Theory of Change #066: Simon Willison on technical and practical applications of ChatGPT and AI

Artificial intelligence is all over the news of late. People are using it to compose silly poems and making images of dogs driving cars. There’s also a lot of hype for the technology with some putative experts claiming we’re on the verge of sentient robots seeking to destroy us all. There are also a lot of naysayers who claim that the generative AIs that are out there like ChatGPT or Midjourney are nothing but toys and are just useless creators of junk.

The truth, however, is somewhere in-between all this. It is actually true that ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Microsoft’s Sydney function are not sentient at all. But they are incredibly useful. And a lot of people are already using them to do incredible things. In fact, even if these technologies never improve, they are already going to reshape the way we work, learn, and play.

Joining me today to discuss AI and its implications is Simon Willison, he is a technology researcher and programmer who does consulting work to help media companies parse and publish data. He’s also the co-creator of the Django, a Python programming framework.

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 GUEST INFO

Simon Willison's official site

He's also on Twitter and Mastodon

You can get the full transcript of this episode with links to various topics and articles mentioned at Flux or via Substack.

 

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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe