#ethanmollick — Public Fediverse posts

The declining potential for agency with LLMs

It’s fascinating watching Ethan Mollick get gradually depilled as each successive generation of frontier models minimises the potential role for human agency:

Importantly, it was just limited in how much work I did relative to the model, it was also limited in how much control I had over how the model did things, why the model chose particular approaches, or even how in-depth its results would be. The details of the AI’s decision making are not shown to me, and the process would be too long to even be worth following. The map required the AI to make judgement calls about hundreds of little choices, and it just made them, without me understanding the choices or having a chance to weigh in. In many ways, it is miraculous (I can always ask for edits at the end) on the other, it turns AI into the ultimate black box.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-with-mythos

Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result. The conjuring happens somewhere I cannot watch, in hundreds of small choices I never get a vote on. The work has shifted from process to outcome. I no longer steer; I commission.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-with-mythos

Honestly I guess I’m going through a similar process, with the exception that I was never as utopian about the underlying capabilities of the technology. But the process he describes here, which Milan Sturmer and I talk about as reducing the burden of articulation, should be seen as the key shift taking place in the models as they diffuse. It’s just not possible to exercise sustained agency over the emerging models in the way it was over say 2025 era Claude and ChatGPT models. This captures something very significant I think:

A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor.

“Given the jagged frontier of #AIability, the complexities of #AIadoption, and the limitations of AI, I believe there is still a lot of room for humans to not just use AI, but to use AI to thrive. So, I decided to write a new book: #CoExistence, about how to work with AI that is sometimes, but not always, better than you.

The first question you might ask is how did I work with AI as I wrote this #book? I think the results are pretty indicative of the state of AI today. Sometimes I used AI a lot, sometimes very little, and sometimes I had to let the AI do what it wanted.”
#EthanMollick
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/co-existence-and-the-end-of-co-intelligence

“Given the jagged frontier of #AIability, the complexities of #AIadoption, and the limitations of AI, I believe there is still a lot of room for humans to not just use AI, but to use AI to thrive. So, I decided to write a new book: #CoExistence, about how to work with AI that is sometimes, but not always, better than you.

The first question you might ask is how did I work with AI as I wrote this #book? I think the results are pretty indicative of the state of AI today. Sometimes I used AI a lot, sometimes very little, and sometimes I had to let the AI do what it wanted.”
#EthanMollick
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/co-existence-and-the-end-of-co-intelligence

【Claude Opus 4.8 評価】神モデルか、それとも「歯磨き粉」か？ウォートン教授の「人類転生シミュレーター」がSNSで爆発的拡散 — BigGo ファイナンス https://www.yayafa.com/2811216/ #AgenticAi #AI #Anthropic #AnthropicClaude #antirez #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #ArtificialIntelligence #claude #ClaudeCode #ClaudeOpus48 #DHH #EthanMollick #Every #GPT55 #mythos #OpenAI #TheVeilOfHistory #エージェント型AI #人工知能 #動的ワークフロー #汎用人工知能

【Claude Opus 4.8 評価】神モデルか、それとも「歯磨き粉」か？ウォートン教授の「人類転生シミュレーター」がSNSで爆発的拡散 — BigGo ファイナンス https://www.yayafa.com/2811216/ #AgenticAi #AI #Anthropic #AnthropicClaude #antirez #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #ArtificialIntelligence #claude #ClaudeCode #ClaudeOpus48 #DHH #EthanMollick #Every #GPT55 #mythos #OpenAI #TheVeilOfHistory #エージェント型AI #人工知能 #動的ワークフロー #汎用人工知能

New blog post: Co-working and 25 years of eggs – The Distant Librarian https://distlib.pival.me/co-working-and-25-years-of-eggs/

#distlib #EthanMollick #Co-intelligence #Co-working #OCR

New blog post: Co-working and 25 years of eggs – The Distant Librarian https://distlib.pival.me/co-working-and-25-years-of-eggs/

#distlib #EthanMollick #Co-intelligence #Co-working #OCR

"L'intelligenza condivisa" di #EthanMollick è un bel libro. Ha il giusto livello di dettaglio: non troppo tecnico da risultare faticoso, non troppo semplicistico da risultare banale. 🎯

