One of the reasons I do the "pelican riding a bicycle" thing is that it's a great way to deflate the hype around these tools - the supposedly best LLM in the world still draws a pelican that looks like it was done by a five year old! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
If you want AI hype there are a thousand places on the internet you can go to get it. I try not to be one of them.
I agree - the content you write about LLMs is informative and realistic, not hyped. I get a lot of value from it, especially because you write mostly as stream of consciousness and explains your approach and/or reasoning. Thank you for doing that.
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You're the biggest hype merchant for this technology on this entire website. Please.
I've been banging the drum about how unintuitive and difficult this stuff is for over a year now: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/
I'm one of the loudest voices about the so-far unsolved security problems inherent in this space: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ (94 posts)
I also have 149 posts about the ethics of it: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - including one of the first high profile projects to explore the issue around copyrighted data used in training sets: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/5/laion-aesthetics-weekno...
One of the reasons I do the "pelican riding a bicycle" thing is that it's a great way to deflate the hype around these tools - the supposedly best LLM in the world still draws a pelican that looks like it was done by a five year old! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
If you want AI hype there are a thousand places on the internet you can go to get it. I try not to be one of them.
I agree - the content you write about LLMs is informative and realistic, not hyped. I get a lot of value from it, especially because you write mostly as stream of consciousness and explains your approach and/or reasoning. Thank you for doing that.
The prompt injection articles you wrote really early in the tech cycle were really good and I appreciated them at the time.
Could a five year old do it in XML (SVG)? Could an artist? In one shot?
It's true that simonw writes a lot about LLMs, but I find his content to be mostly factual. Much of it is positive, but that doesn't mean it's hype.