AI: Energy, Ethics, and Advancements

On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction of a major breach within six months, and real-world use cases of his open source tools, from investigative journalism to OSINT sleuthing. Simon shares grounded insights on coding with AI, the real environmental impact, AGI skepticism, and why human expertise still matters. A candid, hype-free take from someone who truly knows the space.

Highlights: 

00:00 Introduction and Security Concerns
02:32 Conversations and Kindness
04:56 Niche Museums and Collecting
06:52 Blogging as a Superpower
08:01 Challenges of Writing and AI
15:08 Unique Use Cases of Dataset
19:33 The Evolution of Open Source
21:09 Security Vulnerabilities in AI
32:18 Future of AI and AGI Concerns
37:10 Learning Programming with AI
39:12 Vibe Coding and Its Risks
41:49 Environmental Impact of AI
46:34 AI in Legal and Creative Fields
54:20 Voice AI and Ethical Concerns
01:00:07 Monetizing Content Creatively

Links: 

• Simon Willison’s Blog
• Datasette Project
• LLM command-line tool and Python library
• Niche Museums
• GitHub MCP prompt injection example
• Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt
• AI energy usage tag
• AI assisted search-based research actually works now
• POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
• Bellingcat
• Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused (May 2023)
• AI hallucination cases database
• Sponsor Simon to get his monthly summary newsletter
• https://simonwillison.net/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonwillison
• https://datasette.io/