As I listened to the full NYU lecture, I was blown away at how much more clearly I was able to understand SEO, AI and predictive text. Using poetry and the assembly of word meaning through artful design was enormously helpful and illuminating. Creating vector spaces by color and their various inputs, and then seeing how the averages of any vectors produced another color in the space, was a very clear and intelligent way of teaching the concept of computational linguistics. It also tied together some points for me from learning Python in my 320A class, and allowed me to understand even more so how arrays and vectors are interrelated.
I found that about halfway through the NYU lecture, Professor Wang's "Humans in the Loop" article was immediately applicable - it was when the NYU professor said, “Ok, this is with 12% of the Bible added in.” This was where there was choice and interaction with "humans in the loop" in that humans and AI were both co-creating by feeding off of each other's skill set. Also, as the professor explained, the way poetry is read is very important - the way the words are emphasized and pronounced gives meaning accordingly. I couldn’t agree more - sometimes I personally struggle with how my live performances will be much more expressive than what is possible on a version of my recorded song. Additionally, even when robotic voices like Siri or Alexa or hold music voices aim to emphasize certain words to sound more human, it will never achieve the same emotional energy or richness that comes from pure human spirit. Because of this, in my opinion, we will *always* need humans in the loop, and I find myself rarely fearing that artificial intelligence will "take over". Instead, I feel the intentional and collaborative use of AI only pushes humans to double down on what we are already good at which are traits like consciousness, awareness, love, presence, light, emotion, depth, understanding.
I also really loved when the professor gave the example of "soft" and "hard" words and how they can imply a shape or meaning based on the sound of the words. They gave the example of "kiki" and "bouba", and how kids of all languages intuitively felt that "kiki" was sharp and "bouba" was soft. It got me thinking about my own name "Kiran" and how my name starts with a hard sound but ends with a soft sound - It definitely affirmed further that my name fits my personality! It got me thinking about linguistics and phonetics in a different way, and I went as far as even to think about how sounds and shapes affect my own choices for my baby names in the future...("Suri" is my current favorite baby name!)
In conclusion, I was very grateful for this final lecture and this assignment because it exposed me to the core mechanics behind computational linguistics and how these algorithms touch so many aspects of our current interactions with the internet and community today. We give meaning to words by how we use them and the neighboring words that surround them in a vector space. We are actively constructing culture, meaning, facts and community by our speech, texts, posts, likes and online engagement. This gives us enormous power to actively design for the unbiased and meaningful world we might want to live in, vs. to keep the intelligence and spiritual capacity of our humanity more dumbed down. When I think of how we can use words to elevate, inspire, uplift and motivate, especially with lyrics as musicians or poets, and that we can give meaning to words simply by our nuanced and evolved interactions and use cases of those words, I see that as a powerful opportunity, rather than a reason for fear!