More Billionaire Idiocy

Apparently, Elon Musk has decided that the reason his AI platform Grok keeps giving the 'wrong' answers is that the data set it uses is crap.  His solution is to 'correct' this data by 'reorganising' the sum total of human knowledge and making out sure that it only includes the 'right' facts.  In other words, he wants to bend reality to his will by rewriting the entirety of history, rather than admit that either his AI platform is crap, or that it is actually giving the 'right' answers, rather than the answers that he wants.  A bold, if futile ambition.  But this is what we've come to - unelected, unaccountable billionaires deciding that they and they alone can correctly interpret human knowledge and mould it to their own prejudices.  Not that there's anything new in such lofty ambitions: just about every dictator and totalitarian regime in history has sought, to a greater or lesser degree, to recast their local histories to suit their ideologies and whims.  Indeed, even democratic regimes like to interpret history and present facts in a way that will reflect most favourably upon themselves.  But at least in the 'free world' nobody is allowed to be the sole custodian of knowledge, so alternative views always persist and remain freely accessible.  (That said, the current US government is doing its damndest to impose a monolithic and extreme right-wing reactionary interpretation of all history and knowledge upon the country through its bullying and harassment of academia).  But, as we've seen in recent times, the capacity of social media to spread false narratives, fake facts and disinformation is seemingly infinite, posing a real threat, even in pluralist societies, to the body of human knowledge.  And, of course, Musk the would be revisionist, controls one of the main social media outlets.

Which, of course, is another reason why the power enjoyed by these unaccountable bastards needs to be carefully reigned in by governments.  I'm afraid that it is inevitable that once someone achieves these levels of wealth, they'll decide that accumulating it makes them 'special', which, in turn, means that the rules which govern lesser mortals shouldn't apply to them and that they should be able to translate that wealth into power.  Damn it, one man one vote is OK for the little people, the poor people, but surely the super rich should be entitled to more influence than that?  Governments really should be taxing these dangerous individuals into submission, entangling them in as much regulation as possible.  Except that they won't, preferring to fawn over them in order to try and gain their favour.  Getting back to the original point, although his ego will never let him, it would be much easier if Musk just conceded that his AI is crap.  It's nothing to be ashamed of - all AI models are to a greater or lesser degree.  OK, I'll concede that I'm no expert on the subject and that my experiences of using AI are limited and confined to pretty trivial tasks, but, even where such trivial tasks are concerned, they all frequently have difficulty in grasping what it is that you want them to do.  I mainly use them for creating images and no matter how detailed I make my descriptions, they consistently fail to deliver anything approximating what I want to see.  ChatGPT so far has the best hit rate for me, but even that serves up some spectacular misses, (although when it is good, it is very good).  But I certainly wouldn't expect any of them to be capable of answering any complex queries with any degree of accuracy.  There's lots of hype surrounding AI but, as with many things, most of the claims made for it aren't matched by actual user experience.  So, if I was Elon Musk, I certainly wouldn't be relying upon any form of AI to be able to rewrite the sum total of human knowledge into anything intelligible, let alone useful.