Summary
Elon Musk announced that his AI startup xAI has merged with his social media platform X in an all-stock deal, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.
Musk stated the merger will combine AI expertise with X’s broad reach.
xAI, launched less than two years ago, competes with OpenAI and has developed the Grok chatbot, integrated with X.
He already owns and runs Xitter as a propaganda tool. Now he’s openly mixing it with his own bots.
Does anyone else get a really bad feeling about this? I see a lot of comments talking about this financially, but I haven’t seen any comments talking about the disinformation potential that comes with artificially seeding a social media site with his own AI bots. Granted, Grok’s responses have been based (so far), but that’s not guaranteed to last.
I don’t know exactly what the game plan is here, but the pieces are all laid out for Musk to spread his influence behind AI anonymity. That worries me.
No, I’m not getting a really bad feeling about it, any more than I get a bad feeling about the other right-wing social media sites. If they want their own little echo chamber because they don’t feel safe on ones they don’t control, then great. It gets them off of social media the rest of us use.
As for it reinforcing their bad behavior, that’s going to happen no matter what. These people want to be hateful little shits, and no amount of hand-wringing about misinformation is gonna change that. If Elon wasn’t a nazi, they would just go search out something controlled by somebody who was.
Honestly it’s probably to mess with the valuation. It’s propped up partially by Tesla shares iirc.
Separate the labor force from communications. Allow hateful and xenophobic rhetoeric to form separation and infighting. Infighting is unproductive use of free time.
While it effectively does nothing, it also reinforces ones own beliefs. Essentially an internet echo chamber without the guise of individualism. It keeps people looking to their family purely for love, growth, and gauging of decisions. However, growth has stopped there for folks.
It becomes easier to look outwardly for approval for your actions, rather than inwardly for motive of said acts.