Simon Willison's Weblog: tiktok

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

2026-01-30T03:51:53+00:00

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed to automate lighting and audio for live theater productions.

I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts about his business and theater automation in general - Chris founded the Voxel theater in Baltimore which QLab use as a combined performance venue, teaching hub and research lab (here's a profile of the theater), and the resulting videos offer a fascinating glimpse into a world I know virtually nothing about.

This latest TikTok describes his Claude Opus moment, after he used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project and put together a useful application in just a few days that he would never have been able to spare the time for otherwise.

Chris works full time in the arts and comes at generative AI from a position of rational distrust. It's interesting to see him working through that tension to acknowledge that there are valuable applications here to build tools for the community he serves.

I have been at least gently skeptical about all this stuff for the last two years. Every time I checked in on it, I thought it was garbage, wasn't interested in it, wasn't useful. [...] But as a programmer, if you hear something like, this is changing programming, it's important to go check it out once in a while. So I went and checked it out a few weeks ago. And it's different. It's astonishing. [...]

One thing I learned in this exercise is that it can't make you a fundamentally better programmer than you already are. It can take a person who is a bad programmer and make them faster at making bad programs. And I think it can take a person who is a good programmer and, from what I've tested so far, make them faster at making good programs. [...] You see programmers out there saying, "I'm shipping code I haven't looked at and don't understand." I'm terrified by that. I think that's awful. But if you're capable of understanding the code that it's writing, and directing, designing, editing, deleting, being quality control on it, it's kind of astonishing. [...]

The positive thing I see here, and I think is worth coming to terms with, is this is an application that I would never have had time to write as a professional programmer. Because the audience is three people. [...] There's no way it was worth it to me to spend my energy of 20 years designing and implementing software for artists to build an app for three people that is this level of polish. And it took me a few days. [...]

I know there are a lot of people who really hate this technology, and in some ways I'm among them. But I think we've got to come to terms with this is a career-changing moment. And I really hate that I'm saying that because I didn't believe it for the last two years. [...] It's like having a room full of power tools. I wouldn't want to send an untrained person into a room full of power tools because they might chop off their fingers. But if someone who knows how to use tools has the option to have both hand tools and a power saw and a power drill and a lathe, there's a lot of work they can do with those tools at a lot faster speed.

Tags: theatre, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, tiktok, ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude-code

Quoting Felix Nolan

2025-11-30T22:48:46+00:00

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference between actual content and slop. [...]

It's exactly the same cryolab, it's exactly the same robot factory place on all of these different planets. It's like there's so much to explore and nothing to find. [...]

And what was in this contraband chest was a bunch of harvested organs. And I'm like, oh, wow. If this was an actual game that people cared about the making of, this would be something interesting - an interesting bit of environmental storytelling. [...] But it's not, because it's just a cold, heartless, procedurally generated slop. [...]

Like, the point of having a giant open world to explore isn't the size of the world or the amount of stuff in it. It's that all of that stuff, however much there is, was made by someone for a reason.

— Felix Nolan, TikTok about AI and procedural generation in video games

Tags: game-design, ai, generative-ai, slop, tiktok, ai-ethics

Quoting Ada James

2025-11-05T03:50:31+00:00

I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast?

Brenda.

Who is Brenda?

She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda's brow is what allows us to do capitalism. [...]

She's gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she's gonna send that financial report to a higher up and he's gonna need to make a change to the report and normally he would have sent it back to Brenda but he's like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand Excel because AI hallucinates.

You know who's not hallucinating?

Brenda.

— Ada James, @belligerentbarbies on TikTok

Tags: excel, ai, generative-ai, llms, tiktok, ai-ethics, hallucinations

Quoting @pearlmania500

2025-08-08T22:09:15+00:00

I have a toddler. My biggest concern is that he doesn't eat rocks off the ground and you're talking to me about ChatGPT psychosis? Why do we even have that? Why did we invent a new form of insanity and then charge people for it?

— @pearlmania500, on TikTok

Tags: ai, chatgpt, tiktok, ai-ethics

The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers

2025-08-08T17:52:10+00:00

I've been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread with the OpenAI team is a great illustration of the single biggest complaint: a lot of people are very unhappy to lose access to the much older GPT-4o, previously ChatGPT's default model for most users.

A big surprise for me yesterday was that OpenAI simultaneously retired access to their older models as they rolled out GPT-5, at least in their consumer apps. Here's a snippet from their August 7th 2025 release notes:

When GPT-5 launches, several older models will be retired, including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3, o3-pro.

