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…
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…
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…
The Real Problem with Software Development
A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet that said “Writing code isn’t the problem. Controlling complexity is.” I wish I could remember who said that; I will be quoting…
The ChatGPT Surge
I’m sure that nobody will be surprised that the number of searches for ChatGPT on the O’Reilly learning platform skyrocketed after its release in November, 2022. It might be a…
Fearing the Wrong Thing
There’s a lot of angst about software developers “losing their jobs” to AI, being replaced by a more intelligent version of ChatGPT, GitHub’s Copilot, Google’s Codey, or something similar. Matt…
The Alignment Problem Is Not New
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” according to a statement signed by more than…
You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand
The world changed on November 30, 2022 as surely as it did on August 12, 1908 when the first Model T left the Ford assembly line. That was the date…
ChatGPT, Now with Plugins
A few months ago, I wrote about some experiments with prime numbers. I generated a 16-digit non-prime number by multiplying two 8-digit prime numbers, and asked ChatGPT (using GPT -3.5) whether…