Musing on Bodong Chen

Preserving Human Idiosyncrasy: Generative Learning in the Age of Generative AI

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A quiet shift is happening in how we speak and write, and most of us don’t even notice it. Words like “delve,” “underscore,” and “realm” are suddenly everywhere in academic writing and speech. “ You sound like ChatGPT,” before you started to notice.

For example, Kobak et al. (2024) analyzed over 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024 and found certain words showed abrupt frequency increases following the release of ChatGPT. A more recent analysis of 280,000 YouTube videos showed a similar shift to reflect the AI’s flavor (Yakura et al., 2025).

The Many Faces of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Photo Credit: ChatGPT 4o)

AI is often the elephant in the room, surfacing in everything from high-stakes policymaking and academic research to casual conversations with my barber. It permeates so many aspects of life that it’s hard to escape its presence. Yet, because AI is so vast and varied in its applications, it remains a “hyper-object”—something so complex and multi-dimensional that it feels impossible to fully grasp. It impacts education, healthcare, law enforcement, entertainment, and more, each in dramatically different ways. AI is not just one thing; it’s many things, depending on where and how it is deployed.

Let's complicate the idea of infrastructure in conversations about GenAI

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First, a blog post

Rethinking AI Infrastructure: Beyond the Surface-Level Conversations

The current excitement around generative AI has sparked a wave of discussions about its potential to transform various aspects of our lives. Amidst the hype, there’s a growing tendency to refer to AI as “infrastructure.” While this comparison might seem fitting, it oversimplifies the complexity of AI systems and, more importantly, obscures the critical questions surrounding control, benefit, and impact. As we hurtle towards an AI-driven future, it’s essential to pause and reexamine our assumptions about AI infrastructure.