Copyright, AI, and Provenance
Generative AI stretches our current copyright law in unforeseen and uncomfortable ways. In the US, the Copyright Office has issued guidance stating that the output of image-generating AI isn’t copyrightable…
Strawberry Fields Forever
Tim O’Reilly forwarded an excellent article about the OpenAI soap opera to me: Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff: Who Controls Open AI.” I’ll skip most of it, but something caught my…
Generative AI in the Enterprise
Generative AI has been the biggest technology story of 2023. Almost everybody’s played with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, GitHub Copilot, or Midjourney. A few have even tried out Bard or Claude,…
Creativity Isn’t Just Remixing
This is not the first time that I’ve written about AI creativity, and I doubt that it will be the last. It’s a question that comes up repeatedly, and that…
Questions for 2024
This time of year, everyone publishes predictions. They’re fun, but I don’t find them a good source of insight into what’s happening in technology. Instead of predictions, I’d prefer to…
Preliminary Thoughts on the White House Executive Order on AI
Disclaimer: Based on the announcement of the EO, without having seen the full text. Overall, the Executive Order is a great piece of work, displaying a great deal of both…
Model Collapse: An Experiment
Ever since the current craze for AI-generated everything took hold, I’ve wondered: what will happen when the world is so full of AI-generated stuff (text, software, pictures, music) that our…
Prompting Isn’t The Most Important Skill
Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor and of the founders of the EdX educational platform, recently created a stir by saying that prompt engineering was the most important skill you could…
Automated Mentoring with ChatGPT
Ethan and Lilach Mollick’s paper Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students with Prompts explores seven ways to use AI in teaching. (While this paper is eminently readable, there is a…
Structural Evolutions in Data
I am wired to constantly ask “what’s next?” Sometimes, the answer is: “more of the same.” That came to mind when a friend raised a point about emerging technology’s fractal nature.…