Semantic Ablation

It was about a year ago that I signed up for a paid OpenAI subscription. It is no exaggeration to say that the return on investment I get for those 20 USD per month far outweighs almost anything I have ever bought in my life. Its usefulness extends across domains, from academic administration to travel advice, and I am convinced that it has made me a better teacher, supervisor – and perhaps even runner.

In the beginning, much of the concern revolved around “hallucinations”: the tendency of generative AI models to make up facts that are not true. Over time, as the models have improved and I have become more attentive to the kinds of mistakes they make, I have grown less worried about hallucinations and more concerned about what might be called “semantic ablation”. If hallucination is the model seeing what is not there, semantic ablation is the model quietly erasing what is.

The process is subtle. You paste a jagged paragraph into the machine – something slightly overdetermined, perhaps overly metaphorical, maybe even a bit too fond of its own terminology – and ask for “polishing”. What comes back is smoother. Cleaner. More readable. And yet something has been lost.

The rare word is replaced by a more common synonym. The technical term becomes “accessible”. The structure is straightened into a respectable, well-tempered five-paragraph march. Nothing is wrong. But neither is anything quite alive.

Statistically, this makes perfect sense. Large language models are trained to move toward the center of probability distributions. The tail – where idiosyncrasy, precision, and intellectual risk often reside – is shaved off in the name of likelihood and helpfulness. The result is not error, but regression to the mean.

And perhaps that is the deeper danger. Not that the machine invents fantasies, but that it gently encourages us to abandon complexity. Not that it deceives us, but that it smooths us. A civilizational drift toward the middle, where friction is minimized and originality becomes statistically inconvenient.

Used carefully, these systems are immensely helpful when it comes to clarifying thought. Used unreflectively, they may erode it. The question is not whether we can write with AI, but whether we can do so without allowing our sentences – and eventually our thinking – to suffer semantic ablation.

Resistance

Long-distance running always includes an element of resistance. As much as I enjoy a dog jog in Halland, a seaside ultra in the British Isles, or a road marathon in a far-flung city, my body’s natural impulse is nevertheless to slow down and stop.

Some days it is easy to overcome this resistance; on others, like today, it is almost impossible. And this is when it becomes tricky, because sometimes the body really does have something to say – in this case, that I have yet to fully recover from my cold. With my heart rate climbing above 180 bpm, I decided to stop after only five kilometres. The moment I stepped off the treadmill, I knew I had made the right decision: I felt slightly dizzy, my vision not entirely steady.

Now, back home, I am sitting on the sofa, drinking Italian coffee and watching the snow–rain mix freeze against the windows. It is late February, but everything feels far less miserable than a week ago. The other day, one could genuinely sense that spring is just around the corner.

Crying Wolf

Twenty years ago, the Swedish meteorologist and climate activist Pär Holmgren predicted that snow in southern Sweden would be gone for good by now. Making my way from the gym to the railway station in a freezing −13 degrees, this is one prediction that, like the many “ovinter” stories circulating back in December, has not aged particularly well. Still, it is clear that the global climate is warming and that this will have far-reaching ramifications for life on this planet.

At the same time, crying wolf – and advancing outlandish claims such as that climate change poses an existential threat to all of humanity (which it, unlike advanced machine intelligence, most definitely does not) – risks undermining not only the credibility of climate science but also introducing a Manichean logic that renders democratic deliberation more difficult.

Now listen to this

"No eternal reward will forgive us now

For wasting the dawn"

February at Hallandsgatan: the psychedelic depths of distant soundscapes, the lingering warmth of today’s lunch at Söderfamiljen, and the absurd hope that all will eventually be just fine.

Today, I had an extra class for the students who failed their second attempt at the statistics exam. Coming in, their dread was palpable; an hour later, they had conquered what they had once thought insurmountable. Moments like that are reason enough.

