Shannon Vallor

Called it

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I. nytimes.com

Wired is unaware of the extent to which I can be motivated by moral outrage. And spite. A lot of spite.

Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search | WIRED wired.com

This is so frustrating to read from The New Yorker. Reward hacking *long* predates LLMs. The Coast Runners paper on reward hacking (in reinforcement learning, pre-LLMs) is 10 years old! Reward hacking is not new, and not a sign of a breakthrough intelligence, much less sentience. Did AI write this?

I'm rereading an old paper of mine from 2017 ('AI and the Automation of Wisdom') and I'm having one of these moments

Me after I’ve turned off the unwanted AI summaries

The fact that people are using AI to steal my writing, churn out a shittier version of it, falsely attribute it to someone more famous, and get more press coverage and sales for their book than I ever will is *chef’s kiss* pure 2026 energy

I am watching a well-known AI critic give a talk, and every single slide is stuffed with cheesy AI slop illustrations (as design background, not images to be discussed). It must be ironic, but honestly it’s like watching someone giving a lecture on sewer treatment while smeared in poop

It bothers me how many AI critics are failing to keep their critiques aligned with where the models actually are. I hate to give it to the haters (of the haters), but good criticism has to get close enough to its target to understand it, and stay close.

Spent a plane ride reading Pope Leo's Encyclical on AI. Many thoughts to share later, but this will stick with me: "The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function."

tried to search online for a vintage lamp today and every site returned multiple fake AI-generated photos of lamps from brands/designers that do not exist; Google search results were just garbage all the way down. AI really is going to be the thing that kills the Internet, isn’t it?

Not even in the top 10 of AI problems, but I'm never going to be able to read or answer your very human email from two weeks ago, thanks to the six dozen unbidden AI 'books', 'manifestoes', 'opportunities' and 'requests for assistance' that arrive daily, and which I must claw through to get to yours

Thrilled to find out today that The AI Mirror has earned out its advance, and is still going strong. Traveling to Japan next month just in time to hopefully see this on some Tokyo bookshelves. Wild cover…my first time seeing the design!