Simon Willison’s Weblog

For many people in many organizations, their measurable output is words—words in emails, in reports, in presentations. We use words as proxy for many things: the number of words is an indicator of effort, the quality of the words is an indicator of intelligence, the degree to which the words are error-free is an indicator of care.

[...] But now every employee with Copilot can produce work that checks all the boxes of a formal report without necessarily representing underlying effort.

— Ethan Mollick # 2nd February 2024, 3:34 am

Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. [...] And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are.

— Ethan Mollick # 16th July 2023, 12:12 am

There are many reasons for companies to not turn efficiency gains into headcount or cost reduction. Companies that figure out how to use their newly productive workforce should be able to dominate those who try to keep their post-AI output the same as their pre-AI output, just with less people. And companies that commit to maintaining their workforce will likely have employees as partners, who are happy to teach others about the uses of AI at work, rather than scared workers who hide their AI for fear of being replaced.

— Ethan Mollick # 14th May 2023, 2:17 pm