Linguistics in the Wild
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wildlanguaging.bsky.social
Linguistics in the Wild
@wildlanguaging.bsky.social
40 followers 23 following 17 posts
Giving cute little descriptions and explanations of linguistic phenomena seen in the wild/on the internet/whatever. Ruining jokes.

I used to run this same account on the Bird Site.

I am also @claussy.bsky.social
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Reposted by Linguistics in the Wild
amyhoy.bsky.social
wake up babe, a new (old) paper on "artificial intelligence" just dropped!

it's got that extra tasty vintage typography too (1976)

fulltext: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS NATURAL STUPIDITY Drew McDermoH MIT At Lab Cambridge, Mass 02139 As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics <Dreyfus, 1972>, <Lighthill, 1973> have urged that we are over the border. We have been very defensive toward this charge, drawing ourselves up with dignity when it is made and folding the cloak of Science about us. On the other hand, in private, we have been justifiably proud of our wil#ingness to explore weird ideas, because pursuing them is the only way to make progress. Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with the culture of the hacker in computer science <Weizenbaum, 1975> to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, ,~elf-discipline is not necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger. In the past few years, our tolerance of sloppy thinking has led us to repeat many mistakes over and over. If we are to retain any credibility, this should stop. This paper is an effort to ridicule some of these mistakes. Almost everyone I know should find himself the target at some point or other; if you don't, you are encouraged to write up your own favorite fault. The three described here I suffer from myself. I hope self-ridicule will be a complete catharsis, but t doubt it. Bad tendencies can be very deep-rooted. Remember, though, if we can't criticize ourselves, someone else will save us the trouble. Acknow~dEmer~t-- I thank the AI Lab Playroom crowd for constructive play. Wishful Mnemonics A major source of simple-mindedness in AI programs is the use of mnemonics like "UNDERSTAND" or "GOAL" to refer to programs and data structures. This practice has been inherited from more
October 4, 2025 at 2:45 AM
wildlanguaging.bsky.social
Google’s AI: what if predicate modification were disjunction instead of conjunction?
#linguistics #semantics #AI #AIfails
[previously posted on my wild languaging Mastodon]
Search result from Google's AI Overview: "There are many famous gray cats, including fictional characters and a movie cat: Jonesy: a gray tabby from the movie Alien; Duchess: A Disney character from The Aristocats; Eeyore: The gray donkey from Winnie the Pooh; Mr. Mistoffelees: A character from the musical Cats; Vito's cat: A gray, striped tabby from the 1972 movie The Godfather. Some other famous gray cats include: Benny the Ball from the Top Cartoon series, Bugs Bunny, and Edie from Gray Gardens."
January 9, 2025 at 4:42 PM
wildlanguaging.bsky.social
Amazing example of assuming you know how Early Modern English worked and not getting there.
Screenshot from a video game. A character named Pavol, dressed in red armor, says "Praised be Jesus Christ. Ye art the sanctimonious one?"
January 8, 2025 at 7:05 PM
wildlanguaging.bsky.social
Hi all! I used to be on tw!tter doing this account where I gave short-ish descriptions of linguistic phenomena, but then I deleted all my old twitter accounts and moved to Mastodon, but then I never used it on Mastodon. So I'm gonna move it over here. Some will be repeats from old days, mostly new.
January 8, 2025 at 7:02 PM