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, unless human creativity has gone into the prompts that generated the output. This ruling in itself raises many questions: how much creativity is needed, and […]

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 eye. Towards the end, Levine writes about Elon Musk’s version of Nick Bostrom’s AI that decides to turn the world to paper-clips: [Elon] Musk gave […]

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, or run LLaMA1 on their laptop. And everyone has opinions about how these language models and art generation programs are going to change the nature […]

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 is very much in the current mind, with events like the strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, in which […]

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 look at questions: what are the questions to which I’d like answers as 2023 draws to a close? What are the unknowns that will shape […]

Disclaimer: Based on the announcement of the EO, without having seen the full text. While I am heartened to hear that the Executive Order on AI uses the Defense Production Act to compel disclosure of various data from the development of large AI models, these disclosures do not go far enough. The EO seems to […]

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 training sets for AI are dominated by content created by AI. We already see hints of that on GitHub: in February 2023, GitHub said that […]

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 learn. And that you could learn the basics in two hours. Although I agree that designing good prompts for AI is an important skill, Agarwal […]

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 non-academic version in Ethan Mollick’s Substack.) The article describes seven roles that an AI bot like ChatGPT might play in the education process: Mentor, Tutor, […]

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. Across one story arc, they said, we often see several structural evolutions—smaller-scale versions of that wider phenomenon. Cloud computing? It progressed from “raw compute and […]

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 it a lot in the future. That statement nicely summarizes what makes software development difficult. It’s not just memorizing the syntactic details of some programming […]

To follow up on our previous survey about low-code and no-code tools, we decided to run another short survey about tools specifically for software developers—including, but not limited to, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. We’re interested in how “developer enablement” tools of all sorts are changing the workplace. Our survey 1 showed that while these tools […]

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 surprise how quickly it got to the top of our charts: it peaked in May as the 6th most common search query. Then it dropped […]

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve played around with using AI tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to write code for you. Or even if you haven’t yet, then you’ve at least heard about these tools in your newsfeed over the past year. So far I’ve read a gazillion blog posts about people’s experiences […]

Imagine for a minute that you’re a programming instructor who’s spent many hours making creative homework problems to introduce your students to the world of programming. One day, a colleague tells you about an AI tool called ChatGPT. To your surprise (and alarm), when you give it your homework problems, it solves most of them […]

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 Welsh has been talking and writing about the end of programming as such. He’s asking whether large language models eliminate programming as we know it, […]

Does your company plan to release an AI chatbot, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard? Doing so means giving the general public a freeform text box for interacting with your AI model. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Here’s the catch: for every one of your users who has read a “Here’s how ChatGPT […]

Understanding AI’s mysterious “opaque box” is paramount to creating explainable AI. This can be simplified by considering that AI, like all other technology, has a supply chain. Knowing what makes up the supply chain is critical to enforcing the security of the AI system, establishing trust with the consumer of the AI’s output, and protecting […]

“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 350 business and technical leaders, including the developers of today’s most important AI platforms. Among the possible risks leading to that outcome is what is […]

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 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, the day that AI emerged from research labs into an unsuspecting world. Within two months, ChatGPT had over a hundred million […]

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 the larger number was prime. It answered correctly that the number was non-prime, but when it told me the number’s prime factors, it was clearly wrong. […]