http://simonwillison.net/2024-08-31T22:09:15+00:00Simon Willison2024-08-31T22:09:15+00:002024-08-31T22:09:15+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/31/ted-chiang/#atom-tag

<blockquote cite="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art"><p>Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.</p> <p>If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art">Ted Chiang</a></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/art">art</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/new-yorker">new-yorker</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ted-chiang">ted-chiang</a></p>

2023-06-04T14:59:50+00:002023-06-04T14:59:50+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2023/Jun/4/ted-chiang/#atom-tag

<blockquote cite="https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84"><p>There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’. And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84">Ted Chiang</a></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ted-chiang">ted-chiang</a></p>

2023-03-03T04:59:38+00:002023-03-03T04:59:38+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/3/kqed-forum/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101892368/how-to-wrap-our-heads-around-these-new-shockingly-fluent-chatbots">How to Wrap Our Heads Around These New Shockingly Fluent Chatbots</a></strong></p> I was a guest on KQED Forum this morning, a live radio documentary and call-in show hosted by Alexis Madrigal. Ted Chiang and Claire Leibowicz were the other guests: we talked about ChatGPT and and the new generation of AI-powered tools. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/radio">radio</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/my-talks">my-talks</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt-3">gpt-3</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/chatgpt">chatgpt</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ted-chiang">ted-chiang</a></p>

2023-02-09T21:28:37+00:002023-02-09T21:28:37+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/9/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web">ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web</a></strong></p> Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it's a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps.</p> <blockquote> <p>ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.</p> </blockquote> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/new-yorker">new-yorker</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt-3">gpt-3</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/chatgpt">chatgpt</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ted-chiang">ted-chiang</a></p>