Twitter

[Taran Wanderer]

With Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we’re heading off hearing of executive firings, lay-offs, and now mandatory 84 hour workweeks on top of all the other changes to service, moderation, etc.  The people who founded Twitter are gone. The management and culture are going to go through radical changes, and it very much sounds like it’s going to be for the worse. So my question is… why don’t people just leave en masse?  Twitter could basically be shut down, and Musk would have nothing of value with no people to run it. Why stay through this mess?

[Sibley]

Fear, ego, lack of foresight, greed?

It would be even more funny though if the employees unionized.

[seattlecyclone]

I don't doubt a number of their people are taking interviews. These things take time. I also don't doubt that a number of people there find job searching a hassle and prefer to believe that their job will still be theirs and tolerable in a few months' time. We shall see!

[ATtiny85]

Those who survive often thrive?

I have a friend who works there, not a great environment right now.

[chemistk]

I've heard some interesting arguments regarding the usefulness of twitter and why we're unlikely to see it be completely abandoned. The two that stand out the most are news and sports. Many if not most news reporters, journalists, writers, photographers, etc. rely on Twitter to break stories. To them, it's the fastest way to disseminate information in real time since you don't have to have a twitter account to see information that uses the platform as ground zero. If Twitter hadn't built out a robust network of integrated feeds it might be different, but you can often find news faster than waiting for even a 1-paragraph piece.

This might not seem ideal but consider rapidly changing situations where being in direct communication with people on the ground isn't always possible. In a natural disaster or an emergency, a few tweets with pictures can convey the real time status of a situation faster than waiting for a breaking news story.

Similarly with sports - if you aren't watching a game, where's the next best place to see an integration of updates and images/videos? Twitter. Again, for huge leagues this is moot since those have a dedicated network for disseminating information, but for stuff like HS Football or D3 women's basketball or stuff that won't have a reporter present? It can still be tracked pretty easily with a hashtag for those who might be interested but not present.

[jinga nation]

Hilarious to see Elon first pitch $20/month, then $8/month.
Buyer's remorse?
Or his usual method of throwing darts and seeing which one sticks?
¿por que no los dos?

[GilesMM]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

[Sibley]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

Maybe because the new owner has publicly said he wants to downsize the company by 75% and has instituted an 84 hour work week, among other things? Seems pretty reasonable to not want to work for a guy who says and does these things.

[Turtle]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

Maybe because the new owner has publicly said he wants to downsize the company by 75% and has instituted an 84 hour work week, among other things? Seems pretty reasonable to not want to work for a guy who says and does these things.

Maybe some stories for the Epic thread will come out of this. 

[sonofsven]

At first I thought the thread was directed at Twitter users, of which I am not one, leaving en masse, but I see it's about employees?
I'd guess the reason people are staying is they need the money.

[Moonwaves]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

Maybe because the new owner has publicly said he wants to downsize the company by 75% and has instituted an 84 hour work week, among other things? Seems pretty reasonable to not want to work for a guy who says and does these things.

If I knew my company was about to be downsized and thought there was any hope of a redundancy payout, I'd probably stick around for a while.

At first I thought the thread was directed at Twitter users, of which I am not one, leaving en masse, but I see it's about employees?

Is that worth starting another thread for, or should we just add it in to this topic? I read a bit about Mastodon over the weekend and am going to set up an account to see what it's like. Jack Dorsey is also working on something new, called Bluesky, I think but it sounds like it's only in development at the moment.

[GilesMM]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

Maybe because the new owner has publicly said he wants to downsize the company by 75% and has instituted an 84 hour work week, among other things? Seems pretty reasonable to not want to work for a guy who says and does these things.

I couldn't find a work-week quote from Musk, just stories about workers and managers trying to look good by working hard.  There was a report they might cut staff 25% which might be a good thing if it is bloated.

[maizefolk]

Musk is a charismatic leader and his businesses are generally doing well.  Twitter may also.  It is too early to know.  Can't see why anyone would quit now.

Maybe because the new owner has publicly said he wants to downsize the company by 75% and has instituted an 84 hour work week, among other things? Seems pretty reasonable to not want to work for a guy who says and does these things.

Most people think they are above average drivers. Most people think that they are better at their jobs than their co-workers. So I don't think just knowing that a majority of the company would be laid off will always convince a person they they are going to be laid off. And even if they knew they were going to be laid off, layoffs typically come with non-trivial amounts of severance that aren't available to people who resign.