Lynx

Waking up to -15 degrees, the winter still holds Halland in the firmest of grips. Just outside the house: tracks in the fresh snow of what looks like the Eurasian lynx – a secretive nightfarer with thick fur beneath its paws, making the prints appear large and slightly blurred at the edges.

With the morning light, the lynx itself is nowhere to be seen, and yet entirely present – an encounter through absence that becomes impossible not to follow. A quiet assertion of sovereignty in a landscape otherwise claimed by dog walkers and Strava segments.

In forty days, I will trade this crystalline Halland morning for the open expanses of the desert, where the possibility is its North American counterpart, the cougar. Long before that, rain will have turned the snow into slush. But for a brief winter morning, Halland belonged to something wild.

Fettisdagen

After running only 16 kilometres last week and being down with a cold, my legs felt fresh this morning as I went looking for the perfect semla across the bridges. Pacing 5:24 min/km with an average heart rate of 133 bpm, I stopped only to take a few pictures of ferries, high-rise hotels, and the occasional polar bear.

Once on the other side of the river, I made it to Alkemisten just as a fresh batch of semlor arrived. Apparently, the word “fettisdag” has been in use since the late sixteenth century, and this one was definitely worthy of the tradition.

Xennials

While perhaps a bit too early, I could not resist the purple morning skies and went for a run around the neighbourhood, keeping my 373-week-long streak on Strava alive.

Meanwhile, Sofi went for a dog walk in Örebro, past the old shoe factory where we used to live in the early aughties – a formative moment in time for the generation sometimes referred to as “xennials”. Those years somehow completed the transition from an analogue world without social media to the constantly connected and recorded world of today.

Even if one should be careful not to read too much into this kind of pop psychology, there is something to be said about this technological bilingualism: of having used both rotary phones and Reddit; of remembering life before Wi-Fi passwords and push notifications; of experiencing boredom and empty time in a way that the Millennial generation coming after perhaps never quite did. We learned to wait. To call from landlines. To knock on doors without texting first. And then, almost without noticing, we became permanently reachable, geolocated, and archived. Winter morning skies and a 373-week streak feel like fitting metaphors for all this: analogue legs, digital trails.

Cold snap

Waking up to -13 degrees, I read that yet another cold snap is on its way, with cold air coming down from Greenland by midweek. Feeling kind of miserable, all running is on hold, so instead I am spending this Sunday morning revising PowerPoint slides and indulging in a rather epic breakfast.

Having rebooked my hotels for California, I am still planning to run the 28k Billy Goat Mountain Climb in Silverado, as well as heading into the desert for a night under the stars in Anza-Borrego State Park. But instead of staying at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, where the conference is, I found a much more affordable Holiday Inn Express. So I guess it really is full circle to two decades ago, when my road trips with Gabriel featured stays at such romantic IHG locations as Andrews Air Force Base, with fighter jets constantly taking off overhead. At least I used the points well, staying at Coogee Beach in Sydney later the same year.

Circles

Eighteen years ago, I was on a flight from New York to Düsseldorf, looking forward to spending Valentine’s Day in Rome. Reality, however, had other plans, and instead of romance there was theology at the Vatican with a Catholic priest whom I had befriended a few years earlier in Vienna.

With Valentine’s once again proving to be a rough ride, my cold worsened overnight, and the day brought a series of small mishaps and forgotten gloves – only slightly mitigated by a semla in the brilliant sunshine. With the sun now climbing ten degrees higher than at the winter solstice, its rays are at least beginning to warm.

Talamone

Having already confessed my sartorial sins – and the very real risk of becoming a "returmissbrukare" – here is my latest attempt at reproducing the famous Talamone look. This time, however, all sales are truly final, as I ordered an Amazon Essentials piece for 29 USD directly from the US.

Otherwise, I woke up with a slight cold which made me skip my planned half marathon in Skatås in favour of answering student emails and preparing slides for my upcoming statistics classes. Feeling somewhat better in the afternoon, I popped down to the gym with William for some light strength training instead.