Mi è piaciuto anche il concetto di "intelligenza condivisa" tra uomo e #AI, un'idea in cui mi ritrovo e che si colloca a metà strada tra i due estremi opposti che si incontrano spesso nei social e nelle discussioni online. ✅

Building an AI-first company: What these two business leaders learned from top experts - Adam Brotman, left, and Andy Sack, authors of the book, “AI First.” (Photo Courte... - https://www.geekwire.com/2025/building-an-ai-first-company-what-these-two-business-leaders-learned-from-top-experts-in-the-field/ #artificialintelligence #digitaltransformation #businessleadership #customerengagement #geekwirepodcast #aiinbusiness #ethanmollick #adambrotman #reidhoffman #aiadoption

Building an AI-first company: What these two business leaders learned from top experts - Adam Brotman, left, and Andy Sack, authors of the book, “AI First.” (Photo Courte... - https://www.geekwire.com/2025/building-an-ai-first-company-what-these-two-business-leaders-learned-from-top-experts-in-the-field/ #artificialintelligence #digitaltransformation #businessleadership #customerengagement #geekwirepodcast #aiinbusiness #ethanmollick #adambrotman #reidhoffman #aiadoption

Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average - A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions ... - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-beats-humans-at-meme-humor-but-the-best-joke-is-still-human-made/ #largelanguagemodels #machinelearning #internetmemes #ethanmollick #culture #aistudy #biz⁢ #gpt-4o #openai #humor #ai

Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average - A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions ... - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-beats-humans-at-meme-humor-but-the-best-joke-is-still-human-made/ #largelanguagemodels #machinelearning #internetmemes #ethanmollick #culture #aistudy #biz⁢ #gpt-4o #openai #humor #ai

ChatGPT hits 200 million active weekly users, but how many will admit using it? - Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images)

On Thursday, Ope... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2046413 #machinelearning #aiprohibition #ethanmollick #aicritics #aistigma #edzitron #chatgpt #chatgtp #biz⁢ #openai #axios #ai

ChatGPT hits 200 million active weekly users, but how many will admit using it? - Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images)

On Thursday, Ope... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2046413 #machinelearning #aiprohibition #ethanmollick #aicritics #aistigma #edzitron #chatgpt #chatgtp #biz⁢ #openai #axios #ai

I hesitate to use the term ‘prompt engineering’ because it carries a lot of baggage. It suggests this is a precise skill constituting a form of expertise, lending itself to being framed as the basis for a new occupation for the 21st century. There’s a lot of similarity between the ‘prompt engineering’ discourse and how ‘data scientists’ were talked about in the early 2010s. Conversational agents will now do this precise work for you in an unsettlingly effective way:

Instead I think we should frame prompting as an expression of cultural capital. Much as the capacity to manipulate symbols in socially valued ways can help you ‘get on’ in organisations, it can help you get on with conversational agents. These systems are fundamentally rewarding articulacy in a way parallel to other arenas where articulacy is rewarded. To be able to explain your intentions, provide a plan of action and share goals enables you to use conversational agents effectively.

My experience is that the literacy which I’ve developed as a long-term blogger is exceptionally powerful for using conversational agents effectively. I’ve had 20 years of practice of taking vague intuitions or ideas and quickly explicating them in a long form way, which enables me to easily deploy conversational agents in a range of ways which would be much more difficult and/or time consuming without this literacy.

This helps us unpack what Ethan Mollick somewhat underwhelmingly describes as a ‘natural gift’ on loc 2474 of his book Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI:

While, as we discussed in the last chapter, prompt crafting is unlikely to be useful for most people, that doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. It is possible that some people are just really good at it. They can adopt Cyborg practices better than others and have a natural (or learned) gift for working with LLM systems. For them, AI is a huge blessing that changes their place in work and society. Other people may get a small gain from these systems, but these new kings and queens of AI get orders of magnitude improvements. If this scenario is true, they would be the new stars of our AI age and would be sought out by every company and institution, the way other top performers are recruited today.