Now Elon appears to be playing some games trying to get out of this for senior executives, so it may or may not actually show up for the folks laid off from twitter, but a typical silicon valley layoff might come with couple of months pay and health insurance and and potentially represents an opportunity for someone with an in demand skillset comes to take a multi-month sabbatical.

I understand where you are coming from but I can also understand why a substantial number of twitter employees are either planning to stay or at least not actively looking to leave.

[EchoStache]

I wonder if the board and top CEO's who were responsible for forcing Elon to buy the company after he attempted to back out, realized that the person they forced to buy the company(possibly against his will), would then become their boss with the ability to fire them? 

[maizefolk]

I wonder if the board and top CEO's who were responsible for forcing Elon to buy the company after he attempted to back out, realized that the person they forced to buy the company(possibly against his will), would then become their boss with the ability to fire them?

That s a big part of why CEOs typically have "golden parachutes" written into their contracts. To align their interests better with the interests of the (former) public shareholders. Quoting Matt Levine:

sometimes public companies would be better off getting acquired, but that would rarely make their CEOs better off, unless they got paid. Earlier this year, Parag Agrawal had a good job as CEO of Twitter. He got paid well, he got to boss people around, it was nice. Then Elon Musk came along and said, more or less in so many words, “I want to buy Twitter and fire the CEO as rudely as possible.” Agrawal might quite reasonably have said, no, I like my job, I like getting paid, I like being the boss, I don’t like people being rude and firing me. And then, as the CEO of Twitter, he could have tried to prevent the merger. It might not have worked: Musk could have (and almost did) put in a hostile bid to try to buy Twitter without the CEO’s approval; hostile bids do sometimes succeed. But in general if a CEO wants to block a deal, that makes it harder to do the deal.

But the deal was clearly (especially in hindsight) really good for Twitter’s shareholders: They got $54.20 per share, which is way more than the shares would otherwise be worth. And Twitter’s board had set up incentives so that, if a deal came along that was good for shareholders but bad for Agrawal, Agrawal would say yes. The incentive is that Agrawal would get fired rudely, but he’d get a big check to make up for it.

[bmjohnson35]

I have never worked in a tech company like twitter, so my experience may not be completely valid.  As for my own experience, I found that only the most talented or self-motivated employees jumped ship during potential layoffs.  Usually the average and lower performers stick around until their number comes up. If they have been around long enough and are old enough, they hope for early retirement.  Otherwise, they hope for a severance and expect to collect unemployment until they find something else.  I worked for the company for 30 yrs and watched this play out at least 3 times.  I was always at a field site location, so the layoffs didn't affect our team until the company almost went belly up and was bought out shortly after I left.

[mistymoney]

With Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we’re heading off executive firings, lay-offs, and now mandatory 84 hour workweeks on top of all the other changes to service, moderation, etc.  The people who founded Twitter are gone. The management and culture are going to go through radical changes, and it very much sounds like it’s going to be for the worse. So my question is… why don’t people just leave en masse?  Twitter could basically be shut down, and Musk would have nothing of value with no people to run it. Why stay through this mess?

Do you work there? I wasn't clear from the post.

If so, have you resigned?

Most people aren't so agile financially to walk away with nothing else lined up.

Aside from resigning, just don't work 84 hours. See if they fire you, could then get unemployment for sure. Twitter may deny initially but if terminated for not working 84 hours/week, workers would like win that.

And is it mandatory? It seemed that some managers were pushing that but it isn't clear to me where that came from or if it is mandatory or if someone just said - we'd have to work 12/7 and some just said - whatever it takes! and if so - who was that someone?

if someone told me - new CEO, new initiatives, work 12 hours a day continuously, I'd just put in whatever hours I was willing to do and see where it went.

Even if I didn't have FU money, it's be a hard no and I'd bet on getting unemployment if fired for not doing it.

[bacchi]

if someone told me - new CEO, new initiatives, work 12 hours a day continuously, I'd just put in whatever hours I was willing to do and see where it went.

Even if I didn't have FU money, it's be a hard no and I'd bet on getting unemployment if fired for not doing it.

The "touch the wall" rule seems applicable in this situation.

