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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