AI and Censorship
Rudimentary AIs have been used in the form of standalone or interlocking algorithms to push or squash certain content on search engines, YouTube, and other social media platforms for the better part of a decade. We know this. Many of us have been shadow banned or had content taken down off of these platforms, some by the hands of human censors, surely, in the name of fact-checking or “protecting the public from mis/dis-information”, but just as much through algorithmic tools designed to push narrative-compliant posts and squash examples of wrong-think. Algorithms are generally easy enough to fool, simply don’t spell things conventionally, or in video content, change what you call something, or flash it onscreen, rather than saying it yourself. When they turn the human censors on you, it gets harder, though.
Now, these algorithms have a new cousin: the generative AIs. Generative AIs are typically based on Large Language Models or LLMs. This more or less means that they have access to broad swaths of the content that has ever been published on the internet, whether behind a paywall for human users or not.[1] These LLMs are steered and weighted differently for each one, fed different datasets with different limitations.[2] This is what creates the illusion of talking to something or someone intelligent. One thing to keep in mind is that these LLMs are never done growing and being refined. Every user interaction helps to refine it just a little more. There have already been issues of a censorious nature, which the eggheads and would-be regulators call “guardrails”.[3] Another problem with these pieces of programming is that they are really not intelligent. Keep in mind which Big Tech companies are funding much of the research in the AI arena: Microsoft and Alphabet/Google, which means that both of them are being steered by their major investors toward generating that much more profit through scraping that much more data about the users of these AI-based applications which they own.[4] That last bit was conjecture, but if you look at the public investor lists for both of these mega corporations, you are likely to see both of those investment firms (which are really the same thing, by the way) at or very near the top of the lists for each one. In terms of institutional investment, they are #1 and #2 for each company, respectively.[5]
What am I suggesting we should make of this? That is a question which warrants more ink that I can afford here to answer without speculation. All I know is that these companies are opaque and own much of the modern world, from media to fast food, and cosmetics to pharmaceuticals. They also own sizable chunks of major tech companies, as seen above. This means they can, in theory, influence not only the messaging that we see in movies and on TV, but how we see them through the online services and even down to our devices. Now, they have a huge stake in the AI boom. I am not a doomer about AI, guys. I may not like it much, and think that it is already being manipulated by the companies and investors behind it, but it is an interesting piece of technology when built and maintained by people with a greater interest in privacy and freedom of speech than these clowns have demonstrated.
On the other hand, Altha Tech uses AI where it can, and had an experience where they were working on a piece about ending child trafficking, but got flagged by chatGPT for asking it to edit the piece. I guess that is a no-go topic for big tech types. To give it the benefit of the doubt, there is allot of misinformation out there about the issue, so it is hard to cut through to the truth of it. Perhaps that was too charitable, as there are a number of high profile CEOs who have been implicated with types like Epstein, through visits to his properties.[6] Many people who are closer to the bottom of the pecking order than the top have suggested that all of the elites are intimately involved with heinous acts against other human beings, whether adults or children, which involve slavery and abuse. I’m of the mindset that doesn’t want to believe that one human being could do that to another, much less to a child. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. However, there are enough red flags through symbols and the like that it is hard to deny that something is going on, and likely has been for a very long time.[7] Perhaps such editing is better done by hand.
Here, at Altha Tech, the owner appreciates what generative AI is, and how it can help to do some things. He is becoming more aware that it is being shaped by some bad actors in the industry, ones who have more interest in controlling the narrative than in trusting people with the privacy to research and think for themselves. These tools are already very biased toward the Narrative of the elites, so unless you want to keep feeding that beast, I would consider your choices around AI very carefully from now on. Perhaps the ticket is for us to refuse to use the big chat bots from now on. Perhaps the solution is to move to FOSS alternatives, which do exist, by the way.[8]
[1] there is ongoing litigation in this regard… https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66164228
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/vipinbharathan/2023/06/25/guardrails-for-ai-what-is-possible-today/?sh=7f3595923a0d
[4] Vanguard and Blackrock are the two largest institutional investors for both GOOG and MSFT.
[5] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/holders ; https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders?p=GOOG
[6] https://archive.org/download/epstein-flight-logs-unredacted
[7] https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/FBI_pedophile_symbols
[8] https://www.goodfirms.co/artificial-intelligence-software/blog/best-free-open-source-Artificial-Intelligence-software