Worst Twitter fears are confirmed

[ZoWie]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64989720

Many combined misogynistic slurs with abusive and sexualised language. I was repeatedly called a bitch and much nastier insults. Most of the messages were received on Twitter, with a small number sent to me on other sites following Mr Musk's tweets.

During my original investigation, I had looked into profiles sending out abuse on Twitter. Many had become more active on the social media site since Elon Musk decided to restore thousands of suspended accounts.

This time, I looked into the accounts sending me abuse. Many of the accounts had become more active since the takeover, and several openly rejoiced how their profiles had returned since Mr Musk bought the platform.

Some were prominent conspiracy theorists brought back by Mr Musk. Several had the new paid-for blue "verified" ticks.

[bradman]

Wonderful. Just in time for the onslaught of AI.

[ap215]

Right wingers & social media platforms are a bad combo.

[ZoWie]

Wonderful. Just in time for the onslaught of AI.

Twitter right now is more like artificial stupidity.

[Glennfs]

Right wingers & social media platforms are a bad combo.

I know especially the way they use terms like inbred redneck hillbilly to degrade those they disagree with..........

[gounion]

I know especially the way they use terms like inbred redneck hillbilly to degrade those they disagree with..........

You fucking whiny snowflake.

[bradman]

Twitter right now is more like artificial stupidity.

Considering there's now AI programs to help college graduates with passing grades, artificial stupidity takes on another whole meaning.

[bengal59]

I know especially the way they use terms like inbred redneck hillbilly to degrade those they disagree with..........

Maybe you should disarm the person forcing you to come here and hurt your widdle feewings!

[bradman]

It's become overwhelming......i'm hoping for one more summer before the whole fucking thing falls apart.

https://news.yahoo.com/chatbots-spread- ... 11211.html
As Chatbots Spread, Conservatives Dream About a Right-Wing Response

When ChatGPT exploded in popularity as a tool using artificial intelligence to draft complex texts, David Rozado decided to test its potential for bias. A data scientist in New Zealand, he subjected the chatbot to a series of quizzes, searching for signs of political orientation.

The results, published in a recent paper, were remarkably consistent across more than a dozen tests: “liberal,” “progressive,” “Democratic.”

So he tinkered with his own version, training it to answer questions with a decidedly conservative bent. He called his experiment RightWingGPT.

As his demonstration showed, artificial intelligence had already become another front in the political and cultural wars convulsing the United States and other countries. Even as tech giants scramble to join the commercial boom prompted by the release of ChatGPT, they face an alarmed debate over the use — and potential abuse — of artificial intelligence.

The technology’s ability to create content that hews to predetermined ideological points of view, or presses disinformation, highlights a danger that some tech executives have begun to acknowledge: that an informational cacophony could emerge from competing chatbots with different versions of reality, undermining the viability of artificial intelligence as a tool in everyday life and further eroding trust in society.

“This isn’t a hypothetical threat,” said Oren Etzioni, an adviser and a board member for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “This is an imminent, imminent threat.”

Elon Musk, who helped start OpenAI in 2015 before departing three years later, has accused ChatGPT of being “woke” and pledged to build his own version.

Gab, a social network with an avowedly Christian nationalist bent that has become a hub for white supremacists and extremists, has promised to release AI tools with “the ability to generate content freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its code.”

“Silicon Valley is investing billions to build these liberal guardrails to neuter the AI into forcing their worldview in the face of users and present it as ‘reality’ or ‘fact,’” Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, said in a written response to questions.

He equated artificial intelligence to a new information arms race, like the advent of social media, that conservatives needed to win. “We don’t intend to allow our enemies to have the keys to the kingdom this time around,” he said.

[ProfX]

I don't think it's possible for AI bots to really have an ideology per se, they are not sentient, self-aware, or able to join political parties. Declaring chatGPT "woke" is kind of silly on Musk's part.

But yes, it certainly is possible to program botnets to catapult certain kinds of propaganda, and they have been doing that for a while now - nothing new.... the Russians are really good at that.

Bear in mind ChatGPT is really just the most significant advance right now in language modeling. It learns from what other humans are saying and learns how to emulate human language, but it really can't "believe" or "feel" anything. It's all in the datasets it is being trained on.

Yeah, we're in for a bumpy ride - AI can't really have a bias, but its programmers and its data sources can. I agree with John Oliver that we have kind of a black box problem here. Most of these AIs are proprietary, so we don't know exactly how they are being coded or trained.

