Archive for the ‘AI’ Category

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Two language-wranglers on a label hunt

September 1, 2026

On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:

— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.

I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.

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Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »

Billions of dollars in parrots

August 26, 2026

Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhyme

If you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song

Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.

And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …

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Posted in AI, Errors, Language and animals, Memory, Mishearings, Movies and tv, My life | 3 Comments »

How long is it?

February 25, 2026

This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:

The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez 

on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.

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Posted in Academic life, AI, Double entendres, Jokes, Language processing, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Stanford | 2 Comments »

New frontiers in porn for gay men

February 22, 2026

(Once more into man-on-man sex described in street language; kind of silly, and actually rather sweet, but way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest)

In my e-mail this morning (2/22), a gay porn sale ad from ASGmax: for Almost Real (part 1), In the Name of Science, featuring Nico Coopa and Ryder Owens, from the studio Next Door Films, released on 2/14/26. The video tells the tale of a “synthetic intimate robot” — not an AI creation, but a character played by an actual porn performer, which somewhat takes the edge off the kinkiness of getting a blow job from a robot or the unpleasant prospect of getting fucked by one. (The only machines I want up my ass are anal probes and dildoes that are entirely under my control — nothing with any sort of mind of its own.), The whole ad, in all its details, but with the dicks fuzzed out for WordPress modesty (I will, however, describe them):

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Posted in AI, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

Lynneguist, MD

November 13, 2025

On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:


[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.

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Posted in AI, Dialects, Linguists, Music, Parody, Pseudonyms, Variation | 1 Comment »

Bring me the head of Vladimir Lenin

June 14, 2025

The linguist Bert Vaux (information below) has been playing with AI resources for some time; most recently he’s been using head shots of various people — the hot young Brad Pitt and the famously scowling Vladimir Lenin, for example — as elements in AI compositions, today producing this entertaining ad, in which VL goes places VL has never gone before:


(#1) The major contribution to this work is a genuine Bon Ami cleanser print ad from 1949 (which BV posted on Facebook along with #1; I’ll reproduce it below)

For this image I provided a musical text, a burlesque of a wonderful comic song:

You can do such a lot with V. Lenin,
You can use every part of him too.
For work or for pleasure, he’s a triumph he’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that V. Lenin cannot do

Yes, I will also reproduce the original of this text.

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Posted in AI, Language play, Linguists, Nonsense, Parodies, Silliness | 4 Comments »

In the mail, or in the wind

June 12, 2025

My days are spinning out of control, with more crises to attend to and less available time to do much more than race around with my hair on fire. Out of all this, just one thing, the 5 mg prednisone refill through CVS Caremark mail delivery. Reported on in my 6/3 posting “Today’s catch-22”, about this prescription refill gone awry for weeks (after, apparently, being sent for pickup at a local CVS pharmacy), a sad story that ended with the following exchange between someone I believed to be an actual human agent or representative of CVS Caremark, who went on:

to present me with an apology and the news that my prednisone would go out to me this very afternoon. Cautiously, I explained that I was disabled and housebound (she already had my birthdate, so she knew I was really old) and needed reassurance that it was going out in the mail. To my home address.

“Oh yes, sir. To your home address. It should take a few days.”

That was 6/3. It is now 6/12, 9 days later, and today’s mail has come, with a new issue of the New Yorker in it, but no prednisone. We’re now down to composing a 5 mg dosage from smaller-dose pills that we have left over from earlier prescriptions. Crisis time is on the horizon.

I am now seized with alarm, with a feeling of dread that this refill, like the previous one, is in the wind, not in the mail. Let me explain.

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Posted in AI, My life | 3 Comments »

Today’s catch-22

June 3, 2025

Getting prescriptions (re)filled through CVS Caremark turns out to be a constant unpleasant adventure. My password keeps needing to be changed, for no reason I can see, and what happens when I get to the “manage your prescriptions” page is always something different from all previous log-ins. Sometimes I can find no way to get the list of my (alas, very many) prescriptions, or get the list from two years ago, or some list that probably belongs to someone else, so I just abandon the task and try again the next day.  Twice I’ve been told that that resource is not available.

Today my problem was a prescription for prednisone 5 mg tablets, which I put in weeks ago, got a message saying it had been processed, and then no news whatsoever. So, after elaborately proving who I was and then changing my password, I found the “track your orders” resource (sometimes it just vanishes and I’m shit out of luck, but it was there today. And told me that instead of being mailed to me (as I had instructed), the rx was sent to my local CVS, held for two weeks without being picked up, and returned to the warehouse. All without any notification to me.

Oh, you say, that should be no problem, just put in a new order. The “submit an order” option was in fact available. Joy.

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Posted in AI, Events and occasions, Language and medicine, My life, Technology | 3 Comments »

Let’s recap

May 23, 2025

Yesterday on this blog, in “Not in a bad mood, just smart”, I looked at this cartoon panel that had appeared on Facebook:


(#1) Image plus text; the image was pretty clearly from Calvin and Hobbes (isn’t that Susie?), but the text (expressing a sentiment  that resonated with me in current times, packaged in a slogan, or tag line) was unfamiliar to me

Then the searches.

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Posted in AI, Art, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Not in a bad mood, just smart

May 22, 2025

The abbreviated form of a slogan, or tag line, that I came across on Facebook this morning, in what appeared to be a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (see the Watterson signature), or could be an extract from such a panel with the tag line added (we live in a world that has both old Photoshop and new AI, so such things are trivially easy to arrange):


(#1) I had a thought of using this as a visual distillation of my attitude towards the current US government, but I wanted to get the credit right; that became a problem I haven’t yet solved

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Posted in AI, Art, Basque, Clothing, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans, This blogging life | 6 Comments »

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