Yeah, where else but Twitter are you going to find Elmo’s sad attempts at making the funny with nine-year old memes mocking US aid to Ukraine and generating a wave of Kremlin trolls hailing Comrade Musk for supporting Russia?
Now analysis by a volunteer group of researchers who track Russian-language information operations on X says Russian trolls flocked to Musk’s post and news accounts that reported on his meme. “The Zelensky tweet from Musk seems to be the most commented by Kremlin trolls over nearly three months,” says Antibot4Navalny, the anonymous group of volunteers behind the findings.
One former Twitter disinformation researcher, granted anonymity to allow them to speak freely without fear of retaliation, looked at a sample of the accounts highlighted by Antibot4Navalny. “Most accounts had multiple signs of inauthenticity,” the former staff member says, pointing out that their analysis was done using public-facing data, and only X would be able to make “hard findings” based on technical data available to the company. The former staff member says the accounts had repeated behavior in reposts and “inconsistent or clearly falsified” personal information. “There was a spectrum for how realistically or well chosen an account’s profile pic is,” they say, with some profile images being pulled from elsewhere online.
Innes and the Cardiff University researchers say the accounts often have low or zero follower numbers, a lack of identifiable personal details, mostly just reply to other accounts’ posts, and produce anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelensky messaging, which mirror wider Russian narratives. Russia has long used social media to impact politicsand divide opinions. In September, an EU report concluded that the “reach and influence” of Kremlin-backed accounts on social media had increased in 2023, particularly highlighting X.
You’re missing my point. Their ability to summarize has no relevance at all. And while they are good at filtering in many ways, they still are not in general very good at detecting false information. If you feed them a large bulk of false information, they tend to “believe” it.
Yes, there are some who are trying to fix that. But then there’s the rest of my post, where I go on to argue why one would not expect Grok to be all that good at it. I’ll quote the relevant paragraphs again:
LLMs in general have not demonstrated a great ability to curate or fact-check information. And Grok was created quickly, under Musk’s “move fast and break things” paradigm. There’s not a lot of staff for the feeds to be human curated. And Musk himself seems to have trouble with the concept, believing a lot of (often bigoted) conspiracy nonsense.
It’s not like he’s been interested in making Twitter itself do a good job of surfacing reliable information. Any feed using recommended stuff from Twitter is full of crap. You have to go to followed only.
Saying something uses Twitter, a known source of bad information that is only getting worse, is not a positive. Just like saying it has this irreverent, playful attitude is not a positive. None of that screams “accuracy is a priority.”
Absolutely true. But a criminally corrupt psychopath becoming president of the USA and staging a coup to try to remain in office is definitely something new. One of the most influential channels of social media being taken over by an almost unfathomably rich and powerful neo-Nazi trying to control the world’s information is definitely also something new. The fact that said neo-Nazi is trying to run three major companies and a handful of lesser ones while wasted on mind-altering drugs is also new. We are in uncharted waters.
While I agree some of that shit is worse than stuff we’ve already seen, I would argue it is a matter of scale not of substance. (Neo-) Nazis having control of some corner of the media certainly isn’t new and one could argue administrations of the past were not only criminal, but also much, much more competent. (Kissinger accomplished more evil deeds on any given Monday than the orange clan will accomplish in their collective lifetimes).
The actual Nazis ran Germany (into the ground) while high as kites. Hitler was a junkie. The original robber barons were doubtless getting jacked on the ubiquitous coke of the day.
Musk is just following in those footsteps. There is nothing new under the sun.
There are no recordings, but he was heard to rant about how “those Englanders! How dare they fight back! They should just die because I said so. I’m going to take them to court! And just wait till you see the new superweapon. The Massashit 69. Stainless steel fuselage! It can stop a tommy gun bullet! It has a range of 50 miles, but that’s no problem! It can’t get off the ground anyway.”
When Churchill said how he will defend England, whatever the cost may be, Hitler send him a diplomatic communique, with a poop emoji. And since they didn’t have emojis in those days, he sent real poop.
Before coming to a conclusion on this, I would want to try changing the prompt to imply I want the opposite answer. I’m always wary of these things giving the answer that it predicts that the user would agree with more.
So I’m much more happy with it saying that trans women are women, since the repeated questions make it clear that this is not the answer the user wants.
