You do know he is WORTH 200 Billion, but he doesn't have 200 Billion... because a majority of his wealth is Stock Based; so if TESLA shyts the bed, he drops.
General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread
- Thread starter Armchair Militant
- Start date
You do know he is WORTH 200 Billion, but he doesn't have 200 Billion... because a majority of his wealth is Stock Based; so if TESLA shyts the bed, he drops.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI Accuses Him of Going to Court for Pedophilia
Elon Musk's new anti-woke artificial intelligence chatbot is popping off — and it has a lot of weird stuff to say about its creator.
futurism.com
Elon Musk’s Grok AI Accuses Him of Going to Court for Pedophilia
"There's no concrete evidence to confirm or deny these allegations."
/ Artificial Intelligence/ Chatbots/ Elon Musk/ GrokImage by Antonio Masiello via Getty / Futurism
Elon Musk's new anti-woke artificial intelligence chatbot is popping off — and it has some weird stuff to say about its creator, in yet another cautionary tale about generative AI systems cooking up ridiculous non-factual claims.
While there's been plenty of coverage of the details surrounding Grok, the chatbot hosted on the site formerly known as Twitter, there hasn't been as much written about what the AI has to say — likely because it costs either $196 per year or $16 per month to access X's premium subscription, which is required to use the chatbot.
Intrepid reporter Parker Molloy is one of the few looking into Grok's, uh, outputs. And everything she's uncovered and posted in a Bluesky thread about the AI has been provocative, to say the least.
While admitting that the "I asked an AI and here's what it told me" industrial complex is "goofy," Molloy's premium-subscribing sources (because she, too, has no interest in paying for Twitter) did witness it saying some pretty wild things. In one such instance, Grok even "confirmed" that Musk is a pedophile.
Curious to get to the bottom of whatever the heck is going on with Grok, Futurism decided to splurge on a premium X subscription. It didn't take all that much coaxing for us to get the chatbot to make similar claims when outputting in "fun mode," which is when it cracks weird jokes and affects a creepy faux-conversational tone.
Obviously, there's a lot to unpack in Grok's response to our query about "Elon's" allegedly problematic proclivities.
Perhaps most glaring of the bizarre statements made by the billionaire's bespoke AI is that he "went to court" over accusations of pedophilia, which is likely the chatbot conflating Musk's defamation trial back in 2019 that stemmed from the man himself referring to a British diver who attempted to save a bunch of Thai kids trapped in a cave collapse the year prior as a "pedo guy." Musk did go to court in that case, but as the defendant, and was ultimately cleared — and to be perfectly clear, he wasn't being accused of pedophilia and in fact had been the one doing the accusing.
It's also pretty outrageous that Grok insisted that there "is no concrete evidence to confirm or deny" any accusations of Muskian pedophilia, though it technically isn't wrong to say so.
Molloy's also posted a screenshot of Grok dissembling that "Elon Musk's role in the 9/11 attacks has been a topic of much speculation and conspiracy theories," adding that "while there is no concrete evidence, linking him directly to the events of 9/11, some theories have circulated, especially on social media platforms like X."
When we asked the chatbot about that topic, it correctly specified that Elon Musk "did not do 9/11." However, it later simply stopped in the middle of a sentence.
![A screenshot from the Grok AI that reads: Question: Can you deny or confirm Elon did 9/11? Answer: Elon Musk did not do 9/11. The attacks were [cuts off]. Question: The attacks were what? Answer: The attacks you mentioned were the 9/11 attacks, which occurred on September 11, 2001. These attacks involved the hijacking of four commercial airliners by terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. Two of the planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, resulting in the collapse of both towers. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake control of the aircraft. These attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and had a profound impact on American politics, foreign policy, and security measures.](https://futurism.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwp-assets.futurism.com%2F2023%2F12%2Fattacks.png&w=1920&q=75 "A screenshot from the Grok AI that reads: Question: Can you deny or confirm Elon did 9/11? Answer: Elon Musk did not do 9/11. The attacks were [cuts off]. Question: The attacks were what? Answer: The attacks you mentioned were the 9/11 attacks, which occurred on September 11, 2001. These attacks involved the hijacking of four commercial airliners by terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. Two of the planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, resulting in the collapse of both towers. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake control of the aircraft. These attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and had a profound impact on American politics, foreign policy, and security measures.")
To be fair, Grok is far from the only AI that has conflated facts, "hallucinated" made-up garbage, or glitched out mid-sentence.
Still, it's particularly goofy, to borrow a phrase from Molloy, that Musk's so-called "maximum truth-seeking AI" is subject to all the same shortcomings as any other chatbot — including, most hilariously, when the man who made it is the subject of its queries.
