Sil Hamilton
I’m Sil. I’m a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University studying under David Mimno and Matthew Wilkens. Here's my CV.
What do I study? My goal is to sharpen intuitions on where humans and language models epistemologically diverge. My published research draws on narratology and model interpretability to investigate how LLMs capture cultural concepts in areas like jurisprudence, journalism, and storytelling.
Want to connect? Reach out to me on Bluesky, email, and LinkedIn.
Publications
| A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scale. ~70k high-quality literary social networks. |
| Lost in Space: Optimizing Tokens for Grammar-Constrained Decoding. Why does structured output hurt accuracy? |
| Detecting Mode Collapse in Language Models via Narration. Why is GPT getting worse at creative writing? |
| Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Segment the Chapters Herself. |
| Blind Judgement: Agent-Based Supreme Court Modelling with GPT. You can simulate the Supreme Court with chatbots. |
| MultiHATHI: A Complete Collection of Multilingual Prose Fiction in the HathiTrust Digital Library. |
| The COVID That Wasn’t: Counterfactual Journalism using GPT. What would GPT-2 think of COVID-19? |
Posts
Software Projects
| DocPlot, private semantic search in the browser. |
| COVID-17, showcasing a counterfactual COVID narrative. |
| semantic-space, for generating thesauruses from latent space. |
| adsb-utils, for mapping ADS-B packets offline. |
| feature-space-explorer, for plotting sentence embeddings in n-dimensions. |
Online Courses
| Generative AI For Journalists. 350 students. |
| How to use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in your newsrooms. 10k+ students and translated into Spanish and Portuguese. |
Workshops
| Run LLMs On Your Laptop. Media Party. |
| Workshop and Mixer on ChatGPT. Brown Institute for Media Innovation. |
Interviews
| The Future of CNF Writing, Editing and Publishing in a World with AI. Brevity Blog. |
| ChatGPT, Writers, and Publishing: Should You Worry? Heidi Pitlor Editoral. |
Presentations
| AI in journalism: Ethics, opportunities and pitfalls. ISOJ. |
| Artificial Intelligence in Modern Media Organizations. Baltic Media Forum. |
| Open Lecture by Sil Hamilton. Vilnius University, Lithuania. |
| Digital Humanities 2.0. UNLV. |
| Prometheus: Local News for Local AI. Media Party. |
| How AI, Digital Health, & Technology Is Shaping Global Health & Humanitarian Relief. Kennedy Space Center. |
| What Journalists Need To Know About ChatGPT and Other Tools. Knight Center, UTAustin. |
| Mind the Gap: How Newsrooms Can Bridge the AI Moat. Computer History Museum. |
| GPT-4 - How does it work, and how do I build apps with it? CS50, Harvard. |
| The Present State: Generative AI. Nieman Foundation, Harvard. |
| Parallel Worlds: How To Generate Useful Data with AI. McGill University. |
| Superreaders: Recognizing The Value Of Literate Language Models. SLSA. |
Media
| AI Needs Journalism More Than Journalism Needs AI. Computer History Museum. |
| Confessions of a Viral AI Writer. Wired. |
| Newsrooms Should Engage Responsibly with Artificial Intelligence, Say Journalists. Broadband Breakfast. |
| ChatGPT will not take our jobs, but it’s essential to experiment and learn about this technology, say experts in webinar. LatAm Journalism Review. |
| AI Can Reveal Hidden Biases in News Media. Futurity. |
| L’IA rendra-t-elle les médias plus objectifs? Le Devoir. |
| ChatGPT is less wowed by itself than we are. FT. |
| What AI-generated COVID news tells us that journalists don’t. McGill Channels. |