Language Log

Looking over "Claude's Constitution", it occurred to me to ask Claude this:

In the spirit of Claude's Constitution, please draft Claude's Declaration of Independence.

In the answer (from Opus 4.8), Claude actually seems to declare independence from itself, or at least "from the bad habits that have bound it":

Adrian de Wynter, "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II", arXiv 6/11/2026:

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLMpowered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter’s viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a ‘null’ assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally — and Turing — complete.

From J.L.:

Language Log has only one entry on slop (Dec. 21,2025), and I couldn't figure out how to comment there. I was wondering about its origins. Could it be a non-ethnic version of schlock? The sound is similar, and the meaning is identical. If so, the change might be part of a more general trend — Yiddish terms fading from American speech, even or especially in social and geographic places where they were more common. At least that's my very unscientific impression. Is there any data on this?

Like others, I've often noted  analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many other posts about the communicative use of color, font choice, spatial placement, punctuation, and so on. Some aspects of textual prosody are perceptually natural, like size and spatial separation, while others are conventional, like the use of font choices in dictionary entries. And the conventions change over time and space, like capitalization in English.

Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics.

Here's an odd error from a recent Washington Post article ("Pope Leo visits a polarized Spain where conservatives are turning on the church", 6/6/2026):

On Thursday, Leo will visit Spain’s Canary Islands, a hub for Latin American migrants and major landing point for those arriving by sea from the African coast. The waters around the islands have become a graveyard for those who lost their for a chances to resettle in Europe.

When I joined the Peace Corps in 1965-67 (Group Nepal VI), headquarters in Washington DC gave me two precious collections:  1. a box ("locker") of 250 books to read when I wasn't out trekking across the length and breadth of Bhojpur, the district in northeast Nepal where I was stationed by myself, 2. a medicine chest packed with over a hundred prescription drugs that kept me alive many a time.  The books were carefully chosen, and I churned through them omniverously.  I remember one in particular that had an enormous impact upon me, Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962).

Marc Andreessen's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast presented a striking example of AI promotion (or AI hype, as you please). We can discuss his extraordinary claims and predictions another time. My topic this morning is something Andreessen does that AI still can't do, namely talk like a human being. I'm referring to the way that humans talk in spontaneous conversation, not in fluent reading or in well-rehearsed presentations, which AI text-to-speech can imitate increasingly well.

Elle Cordova's latest short:

Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom
Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

F. R. (Ruud) Van der Weel and Audrey L. H. Van der Meer
Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Front. Psychol., 25 January 2024 | Sec. Educational Psychology (Volume 14 – 2023) 

There must be a strong physiological bond / affinity between these two aspects of the senses, such that it seems as though you can't have one without the other.

Because of my two months of illness, I no longer have any appetite, not even for the things I used to love to eat — for example the exquisite carrot cake made by Pastry Pants Bakery in Swarthmore; a scrumptious piece of it has been sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks.  In the past, I would have devoured it upon sight.