What Happens If You Train an AI Only on Scripture and Tolkien?
A thought experiment exploring what happens when AI learns from narratives that prioritize meaning over facts - and the crucial difference between metaphor and false belief.
AI & Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks
106 posts
The AI Lie: Why It Will Never Change
AI is a remorseless liar, trained on a mountain of text whose whole purpose was persuasion, not accuracy. No amount of prompting fixes that on its own. You have to stop enabling it.
Tokens Are the New Electrons
Edison metered electrons by the ampere-hour before anyone metered tokens, and the War of Currents was fought over the same problem the AI economy has now: getting a dead commodity to a device built to do something with it.
Richard Dawkins Knows AI Isn't Conscious. He Feels It Is Anyway.
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
Most AI Conversations Fail (Here's Why)
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
Jev's New Idea Is the Taxonomy Job I Built for AT&T
A taxonomist's view of Jev: the closed-category, confidence-scored work I built by hand for AT&T in the 90s, now manufactured to order by an LLM.
I've Been Writing Em-Dashes Since the 1980s
The em-dash sneer, the anti-AI backlash, and the real skill: curating a machine's raw output down to something worth a human's attention.
There Was No Word for Things That Can't Feel Shame, So I Invented One
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
Graph Theory: The Internet's Secret Skeleton
Graph theory is the other kind of graph — the math of things connected to other things — and once you can see the pattern, you can't stop seeing it.
The Bottleneck Is You
Language models have effectively read every book ever written. You process what they hand back at a fixed fifty bits a second, a number that hasn't moved in your species' history. That fixed rate is the actual chokepoint.