Elon Musk on Tucker Carlson's show. (Credit: Fox News)
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Elon Details More Dangers of AI, Gov’t Intrusion Into Our Twitter DMs

We brought you a couple of clips from the interview that Twitter head Elon Musk had with Fox’s Tucker Carlson where Musk dropped some tantalizing bits of information about artificial intelligence and the government’s intrusion into social media, even including access to private direct messages on Twitter.

Now there’s more from the interview that ran on Monday.

Musk had some fascinating things to say about artificial intelligence and the dangers that it might pose. He said he was having a conversation with Google co-founder Larry Page about AI and Page accused him of being a “speciesist” because he cared about the dangers that AI might pose to humanity.

Of course, Musk should, as should we all, put humans first. But the fact that people involved with such things are not, that should be concerning to everyone. My colleague Brandon Morse has detailed some of the possible dangers of AI and how much it could hurt humanity if used in the wrong way.

Musk further noted his concern with Open AI and how it maybe was being trained to be “politically correct” [translation: to lie to the people].

Elon said he thought there needed to be another option so he was looking at creating “TruthGPT.”

He had a little fun with Tucker about what he called the NY Times.

Musk also spoke about Twitter and what he wanted to do with it. He said he wanted Twitter to be fair and not to be biased for a political side. Carlson said that he wondered why Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, didn’t feel the same. Carlson said he took Zuckerberg at face value, at which Musk laughed, showing he knew that you shouldn’t. But why didn’t he care about free speech in the same way as Musk does, Tucker asked? Musk’s response was pure gold.

“My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election nominally in a get-out-the-vote campaign but fundamentally in support of Democrats,” Musk said. “Does that sound unbiased to you?” he asked. Musk said he takes freedom of speech very seriously.

Musk also showed his humor again when he was asked about how the business was going now that 80 percent of the Twitter employees are gone and he’s running it with 20 percent of the number they previously had.

“It turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter,” Elon said. “If you’re not trying to run some glorified activist organization,” he grinned, “And you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can let go of a lot of people, turns out.” That made Tucker laugh.

Then he talked about how much the government had been involved in surveilling things, including as the preview clip reported, people’s DMs.

“The degree to which various Government Agencies had effectively full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind.” He said that included the DMs because the DMs weren’t encrypted. He said that’s why he was going to be bringing in the ability to encrypt the DMs, if you choose to, to “toggle it on or off,” as you so choose. That way no one could see what you said, “They could put a gun to my head,” he said, “but I couldn’t talk.”

So that still raises a lot of questions. How did the government have this access? Who was letting them in/feeding them information?

His response does help address how we can help protect the information more. But there’s a lot more there that Congress needs to pursue and run to ground so we don’t have that kind of government intrusion into our speech.

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