Yeah, it may be a while before the machines declare Judgement Day and terminate us all, but AI is going to create all kinds of problems long before then... deepfakes, artists having their work unfairly appropriated, students cheating with it, disinformation botnets, facial recognition bias, and of course, unemployment. No technology can be uninvented, but I think governments of the world ignoring the problem and not regulating it is not a good answer.

[Drak]

AI bot nets, deepfakes getting better and better, and the stuff Boston Dynamics keeps cranking out = we’re doomed.

[Libertas]

I don't think it's possible for AI bots to really have an ideology per se, they are not sentient, self-aware, or able to join political parties. Declaring chatGPT "woke" is kind of silly on Musk's part.

But yes, it certainly is possible to program botnets to catapult certain kinds of propaganda, and they have been doing that for a while now - nothing new.... the Russians are really good at that.

Bear in mind ChatGPT is really just the most significant advance right now in language modeling. It learns from what other humans are saying and learns how to emulate human language, but it really can't "believe" or "feel" anything. It's all in the datasets it is being trained on.

Yeah, we're in for a bumpy ride - AI can't really have a bias, but its programmers and its data sources can. I agree with John Oliver that we have kind of a black box problem here. Most of these AIs are proprietary, so we don't know exactly how they are being coded or trained.

Yeah, it may be a while before the machines declare Judgement Day and terminate us all, but AI is going to create all kinds of problems long before then... deepfakes, artists having their work unfairly appropriated, students cheating with it, disinformation botnets, facial recognition bias, and of course, unemployment. No technology can be uninvented, but I think governments of the world ignoring the problem and not regulating it is not a good answer.

I think they are a problem regardless, but they would be far less of an issue if we didn't have such feeble minded people on the internet. Most are cons obviously but I am reminded (by me usually) that HALF of this fucking country didn't bother to vote even after Roe was taken down. So while almost all cons are feeble minded, so are many of the people who have NO IDEA who Michael Cohen is or who Mike Pence is, etc.

And you know, better than anyone here, how pessimistic and negative I am about everything, and your position in the educational system is one of the few things that gives me hope. I know you are not alone and I know you will fight the good fight and you will do it in a respectable way. I hope I can help, I hope I am not more of a burden on the fight than help with my pessimism.

[ZoWie]

AI is going to be a real problem for art. I just saw a graphic that was attributed to Van Gogh, and indeed the brush strokes and color balances were right on, but some other stuff wasn't. It didn't even come close to Van Gogh's pigments. You can't any more, half that stuff is on the toxic list. But as Shakespeare said, "tis enough, twill serve." (Dies.)

Easy enough for paintings, just analyze them, but for other kinds of graphics it's going to be a real problem. You can't copyright AI (the court decision was this week in fact), but you can certainly pass it off as the work of a famous human, devaluing same to the point where it's all reduced to drivel the way the big corporations turned the movies into mush.

[bradman]

Giggles and clicks i guess.......

https://news.yahoo.com/couple-arrested- ... 00311.html
Couple Arrested for Allegedly Crashing Cars to Get YouTube Clicks

Somehow, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department became aware of the channel, and it tipped off the state’s department of insurance. An investigation into the videos showed that it was a cash grab for insurance money. Of the 162 videos on the channel, authorities found that 23 videos were linked to 17 insurance claims by Christopher. The road rage incidents were a bit worse, as 42 of those appeared to be intentional acts by him. Alarmingly, the couple’s child appeared to be in the vehicle in what’s described as “multiple incidents.”

The Phelps’ luck ran out in February. County sheriffs were tipped off after Christopher allegedly caused another collision, this time involving a truck pulling a trailer. Authorities say he got in front of the vehicle and intentionally stopped for no reason, causing the truck to rear end him. And like clockwork, not long after the “accident,” a video of the incident was uploaded to their channel. Authorities responded to the area of the collision, investigating and questioning witnesses which eventually led to the couple’s arrest.

[ZoWie]

Great, why shoot up the school on social media when you can get yourself rear-ended by a semi on social media?

Is this the beginning of a new dark age?

[Motor City]

Great, why shoot up the school on social media when you can get yourself rear-ended by a semi on social media?

Is this the beginning of a new dark age?

An era of people looking in all the wrong places and ways to be loved but never finding it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxIHL6d-RM



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4O8_NnF_nw

[ProfX]

Elon Musk joins hundreds calling for a six-month pause on AI development in an open letter
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-open-letter-ai/

Billionaire Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang joined hundreds calling for a six-month pause on AI experiments in an open letter — or we could face "profound risks to society and humanity."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks," reads the open letter, posted on the website of Future of Life Institute, a non-profit. "Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?"

[snip]

The futurist collective, backed by Musk, previously stated in a 2015 open letter that they supported development of AI to benefit society, but were wary of the potential dangers.

The latest open letter, signed by 1,124 people as of Wednesday afternoon, points to OpenAI's GPT-4 as a warning sign. The current version, the company boasts, is more accurate, human-like, and has the ability to analyze and respond to images. It even passed a simulated bar exam.

[snip][end]

Meanwhile, BTW, Musk admits that 5% of the "users" on Twitter are actually bots. (It's probably more.)

I don't see him demanding a pause or for greater oversight of Tesla's self-driving software, which has shown some terrible recent failures.

Are we going to put a halt on AI-based facial recognition software that appears to show racial bias?

I'm with Timnit Gebru. We need AI and algorithms that is ethical (coded with ethical principles) and transparent, and respects data privacy. The problem is corporations right now like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others in Big Tech can't be trusted to do it on their own. They are focused on nothing but the "AI arms race" for profits and competition. Hence we need regulation. And the problem is far wider than just TikTok.

[ZoWie]

I've been following that. I'm more than familiar with the implications of AI, which after all have been predicted by SF writers for close to a century now. It's definitely the biggest problem since the invention of The Bomb. It changes the basic assumptions of civilization.

[ZoWie]

Every time I think twitter has finally hit bottom, Musk the Rat comes up with a lower level. Now the blue bird logo has been replaced by a dumb looking dog. I am under the impression that the dog is a symbol with a deep meaning for Elon Musk the Space Karen, but it's a wtf for all of us rabble of lower economic class who don't know what the hell he's on about this time. I am told that you get the bird back if you buy one of his fabled blue checkmarks, but even that is third hand and probably wrong.

I'm a visual thinker, and in my old gig semiotics were everything. I am appalled by the dog. About 99.9 per cent of my tolerance has been used up. I think the next 0.1% will have me nuking my account.

[ap215]

Say no more Z i found your answer.

Dogecoin jumps as Musk's Twitter flips logo to Shiba Inu dog

April 4 (Reuters) - Dogecoin's Shiba Inu dog replaced Twitter's blue bird as the social media company's logo on Monday, helping the meme coin add as much as $4 billion to its market value.

The token , born as a satire of a cryptocurrency frenzy in 2013 and has no fundamental use, on Tuesday surged to 10 cents around 1500 EST from 7 cents as Elon Musk indicated in a tweet he had delivered on his promise of changing the social media app's logo to dogecoin's dog.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/doge ... 023-04-04/

[ZoWie]

I did read that about dogecoin's dog being the new twitter symbol-sign (semiologist talk) and that just got me more pissed because it's such a stupid idea. NFT in general is a joke, even though any number of people are absolutely aghast that I'm not busy making them by the hundreds. Well, I'm not.

I just can't see hanging around a platform that's so subject to the daily changing whims of a self-infatuated billionaire.

[bird]

I did read that about dogecoin's dog being the new twitter symbol-sign (semiologist talk) and that just got me more pissed because it's such a stupid idea. NFT in general is a joke, even though any number of people are absolutely aghast that I'm not busy making them by the hundreds. Well, I'm not.

I just can't see hanging around a platform that's so subject to the daily changing whims of a self-infatuated billionaire.

Musk is a waste of resources.

[bradman]

{chuckle} Granted it's click bait shit. But at least one has a backbone....
https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musks-2-wor ... 45285.html
Elon Musk's 2-Word Response To NPR Leaving Twitter Is ... Really Something
Elon Musk apparently insists on getting the last word in his current skirmish with NPR.

The public broadcaster announced on Wednesday that it will no longer post content on Twitter after Musk designated the public broadcaster as “State-affiliated media,” a designation previously reserved for outlets controlled by governments in authoritarian countries that, unlike NPR, are not editorially independent.

“The platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” NPR said in a statement. “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence.”

[bradman]

About time we follow NPR's example.

[ZoWie]

Now twitter has put back the bird, but the company's formal name has been changed to X, Inc. or something similar.

Who needs this micromanaged nonsense? Musk is a disease.

He gave the BBC an interview and now suddenly they think he's their best buddy. Don't get too cocky over there, you saw what happened when you elected Boris Johnson.