[PDXTabs]

In addition to everything that everyone has already said, I would imagine that people who stay will get equity in the new private stock if not immediately then soon. You can't buy that on the open market so they might want some.

[Taran Wanderer]

Hearing of… not heading off. Original post corrected.

I don’t work there. I was a minimal tweet-reader, non-tweeter.

By all means broaden the discussion to Twitter users, too.

My perspective: after being at one company a very long time, I finally left. Only in leaving did I realize how miserable and stressed I was there. However, I knew when the latest CEO started that my function wasn’t valued, and in hindsight I could have and perhaps should have left them. I was well compensated, but I seriously question whether it was worth it. In Twitter’s case with Musk, everyone knows the guy is a jerk. If employees want to work in that environment, then they should stay, by all means. If they’re staying despite Musk, my advice would be to plan an exit as soon as possible. The old culture will be gone, their friendly co-workers will be gone, and soon they will be the friendly neighborhood dinosaur from the old days. Old Twitter is dead. Don’t hang on thinking you’ll somehow preserve it or get it back. 

[dividendman]

I've worked at several megacorps in tech and some smaller tech companies, the best you can do as an employee in a situation like this is try to get the package and have a new job lined up so you basically make double.

If I was in twitter I would be trying to time it properly and obviously slacking off to the max.

[Travis]

I wonder if the board and top CEO's who were responsible for forcing Elon to buy the company after he attempted to back out, realized that the person they forced to buy the company(possibly against his will), would then become their boss with the ability to fire them?

That s a big part of why CEOs typically have "golden parachutes" written into their contracts. To align their interests better with the interests of the (former) public shareholders. Quoting Matt Levine:

sometimes public companies would be better off getting acquired, but that would rarely make their CEOs better off, unless they got paid. Earlier this year, Parag Agrawal had a good job as CEO of Twitter. He got paid well, he got to boss people around, it was nice. Then Elon Musk came along and said, more or less in so many words, “I want to buy Twitter and fire the CEO as rudely as possible.” Agrawal might quite reasonably have said, no, I like my job, I like getting paid, I like being the boss, I don’t like people being rude and firing me. And then, as the CEO of Twitter, he could have tried to prevent the merger. It might not have worked: Musk could have (and almost did) put in a hostile bid to try to buy Twitter without the CEO’s approval; hostile bids do sometimes succeed. But in general if a CEO wants to block a deal, that makes it harder to do the deal.

But the deal was clearly (especially in hindsight) really good for Twitter’s shareholders: They got $54.20 per share, which is way more than the shares would otherwise be worth. And Twitter’s board had set up incentives so that, if a deal came along that was good for shareholders but bad for Agrawal, Agrawal would say yes. The incentive is that Agrawal would get fired rudely, but he’d get a big check to make up for it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-fired-twitter-execs-for-cause-avoid-severance-report-2022-10

Allegedly Musk is trying to fire the senior leadership without paying out their parachutes. That's probably going to a court.

[Metalcat]

Why aren't people leaving?

Simple. A lot of people don't leave miserable jobs until they become absolutely untenable.

People aren't rational, they're rationalizing. And nothing makes people rationalize more than fear, change, and fear of change.

[BlueMR2]

Why aren't people leaving?

Simple. A lot of people don't leave miserable jobs until they become absolutely untenable.

People aren't rational, they're rationalizing. And nothing makes people rationalize more than fear, change, and fear of change.

Young me without responsibilities would have even found it exciting to work in that environment.  Present day me can barely keep all my responsibilities under control with 40 hours of work a week.  Seems like the plan is to weed out all the expensive experienced people and keep the cheap labor to get costs under control.  Pretty standard takeover plan.

[Metalcat]

Why aren't people leaving?

Simple. A lot of people don't leave miserable jobs until they become absolutely untenable.

People aren't rational, they're rationalizing. And nothing makes people rationalize more than fear, change, and fear of change.

Young me without responsibilities would have even found it exciting to work in that environment.  Present day me can barely keep all my responsibilities under control with 40 hours of work a week.  Seems like the plan is to weed out all the expensive experienced people and keep the cheap labor to get costs under control.  Pretty standard takeover plan.

Yep. That kind of tactic doesn't select for the strongest and most skilled, those people are expensive. It selects for those with the most capacity to grind, and that's the youngest and most desperate.

[Phenix]

I'm not an active Twitter user, but I do occasionally visit the site if there's breaking news that interests me.

