Month: April 2025

it’s the interface

A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any sufficiently advanced technology and all that. But why chatbots specifically? Not all ‘generative AI’ or even all LLMs spark so much anthropomorphization and attributions of ‘general intelligence.’ It wasn’t StableDiffusion’s image generator or GPT-2 that excited this imagination. We don’t see much anthropomorphization for the latest versions of Copilot (a code generator) or Suno (a song generator), either. It was ChatGPT. Now often it’s character.ai.

Instruction tuning, and later chat tuning, are the methodological innovations that make some machine learning pass the Turing Test. An object that we can use imperative language with (“write me an email…”) seems to have captured imaginations in ways that other, frankly better, objects don’t.

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>5000 faculty from around the country call on academic leaders to resist

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Faculty From 14 Universities Join Forces to Call on Administrative Bodies to Stand Up to Attacks on Higher Education

Nearly 5,100 Faculty From 14 Universities Call on University Administrations to Stand Up to Attacks on Democratic Principles 

Cambridge, MA – April 17th, 2025 – Faculty from fourteen universities across the United States signed and released letters calling for their respective university’s administrative bodies to stand up to the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, and other democratic principles. Nearly 5,100 faculty have collectively signed these letters on what the American Association of University Professors has called a Day of Action for Higher Ed. This is a collaborative effort independently organized by passionate faculty across four universities – Professor Ryan Enos from Harvard University; Professor Gerry Leonard from Boston University; Professor Brian Cleary from Boston University; Professor Daniel Laurison from Swarthmore College; and Professor Dan Hirschman from Cornell University – to encourage leadership at higher education institutions to stand up and fight back against the anti-democratic attacks of the federal government.

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