If you open a conversation that used one of these models, ChatGPT will automatically switch it to the closest GPT-5 equivalent. Chats with 4o, 4.1, 4.5, 4.1-mini, o4-mini, or o4-mini-high will open in GPT-5, chats with o3 will open in GPT-5-Thinking, and chats with o3-Pro will open in GPT-5-Pro (available only on Pro and Team).

There's no deprecation period at all: when your consumer ChatGPT account gets GPT-5, those older models cease to be available.

Update 12pm Pacific Time: Sam Altman on Reddit six minutes ago:

ok, we hear you all on 4o; thanks for the time to give us the feedback (and the passion!). we are going to bring it back for plus users, and will watch usage to determine how long to support it.

See also Sam's tweet about updates to the GPT-5 rollout.

Update 12th August 2025: Another Tweet from Sam:

4o is back in the model picker for all paid users by default. If we ever do deprecate it, we will give plenty of notice. Paid users also now have a “Show additional models” toggle in ChatGPT web settings which will add models like o3, 4.1, and GPT-5 Thinking mini. 4.5 is only available to Pro users—it costs a lot of GPUs.

Rest of my original post continues below:

(This only affects ChatGPT consumers - the API still provides the old models, their deprecation policies are published here.)

One of the expressed goals for GPT-5 was to escape the terrible UX of the model picker. Asking users to pick between GPT-4o and o3 and o4-mini was a notoriously bad UX, and resulted in many users sticking with that default 4o model - now a year old - and hence not being exposed to the advances in model capabilities over the last twelve months.

GPT-5's solution is to automatically pick the underlying model based on the prompt. On paper this sounds great - users don't have to think about models any more, and should get upgraded to the best available model depending on the complexity of their question.

I'm already getting the sense that this is not a welcome approach for power users. It makes responses much less predictable as the model selection can have a dramatic impact on what comes back.

Paid tier users can select "GPT-5 Thinking" directly. Ethan Mollick is already recommending deliberately selecting the Thinking mode if you have the ability to do so, or trying prompt additions like "think harder" to increase the chance of being routed to it.

But back to GPT-4o. Why do many people on Reddit care so much about losing access to that crusty old model? I think this comment captures something important here:

I know GPT-5 is designed to be stronger for complex reasoning, coding, and professional tasks, but not all of us need a pro coding model. Some of us rely on 4o for creative collaboration, emotional nuance, roleplay, and other long-form, high-context interactions. Those areas feel different enough in GPT-5 that it impacts my ability to work and create the way I’m used to.

What a fascinating insight into the wildly different styles of LLM-usage that exist in the world today! With 700M weekly active users the variety of usage styles out there is incomprehensibly large.

Personally I mainly use ChatGPT for research, coding assistance, drawing pelicans and foolish experiments. Emotional nuance is not a characteristic I would know how to test!

Professor Casey Fiesler on TikTok highlighted OpenAI’s post from last week What we’re optimizing ChatGPT for, which includes the following:

ChatGPT is trained to respond with grounded honesty. There have been instances where our 4o model fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency. […]

When you ask something like “Should I break up with my boyfriend?” ChatGPT shouldn’t give you an answer. It should help you think it through—asking questions, weighing pros and cons. New behavior for high-stakes personal decisions is rolling out soon.

Casey points out that this is an ethically complicated issue. On the one hand ChatGPT should be much more careful about how it responds to these kinds of questions. But if you’re already leaning on the model for life advice like this, having that capability taken away from you without warning could represent a sudden and unpleasant loss!

It's too early to tell how this will shake out. Maybe OpenAI will extend a deprecation period for GPT-4o in their consumer apps?

Update: That's exactly what they've done, see update above.

GPT-4o remains available via the API, and there are no announced plans to deprecate it there. It's possible we may see a small but determined rush of ChatGPT users to alternative third party chat platforms that use that API under the hood.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, tiktok, ai-ethics, ai-personality, gpt-5

Luis von Ahn on LinkedIn

2025-05-26T19:14:49+00:00

Luis von Ahn on LinkedIn

Last month's Duolingo memo about becoming an "AI-first" company has seen significant backlash, particularly on TikTok. I've had trouble figuring out how much of this is a real threat to their business as opposed to protests from a loud minority, but it's clearly serious enough for Luis von Ahn to post another memo on LinkedIn:

One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well. [...]

To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.

My goal is for Duos to feel empowered and prepared to use this technology. No one is expected to navigate this shift alone. We’re developing workshops and advisory councils, and carving out dedicated experimentation time to help all our teams learn and adapt. [...]

