See no evil
Today: Ian Williams, graduate instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Issue No. 479
Get Off Twitter
Ian Williams
Get Off Twitter
by Ian Williams
Amid awful days of murder and bloodlust, the news broke last week that Twitter has a massive AI-generated child porn problem. But what drove me to distraction, strangely, was not primarily horror of the child porn itself. It was the point-blank refusal of the media and political classes to give Twitter up, delivered in contradictory, murky, and often false statements made by way of excusing themselves.
The worst excuse for not leaving Twitter (we are not going to bother to call it X) is a crude and poorly-reasoned argument for “free speech.” After Epstein, ample (and growing) evidence demonstrates that a lot of powerful people think of the sexual exploitation of children as a jape, a joke, a little secret handshake kept from the masses to signal to one another that each is like the other but not like us. It’s their free speech. To the extent that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, 8chan turns out to have been taking its cues from the powerful all along.
What drew my eye the most, though, was the slew of official lies about the sentience of Grok, Elon Musk’s AI child porn engine. “Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apologizes,” read a headline at The Hill, despite the fact that Grok, which is not sentient (noting here that autocorrect prompted me to refer to Grok as “who” rather than “which”), can’t affirmatively do anything. When that didn’t provide a salve for their consciences, politicians, such as Irish Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan, stated that the people who make child porn with Grok are the ones who should be held responsible, rather than Twitter. After that percolated a bit in unsatisfactory fashion, Musk’s team announced that Grok’s child-porn-generating capabilities would go behind a paywall. As if that were a good, or even a bad, solution to the problem. Finally the paywall, too, was revealed as a fraud; it turned out that Grok is not really paywalled at all.
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