Simon Willison’s Weblog

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm

Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

— @deepfates # 7th May 2024, 3:59 pm

I believe these things:
1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity.
2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever.
3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.

— Tim Bray # 4th May 2024, 4:26 pm

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human. [...]

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology? [...]

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

— Zach Seward # 2nd May 2024, 7:44 pm

The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams.

[...] Instead of regulating the development of AI models, the focus should be on regulating their applications, particularly those that pose high risks to public safety and security. Regulate the use of AI in high-risk areas such as healthcare, criminal justice, and critical infrastructure, where the potential for harm is greatest, would ensure accountability for harmful use, whilst allowing for the continued advancement of AI technology.

— Jeremy Howard # 29th April 2024, 4:04 pm

If you’re auditioning for your job every day, and you’re auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no matter what, and at the same time, you have access to unrivaled data on partners, sellers, and competitors, you might be tempted to look at that data to get an edge and keep your job and get to your restricted stock units.

— Dana Mattioli # 26th April 2024, 5:43 pm

I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We’ve had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.

— Meta AI bot, answering a question on a forum # 18th April 2024, 3:34 am

The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.

— Constance Grady # 16th April 2024, 11:31 pm

On the zombie edition of the Washington Independent I discovered, the piece I had published more than ten years before was attributed to someone else. Someone unlikely to have ever existed, and whose byline graced an article it had absolutely never written.

[...] Washingtonindependent.com, which I’m using to distinguish it from its namesake, offers recently published, article-like content that does not appear to me to have been produced by human beings. But, if you dig through its news archive, you can find work human beings definitely did produce. I know this because I was one of them.

— Spencer Ackerman # 7th March 2024, 2:59 am

LLMs may offer immense value to society. But that does not warrant the violation of copyright law or its underpinning principles. We do not believe it is fair for tech firms to use rightsholder data for commercial purposes without permission or compensation, and to gain vast financial rewards in the process. There is compelling evidence that the UK benefits economically, politically and societally from upholding a globally respected copyright regime.

— UK House of Lords report on Generative AI # 2nd February 2024, 3:54 am

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

Danielle Del, a spokeswoman for Sasso, said Dudesy is not actually an A.I.

“It’s a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen,” Del wrote in an email. “The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ was completely written by Chad Kultgen.”

— George Carlin’s Estate Sues Podcasters Over A.I. Episode # 27th January 2024, 5:52 pm