This really isn't saying very much to be honest.

As a consumer-focused company with a passionate user-base I think Duolingo may turn into a useful canary for figuring out quite how damaging AI-backlash can be.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, tiktok, ai-ethics, duolingo

Quoting Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

2025-04-17T17:05:46+00:00

We (Jon and Zach) teamed up with the Harris Poll to confirm this finding and extend it. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z young adults (ages 18-27). We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.” For Netflix, Youtube, and the internet itself, relatively few said yes to that question (always under 20%). We found much higher levels of regret for the dominant social media platforms: Instagram (34%), Facebook (37%), Snapchat (43%), and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47%) and X/Twitter (50%).

— Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch, TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

Tags: social-media, twitter, tiktok

TIL: Downloading every video for a TikTok account

2025-01-19T02:05:44+00:00

TIL: Downloading every video for a TikTok account

TikTok may or may not be banned in the USA within the next 24 hours or so. I figured out a gnarly pattern for downloading every video from a specified account, using browser console JavaScript to scrape the video URLs and yt-dlp to fetch each video. As a bonus, I included a recipe for generating a Whisper transcript of every video with mlx-whisper and a hacky way to show a progress bar for the downloads.

Tags: til, whisper, tiktok, speech-to-text

The Depths of Wikipedians

2024-12-10T18:22:40+00:00

The Depths of Wikipedians

Asterisk Magazine interviewed Annie Rauwerda, curator of the Depths of Wikipedia family of social media accounts (I particularly like her TikTok).

There's a ton of insight into the dynamics of the Wikipedia community in here.

[...] when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they're talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There's not that many of them.

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She's not part of any community that we can tell.

I appreciated these concluding thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT and LLMs on Wikipedia:

The traffic to Wikipedia has not taken a dramatic hit. Maybe that will change in the future. The Foundation talks about coming opportunities, or the threat of LLMs. With my friends that edit a lot, it hasn't really come up a ton because I don't think they care. It doesn't affect us. We're doing the same thing. Like if all the large language models eat up the stuff we wrote and make it easier for people to get information — great. We made it easier for people to get information.

And if LLMs end up training on blogs made by AI slop and having as their basis this ouroboros of generated text, then it's possible that a Wikipedia-type thing — written and curated by a human — could become even more valuable.

Via Hacker News

Tags: wikipedia, chatgpt, llms, tiktok

Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group

2024-12-08T21:05:56+00:00

Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group

I just learned about this delightful piece of internet culture via Leven Parker on TikTok.

Occlupanids are the small plastic square clips used to seal plastic bags containing bread.

For thirty years (since 1994) John Daniel has maintained this website that catalogs them and serves as the basis of a wide ranging community of occlupanologists who study and collect these plastic bread clips.

There's an active subreddit, r/occlupanids, but the real treat is the meticulously crafted taxonomy with dozens of species split across 19 families, all in the class Occlupanida:

Class Occlupanida (Occlu=to close, pan= bread) are placed under the Kingdom Microsynthera, of the Phylum Plasticae. Occlupanids share phylum Plasticae with “45” record holders, plastic juice caps, and other often ignored small plastic objects.

If you want to classify your own occlupanid there's even a handy ID guide, which starts with the shape of the "oral groove" in the clip.

Or if you want to dive deep down a rabbit hole, this YouTube video by CHUPPL starts with Occlupanids and then explores their inventor Floyd Paxton's involvement with the John Birch Society and eventually Yamashita's gold.

Via @leven_parker

Tags: information-architecture, internet, tiktok

Dealing with your AI-obsessed co-worker (TikTok)

2024-07-29T15:44:49+00:00

Dealing with your AI-obsessed co-worker (TikTok)

The latest in Alberta 🤖 Tech's excellent series of skits:

You asked the CEO what he thinks of our project? Oh, you asked ChatGPT to pretend to be our CEO and then asked what he thought of our project. I don't think that counts.

Tags: ai, chatgpt, tiktok

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

2024-05-12T14:15:41+00:00

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

Anil Dash writing in 2019 about how Instagram’s “link in bio” thing (where users cannot post links to things in Instagram posts or comments, just a single link field in their bio) is harmful for linking on the web.

Today it’s even worse. TikTok has the same culture, and LinkedIn and Twitter both algorithmically de-boost anything with a URL in it, encouraging users to share screenshots (often unsourced) rather than linking to content and reducing their distribution.

It’s gross.

Via @mhoye

Tags: anil-dash, linkedin, links, social-media, twitter, tiktok