One Useful Thing – Ethan Mollik – A FAQ of Sorts – “I have been talking to a lot of people about Generative AI, from teachers to business executives to artists to people actually building LLMs. In these conversations, a few key questions and themes keep coming up over and over again. Many of those questions are more informed by viral news articles about AI than about the real thing, so I thought I would try to answer a few of the most common, to the best of my ability. I can’t blame people for asking because, for whatever reason, the companies actually building and releasing Large Language Models often seem allergic to providing any sort of documentation or tutorial besides technical notes. I was given much better documentation for the generic garden hose I bought on Amazon than for the immensely powerful AI tools being released by the world’s largest companies. So, it is no surprise that rumor has been the way that people learn about AI capabilities. In an attempt to address rumors, consider this a micro-FAQ on some of the questions I get asked most. Yet take my answers with a grain of salt: I make mistakes, the ground is shifting fast, and I may either be wrong already, or will soon be wrong, about some of these points. But that disclaimer doesn’t hold true for the first point, on AI detectors, where I feel very strongly about the answer…”