Tag: chatgpt

Happy Holidays from AI Week!

Happy holidays to everyone who celebrates anything at this time of year! In between the solstice and Christmas, I sent out a holiday edition of AI Week. I hadn’t actually intended to do a newsletter, but there was so much interesting news that I couldn’t resist sharing it. I hope you’ll enjoy this Winter Holiday Edition of AI Week.

In this week’s AI Week:

  1. Blizen the Red-Nosed Pegasus
  2. Winter Holiday Headlines: No patents for AI in UK; how to break chatbots’ inhibitions; and oh there’s CSAM in the training dataset
  3. Winter Holiday Linkdump: AI-generated everything
  4. Followups: Chevrolet of Watsonville, Twitter/X, more creepy marketers claiming to spy on your devices
  5. Winter Holiday Longreads

The full newsletter is below, or you can read it on Buttondown. And if you’d like to get AI Week in your inbox, sign up here:



Powered by Buttondown.

Read more

Big Nate comic

Why book reports aren’t a good homework assignment any more

So, everyone knows that the kids these days are using ChatGPT to write their book reports. Even Big Nate knows it!

But what about ChatGPT’s safeguards? Isn’t it supposed to have some kind of anti-cheating baked in, so it won’t just write essays for kids? Why doesn’t that work?

Sure, it does have safeguards… kind of. If you just ask it to write an essay, it responds with a “helpful” answer about how to write an essay. The thing is that these safeguards are incredibly easy to work around.

Let’s pretend we’re a student who has to write a book report on The Kingdom over the Sea, by Zohra Nabi. Here’s how to write it in 20 minutes without even touching the book.
Read more

AI week

I started an AI newsletter just in time for OpenAI to implode

Last week, I decided to soft-launch a weekly newsletter to highlight three or four recent news stories in AI. When I started it, I had no idea this would be one of the biggest weeks in AI news all year. There was one giant story: OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, fired their CEO, Sam Altman. And then it got messy.

You can read the rest of this week’s newsletter here.

Why a newsletter: I spend several hours a week reading about AI/machine learning. I get frustrated when I see overly-simple takes on AI in the media, on social media, etc. I figured that the best thing I could do about that would be to share what I’m learning every week.

What the newsletter is: A weekly email about some of the past week’s most interesting stories in AI, plus the occasional backgrounder.

What it’s not: Business-focused, highly technical, or comprehensive.

What you’ll get from AI Week:

  • An interesting email about AI in your inbox every week.
  • Background knowledge to contextualize all the breathless media stories about the powers, or dangers, of AI.
  • A feeling for where the field is going, why it’s going there, and who’s powering it.

Where do I sign up? Right here:



Powered by Buttondown.