Do I have tons of ideas for posts for this blog? Yes! Will I actually write any of them? Maybe!

My main motivation for finally launching a blog is the proliferation of generative AI, and in particular, language language models (LLMs). My academic background is in linguistics and psychology, and I have years of experience working as a researcher in the field of psycholinguistics—with a specific focus on phonology, language acquisition, and how written language is processed by the brain. I have a lot of thoughts about many of the claims currently being made about LLMs, and I need a place to write them down.

Spoiler alert: It’s not likely that any of that commentary is going to be positive. The people promoting these things seem to be doing so with a very poor understanding of how language actually interacts with the other processes in our brains to produce our experience of cognition, and I’m not going to be shy about calling out empirically-unsupported bullshit.