I would be willing to bet replacing 75% of the workforce with AI will significantly improve the output of the company as a whole.

The $8/month to keep verified status seems like a smart move. It's not financially burdensome to the majority of verified accounts. A quick google search says there are 420,000 verified accounts. If half of them opt to pay $8/month, that's a quick $20MM annual profit with no added expense.

Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter if he didn't see it benefitting him in the long run. He knows how to provide customers with a superior product, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a Twitter IPO for 5x once his improvements are fully in place. Everything you're seeing in the media now is hyped up to get clicks and Musk as the villain is going to get far more attention than Musk as the hero.

[Sibley]

I'm not an active Twitter user, but I do occasionally visit the site if there's breaking news that interests me.

I would be willing to bet replacing 75% of the workforce with AI will significantly improve the output of the company as a whole.

The $8/month to keep verified status seems like a smart move. It's not financially burdensome to the majority of verified accounts. A quick google search says there are 420,000 verified accounts. If half of them opt to pay $8/month, that's a quick $20MM annual profit with no added expense.

Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter if he didn't see it benefitting him in the long run. He knows how to provide customers with a superior product, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a Twitter IPO for 5x once his improvements are fully in place. Everything you're seeing in the media now is hyped up to get clicks and Musk as the villain is going to get far more attention than Musk as the hero.

I mean, maybe, but you've also got facebook which is now Meta and trying to make everyone do this Metaverse. Which doesn't seem all that successful. So I wouldn't just assume that Musk is making rational, well thought out decisions. He already got hauled into court to make him comply with the purchase contract.

AI has a documented problem with racism and bias, plus sometimes just nonsensical results. It's one thing if the AI output is getting reviewed by humans, but if unfiltered AI is doing content moderation, etc on a social media site - that's going to cause problems. FB got in hot water at some point over moderation and they had to pull in a 3rd party to advise. I don't think its actually easy to run a large social media site, especially when you've got politics involved.

[maizefolk]

AI has a documented problem with racism and bias, plus sometimes just nonsensical results.

"AI" isn't a monolithic entity.

Humans have a documented problem with math (after all most two-year-olds cannot do long division). But I'd still trust a trained accountant to do my taxes.

[Sibley]

AI has a documented problem with racism and bias, plus sometimes just nonsensical results.

"AI" isn't a monolithic entity.

Humans have a documented problem with math (after all most two-year-olds cannot do long division). But I'd still trust a trained accountant to do my taxes.

You are correct, it's not monolithic. But that doesn't change the fact that there's problems with AI in general regarding bias.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-google-bias.html
https://www.science.org/content/article/even-artificial-intelligence-can-acquire-biases-against-race-and-gender
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-artificial-intelligence-can-deepen-racial-and-economic-inequities
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/16/racist-robots-ai/
https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/artificial-intelligence-has-a-problem-with-gender-and-racial-bias-here-s-how-to-solve-it/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/uk-data-watchdog-investigates-whether-ai-systems-show-racial-bias

As for whether you'd trust a trained accountant to do your taxes, so would I. But I'd still double check their work.

[teen persuasion]

I'm not an active Twitter user, but I do occasionally visit the site if there's breaking news that interests me.

I would be willing to bet replacing 75% of the workforce with AI will significantly improve the output of the company as a whole.

The $8/month to keep verified status seems like a smart move. It's not financially burdensome to the majority of verified accounts. A quick google search says there are 420,000 verified accounts. If half of them opt to pay $8/month, that's a quick $20MM annual profit with no added expense.

Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter if he didn't see it benefitting him in the long run. He knows how to provide customers with a superior product, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a Twitter IPO for 5x once his improvements are fully in place. Everything you're seeing in the media now is hyped up to get clicks and Musk as the villain is going to get far more attention than Musk as the hero.

I've been following the blue check mark discussion on Twitter as it evolves.  It's no longer going to be about verified status, at all.  That's what the uproar is over - the $8 badge is just something you pay for, with supposed perk benefits above the unpaid "peasants" (Elon's term).  Most on Twitter want some kind of "verified status", so that we know the CDC account is actually the official CDC and not a parody account.  There's been some hand-waving that Twitter will come up with some other "official" tag for govt, etc., accounts, but no real details to date - unlike the oddly ad hoc rolling out of the $8 badge in random tweets between Elon and Stephen King.