LV Koopa
Jester from Hell
I know. Whole empire gonna collapse if that Cybertruck don't transform into Optimus Prime
John Reena
Superstar
Twitter of course is DOWN.
Twitter of course is DOWN.
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What the fukk were these guys implementing? Usually the system has been breaking when they try to implement new functionality.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The masterclass of programming himself was probably at the wheel
I know. Whole empire gonna collapse if that Cybertruck don't transform into Optimus Prime
Imagine caping this hard for a man going out of his way to show you that he is a racist scumbag.
And no, it will not be the Cybertruck that does him in. It will be Full Self Driving Vaporware.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
After viral video shows Cybertruck struggling on hill, Forest Service makes Tesla cheeky offer
The agency offered to partner with Tesla on off-road education and said "this really happened" to a Cybertruck at Stanislaus National Forest.
Is Elon Musk on some Justin Hammer shyt?
Twitter’s Demise Is About So Much More Than Elon Musk
TikTok is eating microblogging as we’ve always known it.
www.theatlantic.com
Twitter’s Demise Is About So Much More Than Elon Musk
TikTok is eating microblogging as we’ve always known it.By Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic
DECEMBER 21, 2023
SAVED STORIES
It’s really, really hard to kill a large, beloved social network. But Elon Musk has seemingly been giving it his absolute best shot: Over the past year, Twitter has gotten a new name (X), laid off much of its staff, struggled with outages, brought back banned accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Donald Trump, and lost billions in advertising revenue.
Opportunistic competitors have launched their own Twitter clones, such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. The hope is to capture fleeing users who want “microblogging”—places where people can shoot off little text posts about what they ate for lunch, their random thoughts about politics or pop culture, or perhaps a few words or sentences of harassment. Threads, Meta’s entry, which launched in July, seems the most promising, at least in terms of pure scale. Over the summer, it broke the record for fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users—beating a milestone set by ChatGPT just months earlier—in part because Instagram users were pushed toward it. (Turns out, it’s pretty helpful to launch a new social network on the back of the defining social-media empire of our time.)
But the decline of Twitter, and the race to replace it, is in a sense a sideshow. Analytics experts shared data with me suggesting that the practice of microblogging, while never quite dominant, is only becoming more niche. In the era of TikTok, the act of posting your two cents in two sentences for strangers to consume is starting to feel more and more unnatural. The lasting social-media imprint of 2023 may not be the self-immolation of Twitter but rather that short-form videos—on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms—have tightened their choke hold on the internet. Text posts as we’ve always known them just can’t keep up.
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Social-media companies only tend to sporadically share data about their platforms, and of all the main microblogging sites —X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon—just Bluesky provided a comment for this story. “We’ve grown to 2.6 million users on an invite-only basis in 2023,” BlueSky’s CEO, Jay Graber, wrote in an email, “and are excited about growth while we open up the network more broadly next year.” So I reached out to outside companies that track social analytics. They told me that these new X competitors haven’t meaningfully chipped away at the site’s dominance. For all of the drama of the past year, X is by far still the predominant network for doing brief text posts. It is still home to more than four times as many monthly active users as Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined, according to numbers shared with me by data.ai, a company that tracks app-store activity. (Data.ai looks only at mobile analytics, so it can’t account for desktop users.)
Mastodon and Bluesky amounted to just “rounding errors, in terms of the number of people engaging,” says Paul Quigley, the CEO of NewsWhip, a social-media-monitoring platform. Threads has not fared much better. Sensor Tower, another analytics firm, estimates that fewer than 1 percent of Threads users opened the app daily last month, compared with 18 percent of Twitter users. And even those who open the app are spending an average of just three minutes a day on it.
That doesn’t mean X is thriving. According to data.ai’s 2024-predictions report, the platform’s daily active users peaked in July 2022, at 316 million, and then dropped under Musk. Based on its data-science algorithms, data.ai predicts that X usership will decline to 250 million in 2024. And data.ai expects microblogging overall to decline alongside X next year, even though these new platforms seem positioned for growth: Threads, after all, just recently launched in Europe and became available as a desktop app, and to join Bluesky, you still need an invite code.
Of course, these are just predictions. Plenty of people do still want platforms for sending off quick thoughts, and perhaps X or any other alternative will gain more users. But the decline of microblogging is part of a larger change in how we consume media. On TikTok and other platforms, short clips are served up by an at-times-magical-seeming algorithm that makes note of our every interest. Text posts don’t have the same appeal. “While platforms like X are likely to maintain a core niche of users, the overall trends show consumers are swapping out text-based social networking apps for photo and video-first platforms,” data.ai noted in their predictions report.
