Monday 9 November, 2026

On reflection Quote of the Day ”Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” Mark Twain Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Tom Rush | What’s Wrong with America Link Wonderful. Long Read of the Day What do you get if you make AI eat its own words? Not what you originally asked for My recent Observer column Here’s an experiment you probably can’t try at home. Take a large language model (LLM) and prompt it with a passage about English church architecture of the 14th century; you know the kind of stuff – towers, master masons, the perpendicular style, and so on. Straight out of Pevsner, if you like. Ask it to carry on writing. Then train a fresh model on what the first one wrote, and ask it to do the same. Keep going, generation after generation. By the ninth, you find that the machine has given up talking about churches and is producing an earnest list of jackrabbits with tails of various colours: black, white, blue,…

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