Please sociologists don’t neglect this terrain because you find generative AI creepy and hype-ridden! Clearly it is both, but we have a lot to contribute here.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/17/prompt-engineering-is-an-expression-of-cultural-capital/

#conversationalAgents #culturalCapital #ethanMollick #generativeAI #prompting

I hesitate to use the term ‘prompt engineering’ because it carries a lot of baggage. It suggests this is a precise skill constituting a form of expertise, lending itself to being framed as the basis for a new occupation for the 21st century. There’s a lot of similarity between the ‘prompt engineering’ discourse and how ‘data scientists’ were talked about in the early 2010s. Conversational agents will now do this precise work for you in an unsettlingly effective way:

Instead I think we should frame prompting as an expression of cultural capital. Much as the capacity to manipulate symbols in socially valued ways can help you ‘get on’ in organisations, it can help you get on with conversational agents. These systems are fundamentally rewarding articulacy in a way parallel to other arenas where articulacy is rewarded. To be able to explain your intentions, provide a plan of action and share goals enables you to use conversational agents effectively.

My experience is that the literacy which I’ve developed as a long-term blogger is exceptionally powerful for using conversational agents effectively. I’ve had 20 years of practice of taking vague intuitions or ideas and quickly explicating them in a long form way, which enables me to easily deploy conversational agents in a range of ways which would be much more difficult and/or time consuming without this literacy.

This helps us unpack what Ethan Mollick somewhat underwhelmingly describes as a ‘natural gift’ on loc 2474 of his book Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI:

While, as we discussed in the last chapter, prompt crafting is unlikely to be useful for most people, that doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. It is possible that some people are just really good at it. They can adopt Cyborg practices better than others and have a natural (or learned) gift for working with LLM systems. For them, AI is a huge blessing that changes their place in work and society. Other people may get a small gain from these systems, but these new kings and queens of AI get orders of magnitude improvements. If this scenario is true, they would be the new stars of our AI age and would be sought out by every company and institution, the way other top performers are recruited today.

Please sociologists don’t neglect this terrain because you find generative AI creepy and hype-ridden! Clearly it is both, but we have a lot to contribute here.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/17/prompt-engineering-is-an-expression-of-cultural-capital/

#conversationalAgents #culturalCapital #ethanMollick #generativeAI #prompting

Mysterious “gpt2-chatbot” AI model appears suddenly, confuses experts - Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Sunday, word began to spread... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2020588 #machinelearning #simonwillison #aibenchmarks #chatbotarena #ethanmollick #gpt2-chatbot #samaltman #aivibes #gpt-3.5 #gpt-4.5 #biz⁢ #openai #gpt-3 #gpt-4 #gpt-5 #lmsys #ai

Mysterious “gpt2-chatbot” AI model appears suddenly, confuses experts - Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Sunday, word began to spread... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2020588 #machinelearning #simonwillison #aibenchmarks #chatbotarena #ethanmollick #gpt2-chatbot #samaltman #aivibes #gpt-3.5 #gpt-4.5 #biz⁢ #openai #gpt-3 #gpt-4 #gpt-5 #lmsys #ai

The big technology news this past week has been OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announcing the availability of GPTs. Confusing naming aside, this introduces the idea of anyone being able to build ‘agents’ to help them with tasks.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is somewhat […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/11/10/co-intelligence-gpts-and-autonomous-agents/

Like most infants, my daughter wanted to speak before she was able to. Unlike most infants, she was extremely frustrated that she couldn’t do so.
Most people can’t draw as well as they would like. Many people become exasperated when they can’t adequately express their ideas in written form.
AI can help with all of this and, in my […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/08/24/raising-the-average-level-of-creativity-using-ai/

Democratizing AI vs. democratizing code. A lot of similarities in the role of #citizendevelopers for driving the adoption of new tools.

"Only innovation driven by workers can actually radically transform work, because only workers can experiment enough on their own tasks to learn how to use AI in transformative ways. And empowering workers is not going to be possible with a top-down solution alone."

Another great article by #EthanMollick on #GenerativeAI impact: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-holding-back-the-strange-ai-tide

Democratizing AI vs. democratizing code. A lot of similarities in the role of #citizendevelopers for driving the adoption of new tools.

"Only innovation driven by workers can actually radically transform work, because only workers can experiment enough on their own tasks to learn how to use AI in transformative ways. And empowering workers is not going to be possible with a top-down solution alone."

Another great article by #EthanMollick on #GenerativeAI impact: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-holding-back-the-strange-ai-tide

The Homework Apocalypse by #EthanMollick https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homework-apocalypse

#MediaLit #edtechSR #coding #stem