Kristian Berg
kristianberg.bsky.social
Kristian Berg
@kristianberg.bsky.social
Linguist an der Uni Bonn
"It's as if climate change had fans." Great thread!
Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.
October 10, 2025 at 5:41 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
Recurring gripe of mine but it is incredible how National Conservatism is supposedly built around decrying lack of community, common project etc, while turning every “hate your neighbors” dial they can access up to 11. Make your professor terrified to say anything, don’t trust your doctor, etc
September 26, 2025 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
www.bostonreview.net
September 23, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
live your life so that when you die everyone talks about how hot you were and not how you were a hateful bigot
September 16, 2025 at 5:08 PM
"Woker Wahn" -- kann jemand hier was zum Ursprung dieses Kampfbegriffs sagen? Haben wir irgendwo ein Korpus rechter Kommunikation (also außer Twitter 🤡), das man für so was nutzen könnte?
September 12, 2025 at 5:55 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
8) Nothing worth achieving can be done without crossing an ocean of cringe. Kill your fear of cringe.
August 9, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
I think about this constantly
July 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
June 26, 2025 at 3:50 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
I have never felt more similar to Paul Krugman.
amazing q&a with paul krugman
June 25, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
I think AI is going to eventually tank in the longterm, but...

the only real way to combat this is single-interest communities. Forums, user comms, etc, with a barrier to entry. They become trustable knowledgebases. It's really the only way forward is to return to what worked best the first time
June 24, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
This is the smartest damn thing I’ve heard all year. If nothing else, it might serve to erode employers‘ trust in ChatGPT.
June 19, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
ON TOP of the ethical reasons to not use AI, it's also
1) bad at what it does
2) literally makes you stupider
3) has HUGE environmental costs: every search is equivalent to pouring out an entire bottle of water. It's not worth it to generate a cutesy emoji or have it write an error-riddled draft.
AI was trained on my books (without my permission and against my will) so this annoys me. I never use AI. Not for research, not for images, not for writing. AI used me.
I keep seeing reports of non-AI users being told that an AI detector has dubbed their work AI generated, and it makes me insane because:
1) AI detection tools *are themselves AI* and thus entirely bullshit; and
2) if an AI was trained on your works, of COURSE it’ll flag you as sounding “like” AI!
June 15, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
This is a hell of a thing to read.
Diabolus Ex Machina
This Is Not An Essay
open.substack.com
June 3, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
April 15, 2025 at 2:56 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
I’m sorry but if your students use AI to write papers and you use AI to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel
Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create
April 15, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
We thank Reviewer 2 for their helpful feedback which has greatly improved the paper
Ok so I didn’t really need that in my adult beverage but thanks for sharing
May 29, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
I think about this comic at least once a week
May 10, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
Wenn man es gut meint mit vielen Veranwortlichen beim ÖRR, wirft man keine Komplizenschaft mit der AfD vor, sondern stellt nur institutionalisierte Feigheit fest. Nie lässt man es drauf ankommen. Sollen sie sich doch erst einmal reinklagen müssen ins Programm und in die Talkshows. Leider undenkbar.
April 22, 2025 at 8:12 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
New R package almost birthed - SemanticDistance - computes two semantic distance metrics (experiential and embedding) for any rolling chunk size (ngram-to-ngram, word-to-word, turn-to-turn, ngram-to-word). You give it your language sample. It does the rest, including lemmatize and stopword omit
April 19, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
no lies detected. #civilrights
March 21, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
Everyone should read this, especially for the bits in the article that give us some insight into what these detention prisons used by ICE are like.

And no one, no one, should be traveling to the US if they can avoid it. No one.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre
Graphic artist Rebecca Burke was on the trip of a lifetime. But as she tried to leave the US she was stopped, interrogated and branded an illegal alien by ICE. Now back home, she tells others thinking...
www.theguardian.com
April 5, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Anyone who has ever tediously downloaded texts from Project Gutenberg will be very happy about this great tool: bsky.app/profile/fmon...
Also new in #corpus building tools, I have just put online Project Gutenberg Corpus Builder, a web app which allows you to search for ebooks in the Gutenberg Project database and download the results as pre-formatted files for use in corpus software:
gutencorpus.prendrelangue.fr
#linguistics
March 28, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Reposted by Kristian Berg
(Stolen from Reddit. Likely lifted from somewhere else)
March 25, 2025 at 6:31 PM