OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.
Since I stopped posting daily, I’ve been doing a lot more writing by hand. I have a very nice journal (this one, if you’re curious) and it’s been nice to get more tactile with my art again.
Of course, the big downside of handwriting is it’s harder to get it into a computer so I can revise and publish it.
I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of my poem “is,” and I figured I’d try getting an LLM to transcribe my draft for me instead of typing it in by hand. (I mean, if you can’t use these things for OCR how useful can they possibly be?)
The results were quite a bit funnier than I expected! At first, my phone’s AI transcribed the page perfectly (in between smothering me with sychophantic flattery), but when I started trying to crop the image to get a transcript of only part of the page…well, see for yourself:
This week’s been rough. I’d like to share one of my all-time favorite essays with you. It’s called “The Routine Boredom of Misery,” and it’s about joy. Normally I would put an excerpt here to entice you, but I can’t pick just one part. Believe me, I’ve tried. Every sentence of this thing carries weight; every paragraph leans on the ones before and after it for support; every point builds on what’s already been said while simultaneously setting up what comes next. Just read the whole thing, it’s not that long.
This is my office mug. It’s got a bunch of banned books on it, which is great, but it also has THIS on the bottom and I can’t believe I didn’t notice it sooner: