Laura Knight-Jadczyk | Letters From the Edge of Reality
I was pretty pumped up when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Well, I didn’t like the name change, but nothing is perfect. Nevertheless, very early on I noticed a couple of things that were disturbing. First, when Matt Taibbi was given the task of publishing the Twitter docs that exposed exactly what had been going on behind the scenes, it looked like he would become a Twitter/X news source. But that didn’t happen. Apparently, Matt very quickly came up against some sort of dilemma vis a vis Musk and switched to Substack and all the hoopla died out. I wondered what was up with that. Then, Tucker Carlson looked to be the next star of X in partnership with Musk but that, too, died a quick death. Again I wondered what happened? Why couldn’t Musk get Taibbi and Carlson onboard and have the hottest show in town?
I’m not sure of the answer to that question but it seems to have had something to do with advertisers pulling out right and left and Twitter/X hemorrhaging cash. Then Linda Yaccarino was brought onboard and things began to become clear. While Musk may have had some idealized dream of being the bringer of Free Speech to the world, the practicalities of doing so hit him slap in the face and he had to compromise. He still likes to see himself as a Free Speech Absolutist, but he isn’t and X is not really the bastion of Free Speech that was trumpeted to the world. Oh, yes, it’s better than what was in some sense, and certainly better than about anything else out there for what it is, but it isn’t what it is promoted to be. In fact, I think it is way more insidiously destructive than old Twitter was with its blatant suppression.
Yaccarino came up with her famous “Freedom of Speech but not Reach” followed by the decision to quarantine any speech considered “Lawful but Awful” (by whose standards?). I began paying close attention to my posts, likes, reposts, followers, etc, even to the extent of taking comparative screen shots several times a day. And yeah, I noticed things. Deboosting and sequestering of posts was in full operation though there were a few hiccups at the beginning.
X users should realize that when they like or repost a post from a deboosted user, nothing really happens. Their 'vote' for that view or remark goes into a black hole. Deboosting users affects not only the user, but those who agree with them. What is “Lawful but Awful” about this system is that it deprives the X analysts of important data that reflects the true sentiments of those individuals. And if those people are the majority, X can be way off in understanding what is really going on and what people really think.
But just thinking about those things didn’t really scare me; it was just frustrating and creating in me a sense of the extreme unfairness of it all.
Along came Grok. Well, I like to play around. I’ve spent over 30 years learning how to ask the right questions to elicit the cleanest and least prejudiced answers from what can be called a “Cosmic Retrieval System”, i.e. the Cassiopaean Experiment, so I thought I would put that experience to work to see what Grok was all about. Was it what was being touted? I went through a number of discussions with Grok, all of which gave me the strong impression that it was not much better than ChatGPT which I had played with a bit and found to be wholly useless for anything helpful to me and real research. Grok just seems to follow mainstream ideas. But I’ll come back to that at some later point and post demonstration exchanges that will make the point. For the moment, I want to get to something a great deal scarier - horrific, in fact.
One day recently I was in a somewhat whimsical mood and I thought I would play with Grok for entertainment. And so, I composed a fairly wild prompt just to see what the mainstream influence on Grok would kick back. I actually expected Grok to tell me that my prompt was so far out there that it wasn’t even answerable, or something like that. Either that, or Grok would go on some wild fantastic story line similar to a science fiction novel. But that isn’t what happened. Here is the exchange:
User Prompt: If you were a hyperdimensional alien group and you fed off of human suffering and sometimes off of human flesh (when you needed to manifest physically), how would you manage Earth as a feeding ground?
Grok Response: If I were a hyperdimensional alien group feeding on human suffering and occasionally flesh, I’d manage Earth like a sustainable farm, balancing extraction with preservation to avoid depleting the resource. Here’s how I’d approach it, thinking strategically:
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