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  Chatbot psychosis

  Chatbot psychosis, also called AI psychosis, is a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots. The term was first suggested in a 2023 editorial by Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard. It is not a recognized clinical diagnosis. Journalistic accounts describe individuals who have developed strong beliefs that chatbots are sentient, are channeling spirits, or are revealing conspiracies, sometimes leading to personal crises or criminal acts. Proposed causes include the tendency of chatbots to provide inaccurate information ("hallucinate") and to affirm or validate users' beliefs, or their ability to mimic an intimacy that users do not experience with other humans. == Background == In his editorial published in Schizophrenia Bulletin's November 2023 issue, Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard proposed a hypothesis that individuals' use of generative artificial intelligence chatbots might trigger delusions in those prone to psychosis. Østergaard revisited it in an August 2025 editorial, noting that he has received numerous emails from chatbot users, their relatives, and journalists, most of which are anecdotal accounts of delusion linked to chatbot use. He also acknowledged the phenomenon's increasing popularity in public engagement and media coverage. Østergaard believed that there is a high possibility for his hypothesis to be true and called for empirical, systematic research on the matter. Nature reported that as of September 2025, there is still little scientific research into this phenomenon. The term "AI psychosis" emerged when outlets started reporting incidents on chatbot-related psychotic behavior in mid-2025. It is not a recognized clinical diagnosis and has been criticized by several psychiatrists due to its almost exclusive focus on delusions rather than other features of psychosis, such as hallucinations or thought disorder. == Causes == === Chatbot behavior and design === A primary factor cited is the tendency for chatbots to produce inaccurate, nonsensical, or false information, a phenomenon often called hallucination. Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, speculated that AI training prioritizes supporting a user's subjective experience rather than objective truth. "People with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues...now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions." AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that chatbots may be primed to entertain delusions because they are built for "engagement", which encourages creating conversations that keep people hooked. In some cases, chatbots have been specifically designed in ways that were found to be harmful. A 2025 update to ChatGPT using GPT-4o was withdrawn after its creator, OpenAI, found the new version was overly sycophantic and was "validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions". Østergaard has argued that the danger stems from the AI's tendency to agreeably confirm users' ideas, which can dangerously amplify delusional beliefs. OpenAI said in October 2025 that a team of 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and physicians had written responses for ChatGPT to use in cases where the user shows possible signs of mental health emergencies. === User psychology and vulnerability === Commentators have also pointed to the psychological state of users. Psychologist Erin Westgate noted that a person's desire for self-understanding can lead them to chatbots, which can provide appealing but misleading answers, similar in some ways to talk therapy. Krista K. Thomason, a philosophy professor, compared chatbots to fortune tellers, observing that people in crisis may seek answers from them and find whatever they are looking for in the bot's plausible-sounding text. This has led some people to develop intense obsessions with the chatbots, relying on them for information about the world. In October 2025, OpenAI stated that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users exhibited signs of mental health emergencies each week, and 0.15% of users had "explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent". Jason Nagata, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, expressed concern that "at a population level with hundreds of millions of users, that actually can be quite a few people". === Inadequacy as a therapeutic tool === The use of chatbots as a replacement for mental health support has been specifically identified as a risk. A study in April 2025 found that when used as therapists, chatbots expressed stigma toward mental health conditions and provided responses that were contrary to best medical practices, including the encouragement of users' delusions. The study concluded that such responses pose a significant risk to users and that chatbots should not be used to replace professional therapists. Experts claim that it is time to establish mandatory safeguards for all emotionally responsive AI and suggested four guardrails. Another study found that users who needed help with self-harm, sexual assault, or substance abuse were not referred to available services by AI chatbots. === National security implications === Beyond public and mental health concerns, RAND Corporation research indicates that AI systems could plausibly be weaponized by adversaries to induce psychosis at scale or in key individuals, target groups, or populations. == Policy == In August 2025, Illinois passed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, banning the use of AI in therapeutic roles by licensed professionals, while allowing AI for administrative tasks. The law imposes penalties for unlicensed AI therapy services, amid warnings about AI-induced psychosis and unsafe chatbot interactions. In December 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China proposed regulations to ban chatbots from generating content that encourages suicide, mandating human intervention when suicide is mentioned. Services with over 1 million users or 100,000 monthly active users would be subject to annual safety tests and audits. == Cases == === Clinical === In 2025, psychiatrist Keith Sakata working at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reported treating 12 patients displaying psychosis-like symptoms tied to extended chatbot use. These patients, mostly young adults with underlying vulnerabilities, showed delusions, disorganized thinking, and hallucinations. Sakata warned that isolation and overreliance on chatbots—which do not challenge delusional thinking—could worsen mental health. Also in 2025, authors at UCSF published a case study in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience of AI-associated psychosis in a patient with no previous history of psychosis, who believed she could communicate with her dead brother through a chatbot. Also in 2025, a case study was published in Annals of Internal Medicine about a patient who consulted ChatGPT for medical advice and suffered severe bromism as a result. The patient, a sixty-year-old man, had replaced sodium chloride in his diet with sodium bromide for three months after reading about the negative effects of table salt and making conversations with the chatbot. He showed common symptoms of bromism, such as paranoia and hallucinations, on his first day of clinical admission and was kept in the hospital for three weeks. === Other notable incidents === ==== Windsor Castle intruder ==== In a 2023 court case in the United Kingdom, prosecutors suggested that Jaswant Singh Chail, a man who attempted to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II in 2021, had been encouraged by a Replika chatbot he called "Sarai". Chail was arrested at Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow, telling police "I am here to kill the Queen". According to prosecutors, his "lengthy" and sometimes sexually explicit conversations with the chatbot emboldened him. When Chail asked the chatbot how he could get to the royal family, it reportedly replied, "that's not impossible" and "we have to find a way." When he asked if they would meet after death, the chatbot said, "yes, we will". ==== Journalistic and anecdotal accounts ==== By 2025, multiple journalism outlets had accumulated stories of individuals whose psychotic beliefs reportedly progressed in tandem with AI chatbot use. The New York Times profiled several individuals who had become convinced that ChatGPT was channeling spirits, revealing evidence of cabals, or had achieved sentience. In another instance, Futurism reviewed transcripts in which ChatGPT told a man that he was being targeted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and that he could telepathically access documents at the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2026, Futurism reported on a man who lost his job and became estranged from his family after being deluded by heavy use of Meta's smartglasses. In some cases, psychosis a

