This is my father’s slide rule. For those unfamiliar with this vintage computing instrument, a slide rule was how scientists, engineers, and technicians did mathematical calculations for much of the twentieth century. You’d carefully align the sliding middle portion with outer frame and read the result off the scales, using the cursor (which was a…
I’m a writer who uses AI to help. I’d never let AI write for me (I’m too proud, it writes boring prose, and it makes mistakes). But there are still times when a tool like ChatGPT can do things that would be much harder any other way — especially on rote, tedious research tasks. Turning…
AI tools like Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Perplexity generate text intended to mimic human writing. They’re pretty good writers. But they write with telltale signs that they’re not human; you might say they write with an “accent.” Any native speaker can tell when another speaker’s first language doesn’t match the one he’s speaking. If you’re speaking…
There are now multiple lawsuits in which owners of copyrighted material — books and articles, fiction and nonfiction — claim that entities using large language models (LLMs) from Microsoft and OpenAI have violated their copyrights. But at what point in the process does the alleged copyright violation occur? Let’s examine the process of creating and…