Saturday, 14th December 2024
BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline. This is bad: the Apple Intelligence feature that uses (on device) LLMs to present a condensed, summarized set of notifications misrepresented a BBC headline as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself".
Ken Schwencke caught that same feature incorrectly condensing a New York Times headline about an ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu as "Netanyahu arrested".
My understanding is that these notification summaries are generated directly on-device, using Apple's own custom 3B parameter model.
The main lesson I think this illustrates is that it's not responsible to outsource headline summarization to an LLM without incorporating human review: there are way too many ways this could result in direct misinformation.
3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or “My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash.” (via) Matt Might in 2010:
The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.
Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.
So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.
In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:
- abuse of the passive voice,
- weasel words, and
- lexical illusions.
"Lexical illusions" here refers to the thing where you accidentally repeat a word word twice without realizing, which is particularly hard to spot if the repetition spans a line break.
Matt shares Bash scripts that he added to a LaTeX build system to identify these problems.
I pasted his entire article into Claude and asked it to build me an HTML+JavaScript artifact implementing the rules from those scripts. After a couple more iterations (I pasted in some feedback comments from Hacker News) I now have an actually quite useful little web tool:
tools.simonwillison.net/writing-style
Here's the source code and commit history.
An LLM knows every work of Shakespeare but can’t say which it read first. In this material sense a model hasn’t read at all.
To read is to think. Only at inference is there space for serendipitous inspiration, which is why LLMs have so little of it to show for all they’ve seen.