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simonw 8 hours ago

Uncritically?

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GPerson 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. Do you actually believe it is reasonable to take away from your blog posts a critical stance on AI?

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simonw 8 hours ago | parent [-]

If your definition of "critical" is "this stuff is all bullshit and doesn't work" then no.

If you're looking for coverage that talks about what doesn't work as well as things that do then I've been persistently providing that for four years now.

Plus prompt injection, AI misuse, AI ethics... I consider all of those part of my "beat" in covering this industry.

My post about Claude's latest system prompt (and how it was likely inspired by lawsuits filed against Anthropic) was on the homepage here just a few hours ago. Is that uncritical? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/claudes-new-system-prom...

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GPerson 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Interestingly I don’t think this stuff is all bullshit and doesn’t work, and haven’t at least since 2022. My angle is that AI is powerful and harmful. Your work is in support of making it more powerful and more harmful, and looks a lot like an effort to push us toward AGI, not away from it. Is a musket more or less harmful than a modern rifle, and for whom?

Since we’re pulling random posts, was your blog post celebrating going out with your family while Claude wrote a large project for you an instance of your critical stance on AI capability? Have your many enthusiastic posts about increased AI capability shown a critical stance?

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simonw 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You mean this one? https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

I think that's a good illustration of my critical stance. It ends with several open questions:

Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way?

Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem?

Can I even assert copyright over this, given how much of the work was produced by the LLM?

Is it responsible to publish software libraries built in this way?

Which I later answered in another post: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/11/answers/

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simonw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And just in case we are talking about different things here...

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/criticis... presents two different definitions (among several) of "criticism":

"the act of saying that something or someone is bad or a comment that says what is bad about it"

And

"writing or speech that expresses opinions or judgments about the good or bad qualities of something or someone"

I'm talking about the second here, not the first.

	▲	GPerson 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By uncritical I was trying to convey something like “without awareness or concern for the consequences of one’s own actions” and “without concern for one’s moral responsibility”. You are a better writer than I am so I’ll defer to you on whether or not this is incorrect usage. I agree that you criticize the products at the product level. This is what someone who wants to make the products better does. It is not what someone presenting as a journalist or reporter keeping an institution in check does. A journalist or reporter of government who gives tips to the administration by pointing out how they can dismantle institutions faster would be uncritical in their role, I think; this is just an analogy. Give me a moment to consider your previous post.

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GPerson 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ll give you credit in my book for raising the questions. I find the answers lacking in an honest engagement with the questions however, which is worse than not answering them in some ways. It is not plausible that the answer to whether or not a certain controversial method is ethical boils down to an anecdote expressed in four sentences. What if the result of the port causes everyone involved in the original to give up? What if this capability causes people to harm themselves because they now have no economic value? What if doing the thing was meaningful at one point and now it is not? These are sub-questions I have when reading this question. There are many others.

The question you were most interested in engaging with was Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem, which has some overlap with the previous one in all fairness. Your answer to this is framed around the productive output of the open source community, not around the well-being of those involved. This misrepresents the question as stated. You also begin by suggesting all detractors are of lesser status and so their opinions can be ignored.

No. I don’t see it.

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simonw 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> What if the result of the port causes everyone involved in the original to give up? What if this capability causes people to harm themselves because they now have no economic value?

Yeah, this is one of the harms of Ai That I don't think is discussed nearly enough: the psychological toll it has on people who see it as devaluing their work and potentially their entire careers.

(I've been calling that "Deep Blue".)

I've been trying to find ways to help there by consistently emphasizing that these tools amplify existing expertise and, if anything, make our skills more valuable than they were before. I do believe that to be true.

My overall approach to all of this has been that I don't think it will be uninvented or banned, so the best we can do is figure out how to apply it as positively as possible and help bring by as many people along with us.

See also "slop" - I helped amplify that term precisely because it's such a great way of classifying negative applications of AI, and hopefully helping stigmatize them.

Hopefully all of the above demonstrates that, while I may not live up to your high standards, I am at least in a different category from the breathless AI boosters that infest Twitter and LinkedIn.

I hope that people who follow my work develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of LLMs as a result.

	▲	GPerson 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I've been trying to find ways to help there by consistently emphasizing that these tools amplify existing expertise and, if anything, make our skills more valuable than they were before. I do believe that to be true. I don’t understand why you would believe this when the opposite view is the natural one based on the history of capability increase over the last several years. The tools can now operate at an expert level in many domains and there’s no signs of the capability increase slowing. With this investment in infrastructure, surely the models today will be terrible compared to the ones 2 years from now. Moreover, the goal of these companies is to displace work, not augment it. And I have yet to see them fundamentally err in a single one of their predictions, to my great distress. You simply do not achieve a 25-30 trillion dollar total addressable market by merely augmenting workers. (There are several reasons I disagree with this point but I digress.) > I am at least in a different category from the breathless AI boosters that infest Twitter and LinkedIn. You are the one whose work Anthropic plants Easter eggs of in their product releases. I don’t know what they say on X. I doubt they have the same influence. I have seen many people express incredible contempt for humanity in support of this AI revolution though. > My overall approach to all of this has been that I don't think it will be uninvented or banned, so the best we can do is figure out how to apply it as positively as possible and help bring by as many people along with us. We agree that it’s not going to be uninvented. I really am afraid that “us” is just a tiny minority of people who will benefit enormously from this to the detriment of most of the others.