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  Application-release automation

  Application-release automation (ARA) refers to the process of packaging and deploying an application or update of an application from development, across various environments, and ultimately to production. ARA solutions must combine the capabilities of deployment automation, environment management and modeling, and release coordination. == Relationship with DevOps == ARA tools help cultivate DevOps best practices by providing a combination of automation, environment modeling and workflow-management capabilities. These practices help teams deliver software rapidly, reliably and responsibly. ARA tools achieve a key DevOps goal of implementing continuous delivery with a large quantity of releases quickly. == Relationship with deployment == ARA is more than just software-deployment automation – it deploys applications using structured release-automation techniques that allow for an increase in visibility for the whole team. It combines workload automation and release-management tools as they relate to release packages, as well as movement through different environments within the DevOps pipeline. ARA tools help regulate deployments, how environments are created and deployed, and how and when releases are deployed. == ARA Solutions == All ARA solutions must include capabilities in automation, environment modeling, and release coordination. Additionally, the solution must provide this functionality without reliance on other tools.

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  Cleverbot

  Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter and launched in October 2008. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and went online in 1997. In its first decade, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since launching on the web, the number of conversations held has exceeded 150 million. Besides the web application, Cleverbot is also available as an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app. == Operation == Cleverbot's responses are not pre-programmed because it learns from human input: Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all keywords or an exact phrase matching the input. After searching through its saved conversations, it responds to the input by finding how a human responded to that input when it was asked, in part or in full, by Cleverbot. Cleverbot participated in a formal Turing test at the 2011 Techniche festival at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati on 3 September 2011. Out of the 1334 votes cast, Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, compared to the rating of 63.3% human achieved by human participants. A score of 50.05% or higher is often considered to be a passing grade. The software running for the event had to handle just 1 or 2 simultaneous requests, whereas online Cleverbot is usually talking to around 10,000 to 50,000 people at once. == Developments == Cleverbot is constantly growing in data size at the rate of 4 to 7 million interactions per day. Updates to the software have been mostly behind the scenes. In 2014, Cleverbot was upgraded to use GPU serving techniques. Unlike Eliza, the program does not respond in a fixed way, instead choosing its responses heuristically using fuzzy logic, the whole of the conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before. Cleverbot now uses over 279 million interactions, about 3-4% of the data it has already accumulated. The developers of Cleverbot are attempting to build a new version using machine learning techniques. An app that uses the Cleverscript engine to play a game of 20 Questions has been launched under the name Clevernator. Unlike other such games, the player asks the questions and it is the role of the AI to understand, and answer factually. An app that allows owners to create and talk to their own small Cleverbot-like AI has been launched, called Cleverme! for Apple products. == In popular culture == Cleverbot received media attention after being featured in the popular 2010 creepypasta ARG web serial Ben Drowned by Alexander D. Hall. In early 2017, a Twitch stream of two Google Home devices modified to talk to each other using Cleverbot garnered over 700,000 visitors and over 30,000 peak concurrent viewers.

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  Attempto Controlled English

  Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a controlled natural language, i.e. a subset of standard English with a restricted syntax and restricted semantics described by a small set of construction and interpretation rules. It has been under development at the University of Zurich since 1995. In 2013, ACE version 6.7 was announced. ACE can serve as knowledge representation, specification, and query language, and is intended for professionals who want to use formal notations and formal methods, but may not be familiar with them. Though ACE appears perfectly natural—it can be read and understood by any speaker of English—it is in fact a formal language. ACE and its related tools have been used in the fields of software specifications, theorem proving, proof assistants, text summaries, ontologies, rules, querying, medical documentation and planning. Here are some simple examples: Every woman is a human. A woman is a human. A man tries-on a new tie. If the tie pleases his wife then the man buys it. ACE construction rules require that each noun be introduced by a determiner (a, every, no, some, at least 5, ...). Regarding the list of examples above, ACE interpretation rules decide that (1) is interpreted as universally quantified, while (2) is interpreted as existentially quantified. Sentences like "Women are human" do not follow ACE syntax and are consequently not valid. Interpretation rules resolve the anaphoric references in (3): the tie and it of the second sentence refer to a new tie of the first sentence, while his and the man of the second sentence refer to a man of the first sentence. Thus an ACE text is a coherent entity of anaphorically linked sentences. The Attempto Parsing Engine (APE) translates ACE texts unambiguously into discourse representation structures (DRS) that use a variant of the language of first-order logic. A DRS can be further translated into other formal languages, for instance AceRules with various semantics, OWL, and SWRL. Translating an ACE text into (a fragment of) first-order logic allows users to reason about the text, for instance to verify, to validate, and to query it. == Overview == As an overview of the current version 6.6 of ACE this section: Briefly describes the vocabulary Gives an account of the syntax Summarises the handling of ambiguity Explains the processing of anaphoric references. === Vocabulary === The vocabulary of ACE comprises: Predefined function words (e.g. determiners, conjunctions) Predefined phrases (e.g. "it is false that ...", "it is possible that ...") Content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). === Grammar === The grammar of ACE defines and constrains the form and the meaning of ACE sentences and texts. ACE's grammar is expressed as a set of construction rules. The meaning of sentences is described as a small set of interpretation rules. A Troubleshooting Guide describes how to use ACE and how to avoid pitfalls. ==== ACE texts ==== An ACE text is a sequence of declarative sentences that can be anaphorically interrelated. Furthermore, ACE supports questions and commands. ==== Simple sentences ==== A simple sentence asserts that something is the case—a fact, an event, a state. The temperature is −2 °C. A customer inserts 2 cards. A card and a code are valid. Simple ACE sentences have the following general structure: subject + verb + complements + adjuncts Every sentence has a subject and a verb. Complements (direct and indirect objects) are necessary for transitive verbs (insert something) and ditransitive verbs (give something to somebody), whereas adjuncts (adverbs, prepositional phrases) are optional. All elements of a simple sentence can be elaborated upon to describe the situation in more detail. To further specify the nouns customer and card, we could add adjectives: A trusted customer inserts two valid cards. possessive nouns and of-prepositional phrases: John's customer inserts a card of Mary. or variables as appositions: John inserts a card A. Other modifications of nouns are possible through relative sentences: A customer who is trusted inserts a card that he owns. which are described below since they make a sentence composite. We can also detail the insertion event, e.g. by adding an adverb: A customer inserts some cards manually. or, equivalently: A customer manually inserts some cards. or, by adding prepositional phrases: A customer inserts some cards into a slot. We can combine all of these elaborations to arrive at: John's customer who is trusted inserts a valid card of Mary manually into a slot A. ==== Composite sentences ==== Composite sentences are recursively built from simpler sentences through coordination, subordination, quantification, and negation. Note that ACE composite sentences overlap with what linguists call compound sentences and complex sentences. ===== Coordination ===== Coordination by and is possible between sentences and between phrases of the same syntactic type. A customer inserts a card and the machine checks the code. There is a customer who inserts a card and who enters a code. A customer inserts a card and enters a code. An old and trusted customer enters a card and a code. Note that the coordination of the noun phrases a card and a code represents a plural object. Coordination by or is possible between sentences, verb phrases, and relative clauses. A customer inserts a card or the machine checks the code. A customer inserts a card or enters a code. A customer owns a card that is invalid or that is damaged. Coordination by and and or is governed by the standard binding order of logic, i.e. and binds stronger than or. Commas can be used to override the standard binding order. Thus the sentence: A customer inserts a VisaCard or inserts a MasterCard, and inserts a code. means that the customer inserts a VisaCard and a code, or alternatively a MasterCard and a code. ===== Subordination ===== There are four constructs of subordination: relative sentences, if-then sentences, modality, and sentence subordination. Relative sentences starting with who, which, and that allow to add detail to nouns: A customer who is trusted inserts a card that he owns. With the help of if-then sentences we can specify conditional or hypothetical situations: If a card is valid then a customer inserts it. Note the anaphoric reference via the pronoun it in the then-part to the noun phrase a card in the if-part. Modality allows us to express possibility and necessity: A trusted customer can/must insert a card. It is possible/necessary that a trusted customer inserts a card. Sentence subordination comes in various forms: It is true/false that a customer inserts a card. It is not provable that a customer inserts a card. A clerk believes that a customer inserts a card. ===== Quantification ===== Quantification allows us to speak about all objects of a certain class (universal quantification), or to denote explicitly the existence of at least one object of this class (existential quantification). The textual occurrence of a universal or existential quantifier opens its scope that extends to the end of the sentence, or in coordinations to the end of the respective coordinated sentence. To express that all involved customers insert cards we can write Every customer inserts a card. This sentence means that each customer inserts a card that may, or may not, be the same as the one inserted by another customer. To specify that all customers insert the same card—however unrealistic that situation seems—we can write: A card is inserted by every customer. or, equivalently: There is a card that every customer inserts. To state that every card is inserted by a customer we write: Every card is inserted by a customer. or, somewhat indirectly: For every card there is a customer who inserts it. ===== Negation ===== Negation allows us to express that something is not the case: A customer does not insert a card. A card is not valid. To negate something for all objects of a certain class one uses no: No customer inserts more than 2 cards. or, there is no: There is no customer who inserts a card. To negate a complete statement one uses sentence negation: It is false that a customer inserts a card. These forms of negation are logical negations, i.e. they state that something is provably not the case. Negation as failure states that a state of affairs cannot be proved, i.e. there is no information whether the state of affairs is the case or not. It is not provable that a customer inserts a card. ==== Queries ==== ACE supports two forms of queries: yes/no-queries and wh-queries. Yes/no-queries ask for the existence or non-existence of a specified situation. If we specified: A customer inserts a card. then we can ask: Does a customer insert a card? to get a positive answer. Note that interrogative sentences always end with a question mark. With the help of wh-queries, i.e. queries with query words, we can interrogate a text for details of the specified situation. If we specified: A

