Back in 1968 when I was graduate student in Computer Science, my greatest interest was in Language Theory. I decided early on that the successful computational analysis of human Natural Language was either far off in the future or possibly a fool’s errand akin to Snipe Hunting.
So, the languages that I studied were those that Noam Chomsky described as Context-Free Languages (CFL). CFLs were synthetic languages created from a set of rules called a Context-Free Grammar. Such rules could be written using several formalisms with names such as Backus-Naur Form (BNF), Floyd-Evans Productions, and others. CFGs were useful in constructing artificial languages aka Computer Languages that allowed programmers to direct a computer’s behavior in order to accomplish a particular task (an algorithm).
Reproducing Natural Language or understanding it requires context sensitivity. Context sensitivity allows for metaphor, simile, ambiguity, and puns. CFLs do not allow for any of these. And despite the ascendancy of neural network AI language models, I remain unimpressed by the ability of these to capture the nuance of context sensitivity.
So, here we are 56 years later. I have, in the past, written in many computer languages – as have most programmers/coders/software developers over the course of their careers. I no longer spend time programming, but I do write. Sometimes I write about food porn aka foodporn. As you can see in Wikipedia’s discourse on the matter of food porn, the expression goes back to the 1970s and is applied in various media including social media, TV, newsprint, magazines, and even blogs such as mine.
Now, Facebook’s open-source AI model, Llama 3.1, or a predecessor, seems likely in charge of enforcing FB’s community rules these days. It’s cheaper to have an AI do this than to put actual humans in charge of the task. However, humans have actual intelligence whereas AIs do not. An AI trained in human language is still applying the rules of CFGs or using statistical or neural net methods. It doesn’t actually understand what it is reading. We might say that Llama, named after a South American camelid, isn’t nearly as smart as its namesake. It is much more Artificial than it is Intelligent.
To the FB algorithms that enforce the so-called Community Standards, a blog post title such as Cucumber Salad Porn is understood as a post advertising the use of edible gourds as sex toys rather than one that describes and shows those gourds used in an attractive and tasty salad.
This is where I find my blog posts today – judged as actual pornography because the Supreme Intelligence of Hala, aka Zuckerlandia, doesn’t have the intelligence of a fucking cucumber. Sigh.