Mind Your Language

How do today’s AIs actually work, and how much do they resemble the human brain? This talk offers a neuro-cognitive tour of neural networks — from early perceptrons to modern transformers — to demystify large language models, build AI literacy, and understand the real strengths, limits, and risks of current AI models.

Every day, you read hundreds of things, like texts, emails, menus, and labels. But here's something strange: most of the time, you already know what the next word will be before you even see it. In a way, you’re predicting the future. Now, large language models like ChatGPT do something surprisingly similar — they predict and generate text, word by word. But does that mean they think like we do? In this talk, I'll explore why AI can read and talk like humans, and what this might reveal about how your brain processes language.

Speech and language are for humans only... or are they? We will talk about our research looking at how the song of corn buntings (an unremarkable-looking bird that lives in farmland in our region) is far richer and more sophisticated than we had thought. In fact, we think that their vocal culture is second only to humpback whales among non-human animals. We'll talk about how we've investigated this, what it means for our understanding of our own culture, and how farming practices might be shaping animal behaviour.