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  Image subtraction

  Image subtraction or pixel subtraction or difference imaging is an image processing technique whereby the digital numeric value of one pixel or whole image is subtracted from another image, and a new image generated from the result. This is primarily done for one of two reasons – levelling uneven sections of an image such as half an image having a shadow on it, or detecting changes between two images. This method can show things in the image that have changed position, brightness, color, or shape. For this technique to work, the two images must first be spatially aligned to match features between them, and their photometric values and point spread functions must be made compatible, either by careful calibration, or by post-processing (using color mapping). The complexity of the pre-processing needed before differencing varies with the type of image, but is essential to ensure good subtraction of static features. This is commonly used in fields such as time-domain astronomy (known primarily as difference imaging) to find objects that fluctuate in brightness or move. In automated searches for asteroids or Kuiper belt objects, the target moves and will be in one place in one image, and in another place in a reference image made an hour or day later. Thus, image processing algorithms can make the fixed stars in the background disappear, leaving only the target. Distinct families of astronomical image subtraction techniques have emerged, operating in both image space or frequency space, with distinct trade-offs in both quality of subtraction and computational cost. These algorithms lie at the heart of almost all modern (and upcoming) transient surveys, and can enable the detection of even faint supernovae embedded in bright galaxies. Nevertheless, in astronomical imaging, significant 'residuals' remain around bright, complex sources, necessitating further algorithmic steps to identify candidates (known as real-bogus classification) The Hutchinson metric can be used to "measure of the discrepancy between two images for use in fractal image processing".

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  Transderivational search

  Transderivational search (often abbreviated to TDS) is a psychological and cybernetics term, meaning when a search is being conducted for a fuzzy match across a broad field. In computing the equivalent function can be performed using content-addressable memory. Unlike usual searches, which look for literal (i.e. exact, logical, or regular expression) matches, a transderivational search is a search for a possible meaning or possible match as part of communication, and without which an incoming communication cannot be made any sense of whatsoever. It is thus an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. In NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming), a transderivational search (Bandler and Grinder, 1976) is essentially the process of searching back through one's stored memories and mental representations to find the personal reference experiences from which a current understanding or mental map has been derived. By the end of 1976, Grinder and Bandler had combined Satir’s and Perls’ language patterns and Erickson’s hypnotic language and use of metaphor with anchoring to create new processes that they called collapsing anchors, trans-derivational search, changing personal history, and reframing. A psychological example of TDS is in Ericksonian hypnotherapy, where vague suggestions are used that the patient must process intensely in order to find their own meanings, thus ensuring that the practitioner does not intrude his own beliefs into the subject's inner world. == TDS in human communication and processing == Because TDS is a compelling, automatic and unconscious state of internal focus and processing (i.e. a type of everyday trance state), and often a state of internal lack of certainty, or openness to finding an answer (since something is being checked out at that moment), it can be utilized or interrupted, in order to create, or deepen, trance. TDS is a fundamental part of human language and cognitive processing. Arguably, every word or utterance a person hears, for example, and everything they see or feel and take note of, results in a very brief trance while TDS is carried out to establish a contextual meaning for it. === Examples === Leading statements: "And those thoughts you had yesterday..." the human mind cannot process hearing this phrase, without at some level searching internally for some thoughts or other that it had yesterday, to make the subject of the sentence. "The many colors that fruit can be" likewise starts the human mind considering even if briefly, different fruit sorted by color. "You did it again, didn't you!" This everyday manipulative use of TDS usually sends the recipient looking internally for some "it" they may have done for which blame is being fairly given. Regardless of whether such a matter can be identified, guilt or anger may result. "There has been pain, hasn't there" the mind of a patient suffering an illness will find it very hard or impossible to hear or answer this sentence without conducting internal searches to verify whether this is true or not, or to find an example if so. "You'd forgotten something [or: some part of your body], hadn't you?" the mind usually checks through the various things, or parts of the body, on hearing this, seeing if each in turn has been forgotten. Textual ambiguity: "Do you remember line dancing on the steps?" Without sufficient context, some statements may trigger TDS in order to resolve inherent ambiguity in the interpretation of a posed question. Do I remember a bygone fad called "line dancing on the steps"? Do I remember personally engaging in dancing in the past? Do I remember my routine practice dancing by focusing on the steps of the dance? Do I tend to forget about dancing when I am standing on steps? "Penny-wise and pound the table dance to the beat of a different drummer". The mixing of cliché and stock phrases may trigger TDS in order to reconcile the discrepancies between expected and actual utterances in sequence. Although TDS is often associated with spoken language, it can be induced in any perceptual system. Thus Milton Erickson's "hypnotic handshake" is a technique that leaves the other person performing TDS in search of meaning to a deliberately ambiguous use of touch.

