Deep Culture Team — University of Amsterdam / deep-culture.org Abstract Rich Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson” argues that general-purpose methods leveraging computation ultimately outperform approaches built on human domain knowledge. We test this hypothesis in the digital humanities by replicating three published experiments: (1) temporal attribution of UN Security Council resolutions, (2) keyword extraction and document classification […]

By Louis Ravn The terms describing the spaces of deep learning (DL) – including latent space, vector space, feature space, and embedding space – are often used interchangeably. While this rightly betrays a close connection between these concepts, they nonetheless differ in important ways. Hence, this blog posts attempts to explain some of the salient […]

We are excited to report that we have started developing our first Little Tools of Difference in the Deep Culture project. For the past years, deep learning has been driven by a culture of uniformity—optimizing for efficiency, smoothing over outliers and categorizing identity. We asked: What if we used these same state-of-the-art architectures (LSTMs, CNN, […]

With Stijn Peeters Read: NOS.nl coverage of our research on Google’s AI Overviews during the Dutch parliamentary elections. In the spring of 2025, Google rolled out its AI Overviews in the Netherlands. Overnight, the blue answer boxes became one of the most influential applications of generative AI in public discourse. Research on AI Overviews (AIOs) […]