Author: P.D. Magnus

AV Undercover lives!

On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.

The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.

As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.

Goodbye, Robert

Today I attended the memorial service for my late colleague Robert Meyers, who passed away last week.

His philosophical writing addressed epistemology and pragmatism, among other things. His work on Peirce and James contains insights that informed my own work.

When I interviewed for the job here at Albany, I had breakfast with another of the faculty on the morning before my flight back to Maine. Robert met us in the parking lot to give me copies of several papers that we’d discussed, and he said he hoped to be seeing me in the Fall.1 I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.

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Parrot progress

Emily Bender famously coined the phrase stochastic parrot to describe text-only chatbots. The trend towards parrots continutes: Ars Technica has a clip of a ChatGPT-4o test run where the bot, which has a canned voice it is supposed to use, replies in the user’s own voice.

OpenAI promises that the actual release version totally doesn’t do this.2

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Measuring influence today

At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel updates his “rough measure of current influence in … ‘mainstream Anglophone philosophy’.” The method is to count the number of distinct Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles in which the philosopher is cited.

When he ran the number five years ago, I defined the Putnam as a unit of influence: By definition, 1 Putnam of influence means being cited in as many articles as Hilary Putnam.3

The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.4

AI problem solving, a snapshot

I ask Copilot: “A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they go across?”

It replies: “The man takes the goat across the river first, leaving the goat on the other side. Then he returns alone to get the boat and brings it back to the original side. Finally, he takes the goat across the river again. 🚣‍♂️🐐”

Finishing with relevant emoji is very much on-brand for Copilot. In ability to find relevant emoji, it is a match for any human.

A snippet about covers

It’s hard to believe July is almost over! A couple of weeks ago I was in Santa Fe for the Rocky Mountain ASA. It was my first aesthetics conference ever. That felt a bit awkward since I’ve been actively doing philosophy of art for more than fifteen years, but everyone was super-welcoming. It was a great conference.

Today I was editing the remarks I delivered there and ended up cutting several paragraphs. I took them out because they don’t need to be in the paper, but I think they’re correct nevertheless. So here they are…

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Solstice fonts

A strange thing about getting old is that there are things I do which I haven’t actually done for years. For example, I make fonts but it’s been almost six years since I actually released one.

I happened to look in an old folder yesterday and saw two half-made handwriting fonts, things I had scribbled years ago. A few hours of work finished them out, and I released them today as Mogrus and Tropical Luge. Unlike some of my made-to-task fonts, these are for nothing in particular. By the same dint, they can be for anything whatsoever.

Specimens for the fonts Mogrus Allcaps and Tropical Luge

On writing and thinking

My forthcoming paper On trusting chatbots is centrally about the challenge of believing claims that appear in LLM output. I am sceptical about the prospects of AI-generated summaries of facts, but I also throw a bit of shade on the suggestion that AI should be used for brainstorming and conjuring up early drafts. Sifting through bullshit is not like editing in the usual sense, I suggest.

Nevertheless, I know people who advocate using chatbots for early drafts of formulaic things like work e-mails and formal proposals. That’s fine, I suppose, but only for the sorts of things where one might just as well find some boilerplate example on-line and use that as a starting place. For anything more original, there’s a real danger in letting a chatbot guide early writing.

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