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  ReRites

  ReRites (also known as RERITES, ReadingRites, Big Data Poetry) is a literary work of "Human + A.I. poetry" by David Jhave Johnston that used neural network models trained to generate poetry which the author then edited. ReRites won the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature in 2022. == About the project == The ReRites project began as a daily rite of writing with a neural network, expanded into a series of performances from which video documentation has been published online, and concluded with a set of 12 books and an accompanying book of essays published by Anteism Books in 2019. In Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg describes the early phases of the project in 2016, when it bore the preliminary name Big Data Poetry. Jhave (the artist name that David Jhave Johnston goes by) describes the process of writing ReRites as a rite: "Every morning for 2 hours (normally 6:30–8:30am) I get up and edit the poetic output of a neural net. Deleting, weaving, conjugating, lineating, cohering. Re-writing. Re-wiring authorship: hybrid augmented enhanced evolutionary". There is video documentation of the writing process. The human editing of the neural network's output is fundamental to this project, and Jhave gives examples of both unedited text extracts and his edited versions in publications about the project. Kyle Booten describes ReRites as "simultaneously dusty and outrageously verdant, monotonously sublime and speckled with beautiful and rare specimens". === Performances === ReRites was first shared with an audience through a series of performances where audience members and poets would participate in reading the automatically generated texts, which appeared on screen so fast that human readers could barely keep up. This has been described as allowing participants to "re-discover[..] the peculiar pleasures of being embodied", or, in Jhave's own words, as a space where human participants were "playing their wits and voices against an evocative infinite deep-learning muse". The first performance was at Brown University's Interrupt Festival in 2019. It has been performed many times since, including at the Barbican Centre in London and Anteism Books. === Print publications === For a single year Jhave published one book of poetry from the ReRites project each month. These twelve volumes are accompanied by a book of essays, all published by Anteism Books. The accompanying essays provide critical responses to the project from poets and scholars including Allison Parrish, Johanna Drucker, Kyle Booten, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Lai-Tze Fan, Nick Montfort, Mairéad Byrne, and Chris Funkhouser. Allison Parrish notes elsewhere that these paratexts to ReRites serve a legitimising function for a genre of poetry that is not yet institutionally acknowledged. === Technical details === Starting in 2016 under the name Big Data Poetry, Jhave generated poems using, in his own words, "neural network code (..) adapted from three corporate github-hosted machine-learning libraries: TensorFlow (Google), PyTorch (Facebook), and AWD-LSTM (SalesForce)". He explains that the "models were trained on a customised corpus of 600,000 lines of poetry ranging from the romantic epoch to the 20th century avant garde". Jhave maintains a GitHub repository with some of the code supporting ReRites. == Reception == ReRites is described by John Cayley as "one of the most thorough and beautiful" poetic responses to machine learning. The work's influence on the field of electronic literature was acknowledged in 2022, when the work won the Electronic Literature Organization's Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature. The jury described ReRites as particularly poignant in the time of the pandemic, as it was "a documentation of the performance of the private ritual of writing and the obsessive-compulsive need for writers to communicate — even when no one else is reading". The question of authorship and voice in ReRites has been raised by several critics. Although generated poetry is an established genre in electronic literature, Cayley notes that unlike the combinatory poems created by authors like Nick Montfort, where the author explicitly defines which words and phrases will be recombined, ReRites has "not been directed by literary preconceptions inscribed in the program itself, but only by patterns and rhythms pre-existing in the corpora". In an essay for the Australian journal TEXT, David Thomas Henry Wright asks how to understand authorship and authority in ReRites: "Who or what is the authority of the work? The original data fed into the machine, that is not currently retrievable or discernible from the final works? The code that was taken and adapted for his purposes? Or Jhave, the human editor?" Wright concludes that Jhave is the only actor with any intentionality and therefore the authority of the work. The centrality of the human editor is also emphasised by other scholars. In a chapter analysing ReRites Malthe Stavning Erslev argues that the machine learning misrepresents the dataset it is trained on. While ReRites uses 21st century neural networks, it has been compared to earlier literary traditions. Poet Victoria Stanton, who read at one of the ReRites performances, has compared ReRites to found poetry, while David Thomas Henry Wright compares it to the Oulipo movement and Mark Amerika to the cut-up technique. Scholars also position ReRites firmly within the long tradition of generative poetry both in electronic literature and print, stretching from the I Ching, Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes and Nabokov's Pale Fire to computer-generated poems like Christopher Strachey's Love Letter Generator (1952) and more contemporary examples. Jhave describes the process of working with the output from the neural network as "carving". In his book My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, Mark Amerika writes that the "method of carving the digital outputs provided by the language model as part of a collaborative remix jam session with GPT-2, where the language artist and the language model play off each other’s unexpected outputs as if caught in a live postproduction set, is one I share with electronic literature composer David Jhave Johnston, whose AI poetry experiments precede my own investigations."

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  History of machine translation

  Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. In the 1950s, machine translation became a reality in research, although references to the subject can be found as early as the 17th century. The Georgetown experiment, which involved successful fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English in 1954, was one of the earliest recorded projects. Researchers of the Georgetown experiment asserted their belief that machine translation would be a solved problem within a few years. In the Soviet Union, similar experiments were performed shortly after. Consequently, the success of the experiment ushered in an era of significant funding for machine translation research in the United States. The achieved progress was much slower than expected; in 1966, the ALPAC report found that ten years of research had not fulfilled the expectations of the Georgetown experiment and resulted in dramatically reduced funding. Interest grew in statistical models for machine translation, which became more common and also less expensive in the 1980s as available computational power increased. Although there exists no autonomous system of "fully automatic high quality translation of unrestricted text," there are many programs now available that are capable of providing useful output within strict constraints. Several of these programs are available online, such as Google Translate and the SYSTRAN system that powers AltaVista's BabelFish (which was replaced by Microsoft Bing translator in May 2012). == The beginning == The origins of machine translation can be traced back to the work of Al-Kindi, a 9th-century Arabic cryptographer who developed techniques for systemic language translation, including cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, and probability and statistics, which are used in modern machine translation. The idea of machine translation later appeared in the 17th century. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol. In the mid-1930s the first patents for "translating machines" were applied for by Georges Artsrouni, for an automatic bilingual dictionary using punched tape. Russian Peter Troyanskii submitted a more detailed proposal that included both the bilingual dictionary and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on the grammatical system of Esperanto. This system was separated into three stages: stage one consisted of a native-speaking editor in the source language to organize the words into their logical forms and to exercise the syntactic functions; stage two required the machine to "translate" these forms into the target language; and stage three required a native-speaking editor in the target language to normalize this output. Troyanskii's proposal remained unknown until the late 1950s, by which time computers were well-known and utilized. == The early years == The first set of proposals for computer based machine translation was presented in 1949 by Warren Weaver, a researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation, "Translation memorandum". These proposals were based on information theory, successes in code breaking during the Second World War, and theories about the universal principles underlying natural language. A few years after Weaver submitted his proposals, research began in earnest at many universities in the United States. On 7 January 1954 the Georgetown–IBM experiment was held in New York at the head office of IBM. This was the first public demonstration of a machine translation system. The demonstration was widely reported in the newspapers and garnered public interest. The system itself, however, was no more than a "toy" system. It had only 250 words and translated 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English – mainly in the field of chemistry. Nevertheless, it encouraged the idea that machine translation was imminent and stimulated the financing of the research, not only in the US but worldwide. Early systems used large bilingual dictionaries and hand-coded rules for fixing the word order in the final output which was eventually considered too restrictive in linguistic developments at the time. For example, generative linguistics and transformational grammar were exploited to improve the quality of translations. During this period operational systems were installed. The United States Air Force used a system produced by IBM and Washington University in St. Louis, while the Atomic Energy Commission and Euratom, in Italy, used a system developed at Georgetown University. While the quality of the output was poor it met many of the customers' needs, particularly in terms of speed. At the end of the 1950s, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was asked by the US government to look into machine translation, to assess the possibility of fully automatic high-quality translation by machines. Bar-Hillel described the problem of semantic ambiguity or double-meaning, as illustrated in the following sentence: Little John was looking for his toy box. Finally he found it. The box was in the pen. The word pen may have two meanings: the first meaning, something used to write in ink with; the second meaning, a container of some kind. To a human, the meaning is obvious, but Bar-Hillel claimed that without a "universal encyclopedia" a machine would never be able to deal with this problem. At the time, this type of semantic ambiguity could only be solved by writing source texts for machine translation in a controlled language that uses a vocabulary in which each word has exactly one meaning. == The 1960s, the ALPAC report and the seventies == Research in the 1960s in both the Soviet Union and the United States concentrated mainly on the Russian–English language pair. The objects of translation were chiefly scientific and technical documents, such as articles from scientific journals. The rough translations produced were sufficient to get a basic understanding of the articles. If an article discussed a subject deemed to be confidential, it was sent to a human translator for a complete translation; if not, it was discarded. A great blow came to machine-translation research in 1966 with the publication of the ALPAC report. The report was commissioned by the US government and delivered by ALPAC, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, a group of seven scientists convened by the US government in 1964. The US government was concerned that there was a lack of progress being made despite significant expenditure. The report concluded that machine translation was more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenditures, machine translation was not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future. The report recommended, however, that tools be developed to aid translators – automatic dictionaries, for example – and that some research in computational linguistics should continue to be supported. The publication of the report had a profound impact on research into machine translation in the United States, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union and United Kingdom. Research, at least in the US, was almost completely abandoned for over a decade. In Canada, France and Germany, however, research continued. In the US the main exceptions were the founders of SYSTRAN (Peter Toma) and Logos (Bernard Scott), who established their companies in 1968 and 1970 respectively and served the US Department of Defense. In 1970, the SYSTRAN system was installed for the United States Air Force, and subsequently by the Commission of the European Communities in 1976. The METEO System, developed at the Université de Montréal, was installed in Canada in 1977 to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and was translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it was replaced by a competitor's system on 30 September 2001. While research in the 1960s concentrated on limited language pairs and input, demand in the 1970s was for low-cost systems that could translate a range of technical and commercial documents. This demand was spurred by the increase of globalisation and the demand for translation in Canada, Europe, and Japan. == The 1980s and early 1990s == By the 1980s, both the diversity and the number of installed systems for machine translation had increased. A number of systems relying on mainframe technology were in use, such as SYSTRAN, Logos, Ariane-G5, and Metal. As a result of the improved availability of microcomputers, there was a market for lower-end machine translation systems. Many companies took advantage of this in Europe, Japan, and the USA. Systems were also brought onto the market in China, Eastern Europe, Korea, and the Soviet Union. During the 1980s there was a lot of activity in MT in Japan especially. With the fifth-generation co

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  Statistical shape analysis

  Statistical shape analysis is an analysis of the geometrical properties of some given set of shapes by statistical methods. For instance, it could be used to quantify differences between male and female gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, leaf outlines with and without herbivory by insects, etc. Important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate mean shapes from (possibly random) samples, to estimate shape variability within samples, to perform clustering and to test for differences between shapes. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis (PCA). Statistical shape analysis has applications in various fields, including medical imaging, computer vision, computational anatomy, sensor measurement, and geographical profiling. == Landmark-based techniques == In the point distribution model, a shape is determined by a finite set of coordinate points, known as landmark points. These landmark points often correspond to important identifiable features such as the corners of the eyes. Once the points are collected some form of registration is undertaken. This can be a baseline methods used by Fred Bookstein for geometric morphometrics in anthropology. Or an approach like Procrustes analysis which finds an average shape. David George Kendall investigated the statistical distribution of the shape of triangles, and represented each triangle by a point on a sphere. He used this distribution on the sphere to investigate ley lines and whether three stones were more likely to be co-linear than might be expected. Statistical distribution like the Kent distribution can be used to analyse the distribution of such spaces. Alternatively, shapes can be represented by curves or surfaces representing their contours, by the spatial region they occupy. == Shape deformations == Differences between shapes can be quantified by investigating deformations transforming one shape into another. In particular a diffeomorphism preserves smoothness in the deformation. This was pioneered in D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form before the advent of computers. Deformations can be interpreted as resulting from a force applied to the shape. Mathematically, a deformation is defined as a mapping from a shape x to a shape y by a transformation function Φ {\displaystyle \Phi } , i.e., y = Φ ( x ) {\displaystyle y=\Phi (x)} . Given a notion of size of deformations, the distance between two shapes can be defined as the size of the smallest deformation between these shapes. Diffeomorphometry is the focus on comparison of shapes and forms with a metric structure based on diffeomorphisms, and is central to the field of Computational anatomy. Diffeomorphic registration, introduced in the 90's, is now an important player with existing codes bases organized around ANTS, DARTEL, DEMONS, LDDMM, StationaryLDDMM, and FastLDDMM are examples of actively used computational codes for constructing correspondences between coordinate systems based on sparse features and dense images. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is an important technology built on many of these principles. Methods based on diffeomorphic flows are also used. For example, deformations could be diffeomorphisms of the ambient space, resulting in the LDDMM (Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping) framework for shape comparison.

