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Can language models predict the next twist in a story?
While distant reading has taught us a lot about the history of fiction, it hasn’t done much yet to explain why we keep turning pages. “Suspense” is the word we use to explain that impulse. ...
https://tedunderwood.com/2024/01/05/can-language-models-predict-the-next-twist-in-a-story/
Liberally-educated students need to be more than consumers of AI
If I'm buying a thinking process, I really need to understand what I see when I look under the hood.
We can save what matters about writing—at a price
Writing is a way of learning. And we can save what matters about it if we're willing to learn something ourselves.
https://tedunderwood.com/2023/07/31/we-can-save-what-matters-about-writing-at-a-price/
Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
https://tedunderwood.com/2023/03/19/using-gpt-4-to-measure-the-passage-of-time-in-fiction/
Mapping the latent spaces of culture
To understand why neural language models are dangerous (and fascinating), we need to approach them as models of culture.
https://tedunderwood.com/2021/10/21/latent-spaces-of-culture/
Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning.
It resembles the Library of Babel more than HAL.
https://tedunderwood.com/2021/02/02/why-sf-hasnt-prepared-us-to-imagine-machine-learning/
How predictable is fiction?
This blog post is loosely connected to a talk I’m giving (virtually) at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events at the ACL. It’s an informal talk, exploring some of th...
https://tedunderwood.com/2020/07/05/how-predictable-is-fiction/
Humanists own the fourth dimension, and we should take pride in it.
This is going to be a short, sweet, slightly-basic blog post, because I just have a simple thing to say. I was originally trained as a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British litera...
Do topic models warp time?
Topic models can be valuable tools. But cultural historians should be aware that they are slightly ... curved.
https://tedunderwood.com/2018/07/26/do-topic-models-warp-time/