James Rovira

Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”

A Cento by James Rovira Suffering is one very long moment. Time itself does not progress | It revolves.It circles round one center of pain. There is only one season | the season of sorrow.It is always twilight in this prison cell and in this heart. In the sphere of time and thought | motionisContinue reading “Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis””

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Ballad of a Selfish Boy

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has withered from the lake,And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full,And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow,With anguish moist and fever-dew,And on thy cheeks a fading roseFast withereth too. I met a ladyContinue reading “Ballad of a Selfish Boy”

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AI in the Classroom

I’ve long been an early technology adapter. I started building webpages/websites in the 90s, used turnitin.com not just for plagiarism checking but for providing rich feedback on student papers in the very early 2000s, and around that time had students write live blogs on a course website as part of their writing requirements. I didn’tContinue reading “AI in the Classroom”

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AI and Talking Heads, Part III: Why Sentient Machines Will Never Exist

In my previous post, I made a distinction between “Strong” AI and “Weak” AI and then went on to describe how Weak AI works. I explained that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT convert words to numbers and then calculate the statistically most probable words and sentences that will follow any given words and sentences.Continue reading “AI and Talking Heads, Part III: Why Sentient Machines Will Never Exist”

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AI and Talking Heads, Part II: Why Machines Can’t Read

I’d like to talk about a distinction between two kinds of artificial intelligence (AI): “Strong” AI and “Weak” AI. StrongAI is AI that has attained artificial consciousness — the machine has become sentient and thinks for itself in a way comparable to a human being. Strong AI has been the subject of numerous films and works of fictionContinue reading “AI and Talking Heads, Part II: Why Machines Can’t Read”