9 Best Articles in 2021
The Guardian
A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
The Guardian
5 min read · 2020-09-08 · We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace
OpenAI
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
OpenAI
20+ min read · Jan 5th · We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
Seth Godin
Why the blockchain matters
Seth Godin
4 min read · May 10th · But first, let’s understand some words… Bitcoin is not the blockchain. If the blockchain is a printing press, Bitcoin is a kind of paper money. There are countless things that one can do with a pri…
Vulture
Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?
Vulture
~16 min read · 2020-02-20 · Literary critic Molly Young offers a witty dissection of how today’s businesses – especially start-ups, creative firms and online companies – spawn nonsense corporate slanguage and self-deluded gibberish. Young’s keen ear and sharp tongue will provide relief and amusement to anyone who’s endured a meeting replete with nonsense terminology, such as “parallel-pathing, growth hacking, upleveling” and “blitzscaling.”
thisworddoesnotexist.com
neuropsychologism: this word does not exist
thisworddoesnotexist.com
1 min read · 2020-05-13 · 1. psychiatry or mental illness as distinguished from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other forms of mental disturbance because of the impairment of the normal development of consciousness. 2. a…
The New Yorker
The Computers Are Getting Better at Writing
The New Yorker
4 min read · Apr 30th · Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed.
MIT Technology Review
OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless
MIT Technology Review
1 min read · 2020-07-20 · “Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few…
builtbywords.substack.com
Writing tools I learned from The Economist
builtbywords.substack.com
6 min read · Apr 5th · I learned writing from The Economist. Back home, it wasn’t easy to learn English. No one in my social circle was fluent in the language and I couldn’t afford a private tutor. The best I could do was…
The Pudding
The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature
The Pudding
8 min read · 2020-07-16 · An analysis of 2,000 books and how body parts are described, by gender.
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Aeon+Psyche
Why is the English spelling system so weird and inconsistent?
Aeon+Psyche
~13 min read · Jul 26th · Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology
The New York Times
Tapping into the Brain to Help a Paralyzed Man Speak
The New York Times
9 min read · Jul 14th · In a once unimagined accomplishment, electrodes implanted in the man’s brain transmit signals to a computer that displays his words.
pair.withgoogle.com
What Have Language Models Learned?
pair.withgoogle.com
5 min read · Jul 28th · By asking language models to fill in the blank, we can probe their understanding of the world.
The Wall Street Journal
Peppa Pig, a Pandemic Favorite, Has American Children Acting British
The Wall Street Journal
4 min read · Jul 18th · After binge-watching the British cartoon about a preschooler pig during lockdowns, children across the U.S. are surprising their parents with their unusual vocabularies and distinct accents. ‘Can we…