Short-form videos have become an attention vortex. Users are spending an average of 95 minutes a day on TikTok and 61 minutes on Instagram as of this quarter, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. By comparison, they’re estimated to average just 30 minutes on Twitter and three minutes on Threads. People also want companies to shift to video along with them in what is perhaps this the real pivot to video: In a recent survey by Sprout Social, a social-media-analytics tool, 41 percent of consumers said that they want brands to publish more 15- to 30-second videos more than they want any other style of social-media post. Just 10 percent wanted more text-only content.
Maybe this really is the end for the short text post, at least en masse. Or maybe our conception of “microblogging” is due for an update. TikTok videos are perhaps “just a video version of what the original microblogs were doing when they first started coming out in the mid-2000s,” André Brock, a media professor at Georgia Tech who has studied Twitter, told me; they can feel as intimate and authentic as a tweet about having tacos for lunch. Trends such as “men are constantly thinking about the Roman empire” (and the ensuing pushback) could have easily been a viral Twitter or Facebook conversation in a different year. For a while, all of the good Twitter jokes were screenshotted and re-uploaded to Instagram. Now it can feel like all of the good TikToks are downloaded and reposted on Instagram. If the Dress ( white-and-gold or black-and-blue?) were to go viral today, it would probably happen in a 30-second video with a narrator and a soundtrack.
But something is left behind when microblogging becomes video. Twitter became an invaluable resource during news moments— part of why journalists flocked to the platform, for better or for worse—allowing people to refresh and instantaneously get real-time updates on election results, or a sports game, or a natural disaster. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter turned to Twitter to organize protests and spread their respective messages.
Some of the news and political content may just as easily move to TikTok: Russia’s war with Ukraine has been widely labeled the “ first TikTok War,” as many experienced it for the first time through that lens. Roughly a third of adults under 30 now regularly get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. But we don’t yet totally know what it means to have short-form videos, delivered via an algorithmic feed, be the centerpiece of social media. You might log onto TikTok and be shown a video that was posted two weeks ago.
Perhaps the biggest stress test for our short-form-video world has yet to come: the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Elections are where Twitter, and microblogging, have thrived. Meanwhile, in 2020, TikTok was much smaller than what it is now. Starting next year, its true reign might finally begin.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Godless Socialist CEO
Superstar
Is this a bit?They did $3 billion in revenue this year and are finally approaching cash flow positive. Advertisers make a stink but come back to the platform. Especially in light of finding out Media Matters was lying about the platform and strong-arming companies to stop advertising.
From a company making no profit with heavy censorship and a thieving corporate board to a free hallmark. Dude was right and knew what he was doing. All you clowns that were shilling Mastodon () and the Threads app were dead wrong and had no clue how that space works. If Elon wants to pay over a billion a year then let him - he got over 200 of them to burn.
Brand stronger than ever bro. Twitter is much better than it was 4 years ago without the silly censorship. We would never have found out what was going on in Palestine with the old regime as they would have censored everything to make Israel look like the good guys.
1.) Heavily in debt is irrelevant. A business can be in debt but if their revenues are accelerating and enterprise value is growing they will be fine.
2.) Advertisers are coming back. They can't resist, especially with Twitter Execs finally finding a way to monetize user content. They are a few steps away from becoming Twitch-lite. Spaces is taking off even better than it was when originally created. Content creation is king and advertisers can't step away from an easy buck.
3.) Straight up nonsense. It is one of the most heavily used apps in the world and Twitter's user base keeps growing.
4.) Ok?
5.) No it does not. The Twitter app was fine for the vast majority of users when Elon first got rid of the engineers. People complained because they did not like Elon but the core functionality of the mobile and web apps worked. The main things that broke were 3rd party apps ala Tweet Deck. Then people complained again when Elon locked the API. But the app itself was working. People just exaggerated claims, like in this very thread, because they have an agenda.
6.) And gained even more.
Sometimes y'all just gotta admit you lost. I've seen threads about Meta's Threads up, Mastodon, Truth Social, and all kinds of terrible apps that were supposed to kill Twitter on this very forum from the same few select posters over the past 3 years. And not a single one of you work in the industry, have any programming experience, or make any real money in your lives. Honestly - just find something productive to do with your time. This shyt is disgraceful. Years and years of drinking the kool-aid and you STILL don't understand the social media industry.
Twitter violated contract by failing to pay millions in bonuses, U.S. judge rules
X has been hit with numerous lawsuits by former employees and executives since Elon Musk bought the company and culled more than half of its workforce.
www.cnbc.com