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dunce
“But now in our age it is growne to be a common prouerbe in derision, to call such a person as is senselesse or without learning a Duns, which is as much as a foole.”
Francis Thynne, Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587
The word dunce hasn’t always meant, well, dunce. Named for Scottish scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus, it first referred to a follower of Duns’s teachings, says the OED. Then it gained the derisive meaning of “a hair-splitting reasoner,” due to later philosophers who ridiculed his work, as well as “a dull pedant” and finally someone dull-witted.
Dunce cap might have first been used by Charles Dickens in his novel, The Old Curiosity Shop: “Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce’s cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size.”
We interviewed twenty professional comedians who perform live shows in front of audiences and who use artificial intelligence in their artistic process as part of 3-hour workshops on ``AI x Comedy'' conducted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2023 and online. The workshop consisted of a comedy writing session with large language models (LLMs), a human-computer interaction questionnaire to assess the Creativity Support Index of AI as a writing tool, and a focus group interrogating the comedians' motivations for and processes of using AI, as well as their ethical concerns about bias, censorship and copyright. Participants noted that existing moderation strategies used in safety filtering and instruction-tuned LLMs reinforced hegemonic viewpoints by erasing minority groups and their perspectives, and qualified this as a form of censorship. At the same time, most participants felt the LLMs did not succeed as a creativity support tool, by producing bland and biased comedy tropes, akin to ``cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist''. Our work extends scholarship about the subtle difference between, one the one hand, harmful speech, and on the other hand, ``offensive'' language as a practice of resistance, satire and ``punching up''. We also interrogate the global value alignment behind such language models, and discuss the importance of community-based value alignment and data ownership to build AI tools that better suit artists' needs.
Based on Strachey and Turing's love letter generator