X/Grok during Operation Sindoor tells us that Musk isn't walking his talk

Time of India

8 hours ago

A nomad interested in twisting the kaleidoscope of science and looking for new patterns
Though Russia-Ukraine and Isreal-Palestine wars have been first X-ed and then Grok-ed, we in India were not able to appreciate or criticise the role played by global communication platform X (enabled by AI of Grok) during a war-like situation.
As X also played a key and probably decisive role in Biden-Trump war, Elon Musk, the owner of X has been hard-selling himself as messiah of freedom of expression by claiming to have kept X free from the biased censorship. By adding Grok to X, Musk has indicated that humanity now has an artificial intelligence tool that will weed out the false/fake information, making X a dream-come-true for we the common citizens of the world, who never had a voice that was free.
Till we looked at the way Grok-enabled X has delivered till now from a safe distance, it was tempting to believe that Musk has really changed the world of mass communication.
But, as we in India are now getting to experience its performance in a war-like situation of Operation Sindoor, it is becoming clear that Mr. Musk ain't walking the talk, and here is why.
X has features that are indicative of the fact that it is not a communication platform that humanity can use meaningfully.
First is the 'Blue Tick'.
Blue Tick is an instant destroyer of free speech, as one core values of free speech is equality right to be heard. Musk has made blue tick a business and, by giving priority to those with blue tick in displaying comments, X is clearly not a platform for freedom of expression. It is a platform where money matters more than truth or quality of content.
The other weakness brought to X by blue tick model is the lack of due-diligence. Thanks to Operation Sindoor, it is now possible to see this clearly as a lot of fake handles created purely to deceive and misinform are granted authenticity by blue tick just because Musk gets to make money from them.
Second is the 'Hashtag'.
The design of the tool of hashtag is a dead giveaway that X of Musk is least bothered about ensuring fair flow of information that is critical for communication.
If X was The (only) Forum for freedom of speech, it would have first built technology that disallows false hashtagging before offering it as a tool to club and collate information.
The way hashtag is designed, it is entirely possible to use hashtag PoK for a post that is actually a cat video tells us that X is not about information. In fact, most of the posts on X can be found to be misusing hashtags to ride the popular wave.
Hashtag feature tells us that X is about eyeballs and eyeballs only.
And third is 'Community Notes'.
Community Notes is a feature touted by X/Musk as a way to give power to the people and it does work, but it is probably the smartest way to fool people into thinking that X is designed to weed out false/fake information when you look at this tool in the context of Grok (or any other AI tool like perplexity).
And the best way to understand is by looking at posts about Operation Sindoor.
Almost 90 % of posts about 'crashed' aircraft or 'bombing' that had flooded X used either an old and unrelated image or an AI-generated video from a war game. This is not new as same happens during any catastrophe such as an earthquake or a cyclone.
X allows millions of posts everyday that are clearly using old or unrelated or AI-generated images. The falsity of these posts is easiest to verify using simple tool like Google lens and yet X smartly waits for 'community' to make the effort and flag only a few of these posts by using community notes feature.
This is probably the biggest giveaway that Musk has very little interest in providing humans with a dependable global platform for information exchange when we understand the power of Grok that is available to Musk.
If Musk really wanted X to be a false-information-free platform, the first use of Grok would have been to weed out what is undisputed false information.
A post with a crashed aircraft image that is 10 years old and calling it out using Grok instead of waiting for community notes to respond is surely not censorship or attack on free speech.
The fact that the power of Grok is not used for this kind of greater-good action that will make X dependable tells us what Elon Musk is really trying to do.
If we look at all the three issues raised above, it is easy to realise that Elon Musk is not interested in free speech or curb the toxicity of fake/false information.
The one and only point of interest for Musk is to encourage more and more use of X and in turn Grok, at whatever cost.
The traffic shift to X is a game changer. The lawlessness of X is encouraging people to use it to lie and drive agenda using misinformation. This, in turn increases use of Grok and hence Grok is on the way to become fastest evolving AI on the planet.
As Elon Musk started with a bit of disadvantage against old players like Google or Facebook that enjoyed a decade of lead in farming data, he had to find ways and means to accelerate the data-collection for his AI and by buying X and turning it into the most-used platform today, he has managed to catch up and go beyond.
Looking at the ambitions that Musk has, it is unlikely that he is going to be interested in actually gifting humanity with a platform that he is claiming X to be.
But, if he really means it, he needs to at least:
Remove chargeable blue tick Allow blue tick only after ensuring that it is used by a real human being Remove priority listing given to blue tick and instead link it with the popularity of the post Make it impossible to use unrelated hashtag Use Grok to weed out what is indisputably fake/false information
If all of the above is integrated into X framework, it can really be what Elon Musk is claiming it to be. Till then, it is a danger to peace and harmony of our diverse planet.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.