Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 17th April 2024

AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.

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But the reality is that you can’t build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that’s kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations.

Molly White # 7:53 pm

Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide. (via) Horrifying in depth report describing sextortion scams: a scammer tricks a teenage boy into sending them reciprocal nude photos, then instantly starts blackmailing them by threatening to forward those photos to their friends and family members. Most online scams take weeks or even months to play out—these scams can turn to blackmail within minutes. # 3:10 am