While the starting place for these words is my vexations when trying to talk about ChatGPT and related tools, these words, húrutásin and húrusikkarin, have application in other areas. This is a compound of húr 'border, boundary' and saka 'idea, thought, notion.' This immediately suggested húrutásin and húrusikkarin for contextually bounded ideas of 'true' and 'false,' from already existing tásin 'true' and ikkarin 'false' (itself derived from ikko 'to lack').

It's always nice if new words can be developed on existing models or metaphors, and, luckily, Kílta already has the word húrusakin 'theory/worldview internal,' an adjective for words, ideas, etc., which won't necessarily make sense to people unfamiliar with a particular theory or worldview. 'false' in a situation where those concepts aren't particularly related to the real world, but are located within the weight matrices of these AI models. I will end my rant on these models here, and rely on what I've said so far to set the stage for some recent new vocabulary.Īs you might imagine, I've been wracking my brains to come up with ways to talk about 'true' vs. Similar models are known to not always cope well with negation, for example, which is a fairly important thing to get right if you want to talk about the real world reliably. ChatGPT just produces a stream of characters that is statistically likely given the prompt. as ' speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.' That is, these models have no meaningful relationship with questions of truth or falsity. I am using 'bullshit' here in the Harry G. The core aspect of these that is so vexing is that they are bullshit machines. Recently I have been exasperated by the lack of good words to describe things surrounding generative AI, in particular the 'language' models, like ChatGPT. I've documented a few of them in Segments issue #4. Sometimes, though, concepts without simple English words get my attention. This sort of fairly routine vocabulary is where most of my creative time goes. I'm even less likely to talk about beavers than I am bird baths, but here I am today, with a word for beaver - kiulon (which means something like 'tree-associated red-brown guy') - and I still haven't gotten to 'bird bath.' Maybe today. Naturally, I didn't already have a word for beaver. So, I created a word for 'pond' - paipa - and then I wanted to talk about a beaver pond as one of the examples. But I didn't even have a word for that ready to go. I decided I was probably going to get that word out of something related to a word for 'pond,' in particular an artificial sort of pond/lake thing. I recently wanted a phrase for 'bird bath' for Kílta. That can sometimes lead to unexpected places. My tendency to create the occasional word that has a complex definition in English is just a result of me drawing borders differently on, for example, my Kílta map of the human-experienced world.īecause of my diary method of conlanging, I regularly have to create fairly mundane vocabulary for things I haven't yet talked about. In particular, this is a good characterization for a lot of my conlanging work, where I am interested in the contours that separate or group meaning in ways I find interesting or pleasing. I have a list in one of my notebooks with the title 'What is Conlanging?' There are quite a few items on that list, but I think one answer to that question is 'artistic mapmaking,' where I mean 'map' in the general semantics sense. One maxim of General Semantics that escaped into the popular consciousness, though, is, 'the map is not the territory.' When a general semanticist uses that phrase, they are often doing so metaphorically, where the territory is the human-experienced world and the map is human language. I have neither time nor space to go into other aspects of General Semantics here. It had impacts in a few areas, including on science fiction authors of the era, but these days it mostly shows up among media ecology people like Neil Postman. General Semantics is a philosophical movement with self-help overtones that had its heyday in the 1950s.

Obsidian definition adjective