinganth.bsky.social with @soclinganth.bsky.social

We are looking forward to a lively conversation with @bethmsemel.bsky.social, prosecco in hand :)

„Die schlimmsten Krisen sollten nicht die besten Zeiten für Unternehmen in überlebenswichtigen Sektoren sein."

Mein Spiegel Interview über den kommenden Preisschock trotz wackligem Frieden und was jetzt zu tun ist. 🧵

Language machines: Toward a linguistic anthropology of large language models

by Siri Lamoureaux, Michael Castelle, Anna Weichselbraun

doi.org/10.1111/jola...

i love all of this so much

Fossil fuel stocks are exploding in response to the war on Iran.

Who stands to benefit? The richest of the rich.

Who stands to lose? All of us who have to pay higher prices for energy and a new round of sellers' inflation.

the special issue will continue to accept submissions on a rolling basis. additional articles are in the pipeline and we welcome new contributions. best to reach out to me or Siri Lamoureaux first :)

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology | AAA Journal | Wiley Online Library Click on the title to browse this issue

the link to our special issue on Language Machines is online! find our introduction (why we need linguistic anthropology to understand LLMs) & the first batch of articles here: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

if you have something to contribute, please contact us!

thank you for reading and commenting! yes, the competence=intelligence conflation is really hard to dispel

Google not only supplies the fake citations via Gemini, their awful products in the form of knowledge infrastructure are so shoddily kept that they can't be fucked to remove fake venues.

!!!!!

and can't wait to read what you're writing...maybe you want to share something in the Language Machines reading group??

thanks for sharing, Julien!

thank you for reading and sharing, Beth! come join the Language Machines workshop sometime 🫶

Here's the introduction to the special issue: doi.org/10.1111/jola... in which we argue: We need linguistic anthropology to understand Large Language Models!

Clickclickclick if you like reading feisty-programmatic-staking-of-intellectual-ground types of words...

Part of a Special Issue in JLA on "Language Machines: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of LLMs" I co-edited together with Siri Lamoureaux and @mcastelle.bsky.social

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology | AAA Journal | Wiley Online Library Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) is a key practice for evaluating their capabilities and risks. This paper considers the development of “BIG Bench,” a crowdsourced benchmark designed to test...

new paper so fresh it doesn't have an issue # yet!
Noya Kohavi and I looked at a crowdsourced AI testing suite and analyzed how contributors’ ideas about language, intelligence & cognition play a surprisingly big role in shaping how LLMs are tested, and what we think AI is. doi.org/10.1111/jola...

There’s no such thing as Social Media.

THE MEME IS REAL

Stellungnahme zum Polizeieinsatz am Peršmanhof am 27. Juli 2025 – Universität Klagenfurt Stellungnahme zum Polizeieinsatz am Peršmanhof am 27. Juli 2025 Angehörige der Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt  Vom 24. bis zum 29. Juli 2025 fand das zweite Antifaschistische Jugendcamp am Peršman...

Kolleg*innen in der AAU Klagenfurt/Celovec erklären sich ebenfalls mit dem Antifa-Camp und dem #Peršmanhof Ko-Museum solidarisch (inklusive früherem Rektor und jetziger Rektorin der Universität:
www.aau.at/blog/stellun...

In Österreich ist eine Gedenkstätte von der Polizei regelrecht überfallen worden.

Die Geschichte der Endphasenverbrechen ist leider sehr reich an Ereignissen.
Eines davon ist der Peršmanhof, wo eine SS-Polizeieinheit im April 1945 ein Massaker anrichtet, auch an Kindern.

Heute ist der Peršmanhof…

If this is accurate, WeTransfer is unusable for professional creative work. Would violate most work-for-hire contracts to share copyrighted material with a third party like this.

Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet Unrestricted AI use could add 1bn tons of planet-heating emissions in the US over the next decade, researchers say

The wild thing here is that the bill text that aims to prevent AI regulation defines "AI" incredibly broadly: Essentially, any system that uses computing to provide information or aid decision-making.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Today's Supreme Court decision does not opine on the constitutionality of Trump's assault on birthright citizenship. It is limited to the question of universal injunctions. But its ruling on that front is MASSIVE—a huge blow to plaintiffs and judges trying to block Trump's most lawless policies.

Our digital repositories team spends a great deal of their time now simply protecting our commoned public digital resources from bots. This insatiable, aimless, destructive desire to excrete novel slop is impeding our access to — and even damaging — our cultural heritage + vetted public knowledge.

"There are a growing # of AI bots crawling repositories[; they're] sufficiently aggressive [to] cause service disruptions + outages... As a result, some repositories have started to block machine access to their collections, which is also inadvertently blocking other desired network services..."

time to get out the pitchforks?