In his 1957 paper Studies in Linguistic Analysis, John Rupert Firth introduced the assertion that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps,” a statement that emphasises the significance of context in understanding word meaning. Firth’s insight into collocational meaning highlighted the importance of studying words in relation to their habitual co-occurrences. This foundational idea paved the way for the development of large language models (LLMs), which rely on vast datasets to learn patterns of word usage within context. The same phrase invites us to consider the limitations of AI systems that create apparent meaning by reducing sentences to a collection of words that have kept \u2018company\u2019 before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, as an increasing use of LLMs through software provided by OpenAI and Google becomes common place, how does the computational collocation of words shape how we know natural environments such as forests?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In recent years, as cinema has socialised the idea of AI, it has often turned to the forests to express the complexity of computational systems. Research and development
laboratories are set in coniferous forests (Ex Machina, 2014, Devs, 2020), suggesting fractal geometries as a reference to mathematical systems. The scale of forests are used as environments in which a human protagonist becomes exposed to unfamiliar climates (Her, 2013), and becomes lost without the aid of instrumentation (Ex, Machina 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A short movie \u201cYou shall know a forest\u201d was filmed on the traditional countries of Taungurung and Wurundjeri peoples, and Gadigal of the Eora Nation, to connect the representational construction of language through AI tools, with landscapes that become extensions of the \u2018wild city\u2019 (Steele 2022). The Firth quote is adapted according to each scene to extend the assertion that\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n