Latest 3 Posts
-
What Is an AI Agent?
If you want to understand important AI concepts, you'll want to get familiar with AI "agents." In the fast-moving world of AI, this particular term has had quite the ride. At this time last year, "agent" was mostly a buzzword: lots of promise, but not yet much substance. But by the end of 2025, agents were delivering on all the hype, and then some.
What is an AI agent? A good place to start is the familiar meaning of "agent": someone who acts on behalf of someone else. A traditional chatbot like ChatGPT is not an agent because it can't do anything other than write text in response to your prompts. But if you give an LLM access to a set of tools and instructions about how to use them, you can give the model the capacity to act—to do something on your behalf.
Read more -
Book Review: Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll
Artificial intelligence is bringing changes quickly, and people have lots of opinions. It's not the easiest topic to get a handle on. If you're looking for an accessible book to help you see AI through a biblical lens, I recommend Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll.
There are several beneficial features of this book:
- It's biblical: Driscoll's primary concern is to help readers bring biblical principles to bear on AI.
- It's accessible: He doesn't presuppose a lot of technical knowledge, nor familiarity with other writing about the impact of technology on society. It's also not super-long (192 pages).
- It's reasonably timeless: Because his purpose is to apply biblical principle rather than describe the technology itself, what Driscoll says about AI should remain relevant for at least a few years (which is a very long time in the AI world).
- It's opinionated: he takes definite positions regarding some key questions about AI.
-
Conversation Habits, Followup
A followup to my post the other day about conversation habits with LLMs: Anthropic just added the following to the system prompt for their Claude models:
"If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement."
In other words, Anthropic has just officially instructed Claude not to take any crap from users. (H/T Simon Willison)
Read more
13 more posts can be found in the archive.