Michael Gavin
banner
michaelgavin.bsky.social
Michael Gavin
@michaelgavin.bsky.social
Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Univ South Carolina. Author of Literary Mathematics (Stanford UP). Quiet poster, usually. Website: https://literarymathematics.org/
LLMs will never be able to make you feel embarrassed that they don't like you. This, in the end, is the real meaning of personhood and the problem of other minds.
July 12, 2025 at 12:23 AM
hesitate to make predictions, but... seems like once the base models cross a certain threshold, there will be so much to do in terms of building applications that the $$ incentives to train new models will recede, and it'll be back on universities to come up with the next big-$ innovation
March 23, 2025 at 12:33 PM
We had a visiting speaker come in last month and explicitly say that universities won't be able to keep up bc research in the field is too resource intensive. sounded true, or at least likely. but there's also a huge middle ground between building new LLMs and working with students
March 23, 2025 at 12:19 PM
that's tricky. I have always struggled getting majors to enroll, and for my nonmajors the literature presents more obstacles than I expected. after several false starts I rebranded the course "Math 4 Shakespeare" (just what it sounds like) and have gotten great responses from nonmajors. good luck!
March 11, 2025 at 6:23 PM
undergrad or grad? are you more training future colleagues who might write quant theses or more offering a fun interdisciplinary class to a bunch of future doctors and engineers?
March 11, 2025 at 5:44 PM
I’ve been there and had the exact same realization
January 10, 2025 at 2:47 AM
Yes but only bc authors are cagey af and too clever by half. Honestly I’d trust an LLM to represent the ideas and intentions accurately over abt 90% of authors 90% of the time. Like if you ask me about my book I’ll spout mostly nonsense
December 12, 2024 at 3:32 AM
Me, me, me! I have a book on the 17th cent origins of English literary criticism, a second book on computational methods, and now editing a big collection on global language policy and international relations.
November 10, 2024 at 9:45 PM