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Ben Swift

Ben Swift

@benswift.me

570 followers 430 following 24 posts

Computer scientist/researcher/dev and creative technologist (livecoder). Academic, but looks longingly over the fence sometimes. Judge me by my GitHub profile, not my h-index :) Senior Lecturer and Cybernetic Studio Lead at the ANU School of Cybernetics.

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Reposted by Ben Swift

austin @aparker.io · 22d

yeah, this is why I like framing AI stuff in terms of cybernetics. it really can be an extension of your capability, but it requires you to think of it that way and plan your work differently.

Reposted by Ben Swift

Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 24d

This might surprise some people given I'm very pro-AI, but I feel this on a visceral level about my own creative writing process.

Coding? Whatever, I'm happy for an LLM to write most of that for me. But I want to solve *these* problems myself, because that feels intrinsic to my creative expression.

SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.

SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

Reposted by Ben Swift

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · Aug 29

AI is interesting to me because it has mainstreamed “what does it mean to be human” and “what is the value of creativity and labor?” Unfortunately it’s also mainstreamed a lot of really dumb responses to those questions

Reposted by Ben Swift

expert-lsp.org @expert-lsp.org · Aug 28

Our GitHub repository is now public!

github.com/elixir-lang/...

Reposted by Ben Swift

Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · Aug 12

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

Reposted by Ben Swift

Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · Jul 30

These three paragraphs are so spot on

The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges:
People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content-search
Google's "News" tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you'll get the gist. (Even this article, which presents individual posts as evidence of broader outrage, unavoidably plays into the cycle.)

Although the Sweeney controversy is predictable, it also shows how the internet has completely disordered political and cultural discourse. Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet's meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant-be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else's statement. People are not quite talking past one another, but clearly nobody's listening to anyone else.

Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether-an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.

Reposted by Ben Swift

Tom Swann @tomswann.bsky.social · Jul 16

i prefer my AI content explicitly hallucinogenic and nightmarish

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

Joe Burgess at #nime2025 with a brief history of the loom (and a fascinating aside about pre-histories of textiles)

Diagram of loom development in 18thC

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

Jordie Shier at #nime2025

System overview diagram for a musical system

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

*alone

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

Michaella Moon at #nime2025: notation and textbooks along can’t teach Gugak…

A slide titled ‘educational gaps in Gugak training’

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

Victor Shepardson on the living looper at #nime2025

Presenter slide of a violinist and computer musician

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

watch and listen here lewiswolf.github.io/drum-modal-f...

Drum Modal Feedback

Compositions used as part of the research 'Drum Modal Feedback: The Process Driven Design of an Augmented Percussion Instrument'

lewiswolf.github.io

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

Lewis Wolstanholme on the creative potential of drum feedback at #nime2025

A presenter next to a big screen displaying their slides

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

if you’re in Canberra this week (either for #nime2025 or otherwise) then my installation PANIC! is installed in the ANU School of Art & Design foyer gallery

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Jun 25

congrats to Karen Brad for being the official theorist of #nime2025

Reposted by Ben Swift

Ged Sperber @gedsperber.bsky.social · Jun 19

One of the most lucid tweets I ever saw regarding AI was along the lines „We created a machine that acted like middle management and believed that meant it had a soul instead of understanding it meant that middle management didn’t.“

Reposted by Ben Swift

Zane Griffin Talley Cooper @zgtcooper.bsky.social · Jun 9

In terms of art, there are SO many great artists thinking critically about AI and its place in society. @eryk.bsky.social is one I consistently recommend as an artist who sees value in expression through the kinds of ecosystems of noise through which AI models articulate. Fascinating work.

Reposted by Ben Swift

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Mar 30

Worthwhile reading.

Some of the features that John rightly criticizes in AI writing are shared by the sort of committee reports and consensus papers that emerge from workshops and symposia because someone felt that there had to be a “product“ associated with the meeting.

John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · Mar 29

I wrote a very long blog post about AI writing. I hope you'll read it.

meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-mental...

The mental tyranny of AI writing

An arduously long blog post

meresophistry.substack.com

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Mar 13

appreciate the shout-out, but I’m the wrong benswift ☺️

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Feb 21

the e/acc approach to the problem of AI research credibility

jacobbuckman.com/2021-05-29-p...

Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud

This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other...

jacobbuckman.com

Reposted by Ben Swift

Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · Feb 21

Great piece by @benswift.me for @timeshighered.bsky.social highlighting how dynamic the #GenAI space is - and that universities are well advised not to keep all their eggs in one AI basket by signing exclusive deals.

Strong agree with Ben's arguments.

www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/deeps...

DeepSeek and shallow moats: what does it mean for higher education?

DeepSeek’s arrival may have spooked the markets, but what does it mean for the research and development of LLMs? Higher education should avoid putting all its eggs in one GenAI basket, writes Ben Swif...

www.timeshighereducation.com

Ben Swift @benswift.me · Feb 16

external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%...

Everything’s coming up Milhouse (from the Simpsons)

Reposted by Ben Swift

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Feb 3

OK, shit is getting real. A lot of teachers that understand the limits of straight LLMs — and know when an assignment falls outside them — are going to need to recalibrate in 2025.

Kevin A. Bryan @afinetheorem.bsky.social · Feb 3

The new OpenAI model announced today is quite wild. It is essentially Google's Deep Research idea with multistep reasoning, web search, *and* the o3 model underneath (as far as I know). It sometimes takes a half hour to answer. Let me show you an example. 1/x

Reposted by Ben Swift

dr. hazel 🐇 @hazelmonforton.com · Jan 22

A post by @16af93@wetdry.world on Mastodon:

renaming the main branch to 'canon' and side branches to 'heresy' (forking is renamed to schisms and pull requests/merges become ecumenical councils)