Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 222.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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    [1]    From: Francois Lachance 
           Subject: Mimesis and Gamut >> Re: [Humanist] 34.221: on GPT-3 and imitation (20)

    [2]    From: Melissa Terras 
           Subject: ImprovBot, Edinburgh Fringe and imitation Re: [Humanist] 34.221: on GPT-3 and imitation (40)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-08-10 00:22:27+00:00
        From: Francois Lachance 
        Subject: Mimesis and Gamut >> Re: [Humanist] 34.221: on GPT-3 and imitation

Willard

This thread on machines and imitation makes me wonder what is being imitated. I
know the focus has been on intelligence. But is there not a gamut: reflex,
tropism, instinct, intelligence, personhood (as in agent for speech act)? What
value might there be in approaching the problematic from alternative categories:
to what extent might we speak of a machine-reflex?


~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~
François Lachance
Scholar-at-large
Wannabe Professor of Theoretical and Applied Rhetoric
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
https://berneval.hcommons.org

to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied tasks




--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-08-09 09:51:52+00:00
        From: Melissa Terras 
        Subject: ImprovBot, Edinburgh Fringe and imitation Re: [Humanist] 34.221: on GPT-3 and imitation

Dear Colleagues,

Those interested in GPT-3 and imitation may like a bit of digital fun - over the
past few weeks I've been working on a project with the Edinburgh Fringe,
called ImprovBot, which is a reflection on the interaction of AI and the
creative industries, at a time when the Edinburgh Festivals are not happening
this year, and the digital is ever more important.

We've scraped the last 8 years of programs, and are putting out a new
'show' description that is written by a neural net, hourly over the Fringe
period. We're encouraging people to play along - and at 7pm-ish Edinburgh time
for the next couple of weeks, the Improverts (the Edinburgh Uni theatre improv
society) will be putting out a scene they've improvised from the suggestions
the bot has made. Good larks, and part of the #makeyourfringe programme with the
Fringe Society.

The project is now live, over at
https://twitter.com/improvbot_ai
and
https://improvbot.ai

And we'd appreciate any bump you could give this on the socials ;-)

It's not GPT-3 we are using, but a Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural
Network, trained only on the 2 million word dataset of 28,000 previous Fringe
shows (https://improvbot.ai/about/how-the-ai-works/) - that we, we can also
comment on the language and tropes of the Fringe. (And actually, its proving to
be an interesting insight into things to look into with future, more
established, text analysis write ups of the corpus - Hmmm, AI as Research
Assistant?)

Thanks!

Melissa

-----
Professor Melissa Terras
University of Edinburgh, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
@melissaterras



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