I know quote tweets aren't a thing here but I feel strongly about this, so here goes!
It makes me sad to see the below take pop up so often. Because they're trained directly on data and adopt the perspective of those data, the epistemology of ML/AI/LLM is, IMO, perfectly aligned with the situated knowledges perspective. Feminists, this is actually *our* moment to shine! We can do so much with these methods! We can absolutely use these methods in a way that aligns with a #feminist epistemology.
@LauraNelson e.g., here's my phd advisor's paper on linguistic change in online communities -- really, beer-review forums. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/Linguistic_change_files/linguistic_change_lifecycle.pdf
here, language models are bespoke and bigram-level, used to model month-by-month patterns of language used by this group of people who reviewed craft beers on the internet. baked into the research question is the intuition that these patterns change over time.
@LauraNelson the cool finding is that as you write more beer reviews, you might start to settle into your habitual ways of writing these reviews, even as the community moves on without you.
(side note, i feel maybe a variant or reversal of this about my current mastodon instance? anyway, not important.)
but maybe there's something here? i.e., in the vein of, "here we map the gradual ossification of bureaucratic-speak in this organization, showing the development of linguistic devices that help it shirk responsibility for the various crises it's implicated in."
@LauraNelson second, the "LMs have knowledge" trend is totally bizarre to me, given the "community norm" interpretation that i was socialized into. maybe that's why people make distinctions between NLP and comp-soc-sci/text-as-data.
(i mentioned both interpretations to an anthro professor recently, who seemed a bit weirded out by the idea of writing down a unified interpretation of "what it means to find patterns in text", so...that too.)
Laura K. Nelson
justine