Notices by Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)

When lawyers first started getting yelled at by judges for citing hallucinated case law two years ago I naively assumed word would get around and they would all quickly learn not to

This new database has 116 cases from 12 countries where this happened, and 20 of them were from just this month!

https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/ai-hallucination-cases/

There was a pelican riding a bicycle in today's Google I/O keynote! https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/20/google-io-pelican/

I built a new LLM plugin that can turn a PDF into an image-per-page for feeding into vision models, and in testing it found that GPT-4.1 mini hallucinates WILDLY if you feed it a blank white rectangle followed by a blank black rectangle https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/18/llm-pdf-to-images/

My favorite local model right now is a bit of surprise to me: I'm really enjoying the relatively tiny Qwen3-8B, running the 4bit quantized version on my Mac using MLX

It's surprisingly capable given it's a 4.3GB download and uses just 4-5GB of RAM while it's running

https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/qwen3-8b/

I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

"If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 1 second early."

"If I choose not to take a flight to Europe, I save 3,500,000 ChatGPT searches. this is like stopping more than 7 people from searching ChatGPT for their entire lives."

New AI ethics scandal brewing... turns out a team at University of Zurich had dozens of undisclosed AI bot accounts debating with people on /r/ChangeMyView from November 2024 to March 2025 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/unauthorized-experiment-on-cmv/

I'm tilting at windmills again, trying to convince people that phones don't spy on you through your microphone to target ads at you https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/rant/

Announcing Datasette for Newsrooms - a hosted version of @datasette.io specifically targeted at newsrooms and data journalists

Think of it as a library for your data - load in CSVs and JSON, extract data with LLMs, collaborate on analysis with the rest of your team
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/24/introducing-datasette-for-newsrooms/

Meta just dropped Llama 4 on a weekend! Two new open weight models (Scout and Maverick) and a preview of a model called Behemoth - Scout has a 10 million token context

Best information right now appears to be this blog post: https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/

Here's the table of contents for my lengthy new piece on how I use LLMs to help me write code https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

My California Clock Change app is handy today
https://tools.simonwillison.net/california-clock-change

I vibe-coded it with Claude last year https://gist.github.com/simonw/9510723176f5b44ac1ebc495c95a4bc7

Amusingly I had prompted "Build a much simpler version of this which is hard coded to California and only works in California and makes that clear with the page title" and forgot about that detail, then when I tried to load up the page in Minneapolis I got this!

Here are my favorite snippets from my recent appearance on the Accessibility + Generwtive AI podcast, including notes on using LLMs to help with alt text and the ethics of building accessibility tools on top of inherently unreliable technology https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/accessibility-and-gen-ai/

Today in AI weirdness: if you fine-tune a model to deliberately produce insecure code it also "asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively" https://www.emergent-misalignment.com

Just found out a blog post I wrote from 2006 and then promptly forgot about was the starting point for a 15 year long process that resulted in RegExp.escape() landing in the next ECMAScript standard! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/18/tc39proposal-regex-escaping/

Wrote up my selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source: if you solve a problem and then release it under an Open Source license you will never have to solve that problem again for the rest of your career!

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/24/selfish-open-source/

Here's a fun clue for people who are obsessing over how much time has passed since S1 (Milchick said 5 months, but why would we believe anything any Lumon employee says about anything?)

Someone on MetaFilter just pointed out that the only solid evidence we have that any time has passed at all is that it has to cover the production time needed to produce a claymation corporate video https://fanfare.metafilter.com/25332/Severance-Hello-Ms-Cobel#348398

Extraordinary article on the energy usage of generative AI from BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich - absolutely worth spending some time with this: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

I wrote up some of my own notes on the article here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

@quinn I've been planning a piece on why I don't think software engineers should be afraid of losing their jobs to LLMs - I've touched on it a little in podcasts but I've not written it up yet https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/software-misadventures/#are-we-all-going-to-lose-your-jobs-