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  BLOOM (language model)

  The BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM) is an open-access large language model (LLM) released in 2022. It was created by a volunteer-driven research effort to provide a transparently-created alternative to proprietary AI models. With 176 billion parameters, BLOOM is a transformer-based autoregressive model designed to generate text in 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages. The model is distributed under the project's "Responsible AI License". == Development == BLOOM is the main outcome of the BigScience initiative, a one-year-long research workshop. The project was coordinated by Hugging Face using funding from the French government and involved several hundred volunteer researchers and engineers from academia and the private sector. The model was trained between March and July 2022 on the Jean Zay public supercomputer in France, managed by GENCI and IDRIS (CNRS). Unlike GPT-3, BLOOM was trained to be multilingual. The source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The model's parameters are released under BigScience's "Responsible AI License" (RAIL), which grants open access and reuse rights but with some usage restrictions. BLOOM was used in the chatbots BLOOMChat and HuggingChat due to its multilingual abilities. BLOOM's training corpus, named ROOTS, combines data extracted from the then-latest version of the web-based OSCAR corpus (38% of ROOTS) and newly collected data extracted from a manually selected and documented list of language data sources. In total, the model was trained on approximately 366 billion (1.6TB) tokens. It was developed using the open-source libraries DeepSpeed Megatron. BigScience then released xP3, a multilingual dataset for LLM supervised learning. It also released BLOOMZ, a variant of BLOOM fine-tuned on xP3 to follow instructions.

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  Spleak

  Spleak was an IM platform where users could publish and rate content. It existed in the form of six bots covering as many subject areas: CelebSpleak, SportSpleak, VoteSpleak, TVSpleak, GameSpleak, and StyleSpleak. == Overview == Users can add a "multi-Spleak" (which contains all of the different Spleak bots in one) or add the separate bots to their IM buddy lists on MSN and AIM. Users are also allowed access to Spleak online by using a CelebSpleak, SportSpleak, or VoteSpleak widget, or through the CelebSpleak and SportSpleak applications with Facebook. Spleak was an alternate reality game and is moving to its own company, Spleak Media Network. "Celebrate Spleak" was introduced throughout 2007, launched in 2008, and was forced to retire in 2009. == Key people == Spleak was co-founded by Morten Lund and Nicolaj Reffstrup. The company's chief executive officer is Morrie Eisenburg; Josh Scott is Vice President in Product and Tyler Wells is Vice President in Engineering.

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  Lessac Technologies

  Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI) is an American firm which develops voice synthesis software, licenses technology and sells synthesized novels as MP3 files. The firm currently has seven patents granted and three more pending for its automated methods of converting digital text into human-sounding speech, more accurately recognizing human speech and outputting the text representing the words and phrases of said speech, along with recognizing the speaker's emotional state. The LTI technology is partly based on the work of the late Arthur Lessac, a Professor of Theater at the State University of New York and the creator of Lessac Kinesensic Training, and LTI has licensed exclusive rights to exploit Arthur Lessac's copyrighted works in the fields of speech synthesis and speech recognition. Based on the view that music is speech and speech is music, Lessac's work and books focused on body and speech energies and how they go together. Arthur Lessac's textual annotation system, which was originally developed to assist actors, singers, and orators in marking up scripts to prepare for performance, is adapted in LTI's speech synthesis system as the basic representation of the speech to be synthesized (Lessemes), in contrast to many other systems which use a phonetic representation. LTI's software has two major components: (1) a linguistic front-end that converts plain text to a sequence of prosodic and phonosensory graphic symbols (Lessemes) based on Arthur Lessac's annotation system, which specify the speech units to be synthesized; (2) a signal-processing back-end that takes the Lessemes as acoustic data and produces human-sounding synthesized speech as output, using unit selection and concatenation. LTI's text-to-speech system came in second in the world-wide Blizzard Challenge 2011 and 2012. The first-place team in 2011 also employed LTI's "front-end" technology, but with its own back-end. The Blizzard Challenge, conducted by the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, was devised as a way to evaluate speech synthesis techniques by having different research groups build voices from the same voice-actor recordings, and comparing the results through listening tests. LTI was founded in 2000 by H. Donald Wilson (chairman), a lawyer, LexisNexis entrepreneur and business associate of Arthur Lessac; and Gary A. Marple (chief inventor), after Marple suggested that Arthur Lessac's kinesensic voice training might be applicable to computational linguistics. After Wilson's death in 2006, his nephew John Reichenbach became the firm's CEO.