[maizefolk]

Yes and I can give you half a dozen links of humans being bad at math. Or we could just browse the anti mustachian wall of shame and comedy.

Certain AI models (build on certain algorithms and trained on certain datasets) having a problem in certain use cases doesn't mean all approaches to AI will have the same problem in all use cases.

[Phenix]

Musk has a pretty strong history of taking hi-tech to the next level.
Completely changed online banking (PayPal)
Electric cars with better performance and range than ICE comparables
Rockets that can be launched, land themselves, and be relaunched far less expensively than others
Satellite internet that doesn't suck

If anyone can take a technology that currently has flaws and find a way to make it work, my money is on Musk.

[sixwings]

Twitter is also a horrendously bloated org. From what i hear from friends who work there, downsizing isn't a bad idea. It's also not unusual for new owners to replace execs after a buyout, especially in a hostile takeover. What's alarming to me is his whole "free speech" thing and changes to how content is moderated.

[jinga nation]

AI has a documented problem with racism and bias, plus sometimes just nonsensical results. It's one thing if the AI output is getting reviewed by humans, but if unfiltered AI is doing content moderation, etc on a social media site - that's going to cause problems. FB got in hot water at some point over moderation and they had to pull in a 3rd party to advise. I don't think its actually easy to run a large social media site, especially when you've got politics involved.

Could be bad datasets for the models to train on? Bad inputs lead to bad outputs.
The problem is finding good AND sufficient datasets to cover all scenarios.
Then there's massaging the data before feeding it to the bots for their yoga. Om nom nom.

[sonofsven]

New thread: " How To Save $8 per month".

[bacchi]

AI has a documented problem with racism and bias, plus sometimes just nonsensical results. It's one thing if the AI output is getting reviewed by humans, but if unfiltered AI is doing content moderation, etc on a social media site - that's going to cause problems. FB got in hot water at some point over moderation and they had to pull in a 3rd party to advise. I don't think its actually easy to run a large social media site, especially when you've got politics involved.

Could be bad datasets for the models to train on? Bad inputs lead to bad outputs.
The problem is finding good AND sufficient datasets to cover all scenarios.
Then there's massaging the data before feeding it to the bots for their yoga. Om nom nom.

A good lesson is Microsoft's Tay, which quickly became an alt-right troll.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/in-2016-microsofts-racist-chatbot-revealed-the-dangers-of-online-conversation

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay to the public on Twitter. At first, Tay engaged harmlessly with her growing number of followers with banter and lame jokes. But after only a few hours, Tay started tweeting highly offensive things, such as: “I f@#%&*# hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell” or “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job…”

[maizefolk]

The cases where ML goes wrong (typically because of imbalances or active problems in the training dataset, like Tay) make the news.

All the places where we already depend on AI models because they do their jobs well without any fireworks don't.

Getting a good training dataset is often hard, depending on the use case. A lot of the worst "failures" of AI are actually examples of AI learning and reproducing problems present in the initial human generated training dataset because of human's documented problem with racism and bias.

[ChpBstrd]

All Musk has to do is execute step 2-3 the typical monopolists' playbook:

1) Eliminate the competition. Twitter and other social media sites have already eliminated most paid journalists' jobs. There is now virtually no competition for people and organizations to get their messages out besides Twitter.

2) Jack up prices. Hence the $8/mo thing for what used to be free.

3) Fend off competitors through network effects, etc.

[gooki]

Twitter is also a horrendously bloated org. From what i hear from friends who work there, downsizing isn't a bad idea. It's also not unusual for new owners to replace execs after a buyout, especially in a hostile takeover.

This. Musk is also good at removing chaff from the middle management teir. The management cull on the Starlink team a few years back is a great example where management was getting in the way of progress. The results seem to speak for themselves.

[maizefolk]

1) Eliminate the competition. Twitter and other social media sites have already eliminated most paid journalists' jobs. There is now virtually no competition for people and organizations to get their messages out besides Twitter.

Is this right though?

A huge number of journalism jobs have disappeared in the last couple of decades and it has been terrible for our democracy. But it isn't clear to me how much of this is driven by twitter vs the huge loss of ad revenue from craigslist and later things like facebook marketplace that destroyed the classified ads sections that used to keep many local papers in the black.

