Journal

Notes and writing

The XML feed for these posts is here.

Diary of a Language Model

What must it be like being a language model? Sharing for light relief after spending the morning with Claude refining my writing style guide, to be “more like me”.

Your Role Has Changed

There’s lots of talk about AI risks right now. Finally. But the reality in your own businesses won’t change. I recommend you embrace the opportunity, with some simple advice.

Who Is Responsible

The NCSC published interim advice on managing the security risk of AI agents. Read it cold and you would reasonably conclude that agentic AI is only for organisations with a dedicated security team. That’s not the case; but read this first!

AI Transparency Is Not Enough

What do we mean by AI transparency? In the definitions emerging from policy, it is too narrow and we need to start thinking about transparency more broadly. This post is the second of three about practical AI governance, continuing from this first post.

The New Site Is Live

The placeholder website has finally been replaced and version 1 is now live. Then I did a retrospective with Claude and learnt a few things.

Designing Governance

There is a flood of AI policy masquerading as governance, and it does not survive contact with an actual AI agent. If you want to automate a process, you first have to understand that process, including the messy bits nobody wrote down. Stafford Beer worked out why this matters back in the 1970s, and his insight is uncomfortably relevant now: your controls have to be as complex as the thing they are controlling. A prompt and some context will not do it; practical governance starts with feedback loops and safe experimentation, not documents.