Tech philosopher, author, dad. Critical thinking, AI ethics & future skills. Views mine. Not very active on here these days.
Sunny Kent
Joined November 2009
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Something I've been working on for the last couple of years with some brilliant collaborators: Duologue, a learning platform that teaches you *how* to think rather than *what* to think. Do take a look. duologue.ac.uk/
Tom Chatfield retweeted
Stanford neuroscientists Dr. David Eagleman says AI will have a problem with selection
AI is massively creative. The part of creativity that AI can’t do right now is selection… meaning, it can generate 100 pictures, but it doesn’t know which one to pick.”
“It doesn’t know which one is going to be the most appealing to you, but it can remix beautifully.”
“When it generates the pixels, it’s doing this magical stuff under the hood where it’s deciding which pixels and how they diffuse together to make the image.
But it doesn’t know how to read that image… it’s not seeing the image except as a bunch of pixels.”
Tom Chatfield retweeted
this is … odd.
the whole problem with agentic code is that people wind up with hard to debug redundancies, security holes, deleted databases, etc., which is exactly why you need roadmaps and code reviews, with AI-written code.
I am with @Grady_Booch on this one (and almost everything else).
I don’t doubt that we will have more code written cheaper than ever, but a lot of it is going to be a mess unless there is serious oversight. (Companies like Amazon have already seen this.)
For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews.
This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system.
LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it.
If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.
Treated myself while passing through Charing Cross to a copy of How to Talk to AI by the brilliant @JamieJBartlett to find it was both already signed and officially bestselling. Congratulations, Jamie! Can't wait to read it.
Tom Chatfield retweeted
As an avid cyclist, I was amused to see ChatGPT's “powerful new image engine" draw a bicycle with the "brake" label pointing to empty space where brakes are sometimes found on other bicycles. The point of these AI fails (regularly collected by @garymarcus) is not that LLMs are useless or unintelligent but that they think differently from humans, lacking explicit knowledge of reality and instead amalgamating billions of statistical generalizations. open.substack.com/pub/garyma…
A fascinating experiment. And also a window into a central limitation of present LLMs. Any system pre-trained up to cutoff date X is myopic beyond it; yet convincingly and fluently willing to predict and generlize without the capacity for updating underlying assumptions.
Played with Talkie, an LLM trained only on pre-1930 data. It's pretty dumb and inconsistent, as to be expected at its size. But still very cool.
Excited about "vintage LLMs." Testing a model on forecasting world events that haven't happened for decades is both badass and a promising way to understand LLMs' forecasting capabilities.
Tom Chatfield retweeted
Spent an hour messing with ChatGpt & images, and I'm increasingly convinced we're over the horizon. Not where human artists are obsolete, I don't plan to quit, but yeah, it's going to define processes, mostly in the positive, sometimes in the negative ("I don't use it") way
Tom Chatfield retweeted
here's a new version of "what we talk to when we talk to language models", with an added section (pp. 16-23) on LLM interlocutors as characters, personas, or simulacra. philarchive.org/rec/CHAWWT-8
the new version discusses role-playing vs realization, the simulators framework, the persona selection hypothesis, and more -- in addition to the existing discussion of quasi-mental states, LLM identity, personal identity in severance, LLM welfare, and related topics.
this version was mostly written before recent discussions of these issues on X and in NYC, but i've updated it a little in light of those discussions. any thoughts are welcome.
This feels like a subtle, important point. Role-playing is something people do, imaginatively inhibiting a persona. This doesn't apply to LLMs, which (if I'm extrapolating correctly) in effect subtly constantly shift what they *are* in line with context, weights and prompts.
I suspect a lot of authors are now getting LLM-crafted custom spam like this.
A saving grace: it shows how important tone, context and tacit knowledge are to decent writing and trustworthy communication.
More depressingly: unsolicited approaches are fast becoming impossible.
ALT An LLM-generated spam email purporting to be from Radio 4 that begins like this: Dear Tom Chatfield, I hope this email finds you well. My name is Jane Garvey, and I’m reaching out about a potential author interview for BBC Radio 4’s Book and Author Interview series, broadcast from Broadcasting House in London. We’re currently curating thoughtful monthly conversations with authors whose books explore compelling cultural, educational, and intellectual themes. Your highly regarded book, Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study (2nd Edition), immediately caught our attention for its clear and practical guidance on developing essential thinking skills, and for showing how structured reasoning can empower learners to navigate today’s complex information landscape...
It's not just a tool. It’s an alien life form! Bowie on the internet, in 1999.
So prescient and eloquent that some are wondering whether it's AI generated.
A fact that in turn suggests something just as big (and terrible, and strange, and amazing) is happening all over again.
The mirage effect: the fact that LLMs are superhuman at guessing may conceal the fact that they don't know what they're talking about. Fascinating.
New AI paper from us this week. When my student first showed me his initial findings, I really didn’t know what to make of them. I felt that this was an interesting but curious loophole phenomenon that would shortly be closed. I was very wrong.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687
Depressing how much AI-generated email spam I get pretending to be some kind of "author service" related to my books.
Utterly bogus detailed praise of things I've written, peppered with cheery promises and "no pressure" invitations to connect.
Predatory on vanity and hope. Ugh.
