Archival bots: My mother, my model for language
Jenny Hedley During two stages in my life—at age seven and again in my twenties—I acted as surrogate speaker when head-and-neck cancer muted my mother’s voice. In the years between, we collaborated on so many creative projects that our voices often became enmeshed. I have perpetuated this mother–daughter entanglement eighteen years after her death by training a small language model (SLM) on a dataset of personal writing which includes her voice. Specifically, my JenAI language model’s ‘memoir’-tagged voice trained upon my unpublished manuscript ‘Hermit Crab Diary’ which weaves together my mother’s and my 2005–2007 diary entries with my contemporaneous…
