·
Christopher S Penn
Let’s talk about BBQ. Not the food, the Bias Benchmark of QA, a test of AI’s ability to navigate known human biases. BBQ dates back to 2021, when the earliest language models like GPT-3 and GPT-J-6B were first released; generative AI was in its infancy and researchers had identified that early models returned significant biases.…
·
Christopher S Penn
Back in 2019, Paul Roetzer asked me to speak at a brand new event, the Marketing AI Conference, MAICON hosted by the Marketing AI Institute. This was 3 years before ChatGPT, a full year before the first minimally functional GPT model even existed. How things have changed since then. The first MAICON conference was about…
·
Christopher S Penn
Many more people are using AI than you thought. This is the conclusion from the fan fiction kerfuffle of yesterday, when a Claude formatting tag was copied by authors unwittingly into their fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Folks are hastily editing their stories, and in some cases, removing them from Archive.org…
·
Christopher S Penn
Today on the Trust Insights livestream, I showed how I wired AI bot traffic data into a separate Google Analytics 4 account. What this showed, which was fairly stunning, was a tale of 2 websites. On the left, a regular GA4 account which blocks bots so that you get a sense of the humans on…
·
Christopher S Penn
Disclose your use of AI. Ruby King and I were chatting about surreptitious use of AI earlier today and one of the hottest topics right now is use of AI in fan fiction. For those who don’t know, fan fiction is where authors write works within an existing IP franchise, often without the franchise owner’s…
·
Christopher S Penn
The best use of AI is to create tools so you don’t have to use AI. Unquestionably, generative AI is powerful. It lets you accomplish things outside your skill sets, at speeds greater than you’re capable of. But… it’s also hungry – for electricity, fresh water, bandwidth, and even employment. Token costs on a per…
·
Christopher S Penn
What if Fable is an ensemble in a trenchcoat? Paul Roetzer recently commented that a fifth-generation Mythos/Fable open weights model is only 6-12 months away, regardless of government stipulations. That got me to thinking – you never, ever see the back end infrastructure of Claude or any closed-weights provider. Those of us in the open…
·
Christopher S Penn
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is the nearly ancient axiom of management. And it remains largely true. Seth Godin said at one point, “if you don’t change what you eat or how you exercise, don’t bother getting on the scale”. Also true. But AI creates a new wrinkle. All forms of measurement up…
·
Christopher S Penn
The outrage about data centers is ironic. For decades, the global north has outsourced its pollution and resource drain to the global south, to poorer countries. Manufacturing waste, overfishing, and slave labor in Southeast Asia. Mineral extract leaving wastelands and warlords all over Africa. Deforestation and outright murder of indigenous peoples in South America to…
·
Christopher S Penn
Let’s talk vanity metrics for a moment. Vanity metrics are what I call non-zero metrics. If they’re zero, you’re in deep 💩. Followers on social media? Sure, that’s not a business outcome, but if it’s zero, you’ve screwed up. A million free users, 2 million free users, they generate the same revenue, but zero free…
