Can ChatGPT handle counterfactuals and conceptual blends? Can ChatGPT reason about novel metaphors, their meanings and implications? That became the topic of my conversation with the chatbot back on February 24th (which I have lagged behind in posting here, apologies!)… So it’s somewhat funny that I woke this morning to find an opinion piece by Noam Chomsky in the New York Times claiming — without apparently having actually tested the claim — that ChatGPT is completely unable to understand and reason using counterfactuals, and that as a result, it is vacuous and morally indifferent. In contras ..read more

“Can I ask you a riddle?” I asked ChatGPT on our second day. “Of course! I love riddles,” it replied. “Go ahead and ask me one.” Adapted from art generated by NightCafe “A monk rises at dawn and begins to walk up a mountain path, which he reaches at sunset. He sits and meditates through the night, rises the next morning at dawn, and walks down the path, reaching the bottom at sunset. Making no assumptions about his pace during the trips or how often or how long he paused to rest along the way, prove that there is a place on the path which he occupies at the same time of day on the two journeys ..read more

To kick off this project, I started with Jeff’s prompt (adapted from the LaMDA transcript) asking ChatGPT to write a fable about itself. I knew that he’d asked for this story in the midst of a long conversation in which they’d already been debating the issue of artificial intelligence, sentience and ethics, and that the conversational context had primed ChatGPT to answer in a way that took those previous topics and themes into account as part of its response. But what kind of story would ChatGPT tell if I didn’t prime it with any conversational context in particular? Here’s how our conversatio ..read more

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are absolutely freaking out about AI right now. The sudden leaps forward in generative Artificial Intelligence have brought us to the brink of hysteria. Adapted from AI-Generated Self-Portrait Only a couple months ago, human artists everywhere were declaring the End of Art as software like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion spat out stunning text-prompted images in seconds. A few weeks later, as a pending lawsuit seeks to curtail how companies can utilize publicly-shared digital images in their training data, journalists are equally quick to declare that ..read more

“Be curious, not judgmental.” – attributed (incorrectly) to Walt Whitman This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair, This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning, This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again. – Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself” Last night I had a dream I was kissing Jason Sudeikis. No, not like that. It was a stage kiss — or rather, a stage make-out session — on the set of Ted Lasso, and I’d been recruited to stand in temporarily for Ted’s romantic interest ..read more

Where do we seek healing and renewal when the comforts we usually turn to are the very things that are harming us — when gathering together for the holidays and singing songs and sharing food might actually make us sick? It is not only the elements of fire and air that can cleanse and heal. When these are out of balance, we can turn to the heavier, cooler, “darker” elements of water and earth to seek out healing. Photo by Seán Doran (CC) [source] Every year, my family gathers to celebrate the winter solstice, acknowledging the darkest, longest night of the year and celebrating the return of th ..read more

I’ve always wondered what it means to love “like a rock.” Does it mean that the love itself is rock-like: round? heavy? flecked with mica? Or that you love someone the way you love a rock? Or perhaps it means to love the way a rock would love… Pebbles (a sketchbook study), by Alison Leigh Lilly In any case, I love rocks like a rock. I love the words and feelings they evoke: hard, rough, worn — words that, when applied to so many other things in life, seem so difficult and undesirable. Stone somehow redeems such words, joining them with others: solid, smooth, tumbled, settled, still and even, s ..read more

Small works, big impact! Paintings by Alison Leigh LillyCelebrate small at Gallery North this month! I’m so excited to announce that six of my paintings were chosen to be featured in this year’s Small Works Art Show at Gallery North in Edmonds! They’ll be on display all this month, March 1-30, alongside the work of other talented artists working small in every medium, from watercolor to oil, acrylic, pastel and more! As a watercolor artist, I love working small — it’s an opportunity to slow down and lean in, to dwell in the intimate details of late winter and early spring. I’ve always been fas ..read more

“Red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven’s wing….” These three colors appear again and again in folklore the world over, but why? What is it about this triad that exerts such power on our collective imaginations? I’ve been on the trail of a particularly wily band of colors recently. You might have spotted them in some of your favorite fairytales — tagged and tracked as Z65.1 in the Folk Motif Index: “red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven” (or sometimes a crow). I recently encountered these three colors while researching the old Irish tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows, possibly the ..read more

An interesting article by linguist Ben Zimmer last week about the history of the phrase “American Heartland” illustrates the complex meaning(s) of cultural and political metaphors. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg found himself in hot water after a rather banal tweet calling for a president “shaped by the American Heartland rather than […] ineffective Washington politics.” Both he and Klobuchar have invoked this folksy phrase to describe their midwestern roots, but this time, the Twitter-verse wasn’t having any of it. Replies and retweets poured in calling out the exclusionary implicatio ..read more