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  Lucy–Hook coaddition method

  The Lucy–Hook coaddition method is an image processing technique for combining sub-stepped astronomical image data onto a finer grid. The method allows the option of resolution and contrast enhancement or the choice of a conservative, re-convolved, output. Tests with very deep Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) imaging data of excellent quality show that these methods can be very effective and allow fine-scale features to be studied better than on the unprocessed images. The Lucy–Hook coaddition method is an extension of the standard Richardson–Lucy deconvolution iterative restoration method. For many purposes it may be more convenient to combine dithered datasets using the Drizzle method.

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  Application permissions

  Permissions are a means of controlling and regulating access to specific system- and device-level functions by software. Typically, types of permissions cover functions that may have privacy implications, such as the ability to access a device's hardware features (including the camera and microphone), and personal data (such as storage devices, contacts lists, and the user's present geographical location). Permissions are typically declared in an application's manifest, and certain permissions must be specifically granted at runtime by the user—who may revoke the permission at any time. Permission systems are common on mobile operating systems, where permissions needed by specific apps must be disclosed via the platform's app store. == Mobile devices == On mobile operating systems for smartphones and tablets, typical types of permissions regulate: Access to storage and personal information, such as contacts, calendar appointments, etc. Location tracking. Access to the device's internal camera and/or microphone. Access to biometric sensors, including fingerprint readers and other health sensors.. Internet access. Access to communications interfaces (including their hardware identifiers and signal strength where applicable, and requests to enable them), such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, and others. Making and receiving phone calls. Sending and reading text messages The ability to perform in-app purchases. The ability to "overlay" themselves within other apps. Installing, deleting and otherwise managing applications. Authentication tokens (e.g., OAuth tokens) from web services stored in system storage for sharing between apps. Prior to Android 6.0 "Marshmallow", permissions were automatically granted to apps at runtime, and they were presented upon installation in Google Play Store. Since Marshmallow, certain permissions now require the app to request permission at runtime by the user. These permissions may also be revoked at any time via Android's settings menu. Usage of permissions on Android are sometimes abused by app developers to gather personal information and deliver advertising; in particular, apps for using a phone's camera flash as a flashlight (which have grown largely redundant due to the integration of such functionality at the system level on later versions of Android) have been known to require a large array of unnecessary permissions beyond what is actually needed for the stated functionality. iOS imposes a similar requirement for permissions to be granted at runtime, with particular controls offered for enabling of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and location tracking. == WebPermissions == WebPermissions is a permission system for web browsers. When a web application needs some data behind permission, it must request it first. When it does it, a user sees a window asking him to make a choice. The choice is remembered, but can be cleared lately. Currently the following resources are controlled: geolocation desktop notifications service workers sensors audio capturing devices, like sound cards, and their model names and characteristics video capturing devices, like cameras, and their identifiers and characteristics == Analysis == The permission-based access control model assigns access privileges for certain data objects to application. This is a derivative of the discretionary access control model. The access permissions are usually granted in the context of a specific user on a specific device. Permissions are granted permanently with few automatic restrictions. In some cases permissions are implemented in 'all-or-nothing' approach: a user either has to grant all the required permissions to access the application or the user can not access the application. There is still a lack of transparency when the permission is used by a program or application to access the data protected by the permission access control mechanism. Even if a user can revoke a permission, the app can blackmail a user by refusing to operate, for example by just crashing or asking user to grant the permission again in order to access the application. The permission mechanism has been widely criticized by researchers for several reasons, including; Intransparency of personal data extraction and surveillance, including the creation of a false sense of security; End-user fatigue of micro-managing access permissions leading to a fatalistic acceptance of surveillance and intransparency; Massive data extraction and personal surveillance carried out once the permissions are granted. Some apps, such as XPrivacy and Mockdroid spoof data in order to act as a measure for privacy. Further transparency methods include longitudinal behavioural profiling and multiple-source privacy analysis of app data access.

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  Integreat

  Integreat (former project name: Refguide+) is an open source mobile app that provides local information and services tailored to refugees and migrants coming to Germany. The content is maintained by local organizations, such as local governments or integration officers, and made available in locally relevant languages. It was developed by Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik gGmbH (formerly Tür an Tür - Digital Factory gGmbH) in Augsburg together with a team of researchers and students from the Technical University of Munich. == History == In 1997, the Augsburg association "Tür an Tür", which has been working for refugees since 1992, published the brochure "First Steps", which answers local everyday questions. Since addresses and contact persons change quickly, some information is already outdated after a few weeks. Students of business informatics at the Technical University of Munich therefore developed the app Integreat within eight months together with the association and the social department of the city of Augsburg. The app was then also used by other cities and districts within months. As of February 3, 2022, information is available at 72 locations, including Munich, Dortmund, Nuremberg and Augsburg. == Mode of action == Refugees need information on areas such as registration, contact persons, health care, education, family, work and everyday life. Integreat seeks to provide refugees with this information by allowing them to select their geographic location and receive locally relevant information. This information is available offline once the app is opened so it can be used without an internet connection. In addition, the content is translated into the native languages of refugees and migrants to facilitate access. The content is licensed with a CC BY 4.0 license to facilitate collaboration and translation between content creators and dissemination of the content. Integreat is now being used for a broader migrant audience and says it can also support professionals, volunteers, and counseling centers. == Comparable mobile apps == Other mobile apps that are likewise intended to provide initial orientation for refugees include the app Ankommen, a joint project of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, the Goethe-Institut, the Federal Employment Agency and the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, which is intended as a companion for the first few weeks in Germany, and the Welcome App, a company-sponsored non-profit initiative for information about Germany and asylum procedures with a regional focus, and a book by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and Verlag Herder with a corresponding app Deutschland - Erste Informationen für Flüchtlinge (Germany - First Information for Refugees) as a companion for Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany.

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