Far from being a method without competition for people and organizations to get their messages out, it isn't clear that twitter even does a good job of reaching significant numbers of "normal" people in the first place. It works for getting messages out to the highly online super politically engaged set but that's only valuable to a relatively small slice of the country (politicians and political activists). Most advertisers have plenty of other options (google, facebook, etc). Most non-political communities have and prefer other venues (reddit, discord, etc).

[roomtempmayo]

If anyone can take a technology that currently has flaws and find a way to make it work, my money is on Musk.

I'm afraid he's mistaking a political problem for a technology problem.

[PDXTabs]

1) Eliminate the competition. Twitter and other social media sites have already eliminated most paid journalists' jobs. There is now virtually no competition for people and organizations to get their messages out besides Twitter.

Is this right though?

The internet probably hasn't helped journalism (though I pay for no less than three online news outlets). But I don't see how social media is hurting journalism.

[nick663]

There's been some hand-waving that Twitter will come up with some other "official" tag for govt, etc., accounts, but no real details to date - unlike the oddly ad hoc rolling out of the $8 badge in random tweets between Elon and Stephen King.

This is kind of how Elon works.  I've heard from friends at Tesla that more than once they have had to develop a new feature after Elon posted about it on twitter.

[Sibley]

Um, you were saying about AI not necessarily being racist and otherwise biased?

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-ai-ethics-1849743051

Getting rid of the people who's job it is to try to make sure the AI isn't racist doesn't seem like a good start.

[Taran Wanderer]

Is it a coincidence that Elon fired all the fact checkers 4 days before the election?

[maizefolk]

Um, you were saying about AI not necessarily being racist and otherwise biased?

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-ai-ethics-1849743051

Getting rid of the people who's job it is to try to make sure the AI isn't racist doesn't seem like a good start.

So your view is that an example of a human being doing bad things should make us more willing to trust human moderators?

Sure seems like humans have a demonstrated history of disregarding ethics.

[SotI]

If Elon brings in a wider range of content moderators to minimize group think, I would consider this beneficial.

And moderating/deleting content that are legally prohibited should be a clear given anyway, for legal reasons.

However, if I remember the deep state censorship discussions of the early 2010s well, Twitter even used to stand up against dodgy "security agency" requests against users. That's an attitude I would like to see coming back.

[nick663]

If Elon brings in a wider range of content moderators to minimize group think, I would consider this beneficial.

That seems pretty difficult.  For example, how do you minimize group think when a major political party's platform is a claim they have zero credible evidence to support? 

[Sibley]

Um, you were saying about AI not necessarily being racist and otherwise biased?

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-ai-ethics-1849743051

Getting rid of the people who's job it is to try to make sure the AI isn't racist doesn't seem like a good start.

So your view is that an example of a human being doing bad things should make us more willing to trust human moderators?

Sure seems like humans have a demonstrated history of disregarding ethics.

Human beings are not monoliths.

There is clearly an underlying difference between how I think and how you think. I fundamentally think that we have progressed technology past the point that we can cope with it. Culture, society, etc do not change that fast, and the advancement and adoption of computers has FAR outstripped the pace of change that can be supported. Which means, unintended and unexpected consequences. I look at what computers and smartphones have done, and yes there's a lot of good but there's also a lot of bad. Tech has taken age old problems and supercharged them. Bullying is one thing, but cyberbullying takes it to a whole new level.

AI is cool and everything, but I don't think it's automatically a net positive. I also don't think we know all the harms that are going to result. A human being can pull the power plug if necessary. If you let AI go, without people overseeing it and at least trying to prevent the bad stuff from happening, then bad stuff is going to happen. Is a human overseer perfect? No. But its better than nothing.

Yes, I use tech, but I am also aware of the negatives of that tech in my life and in the lives of the people around me. Even when its a net positive, there are still negatives in there. And I'm not sure if it is a net positive to society. In some ways, we were better off in the 80s and early 90s than we are today. We can't turn back time, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so we are left to try to cope as best we can, individually and collectively. Adding AI to the mix just adds more that we have to cope with. I suspect that far in the future, historians are going to look back and discuss how the rapid development and adoption of computer technology kicked off whatever era in human history. Just like the Industrial Revolution the Bronze Age, and the agricultural revolution did.

[maizefolk]

Um, you were saying about AI not necessarily being racist and otherwise biased?

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-ai-ethics-1849743051

Getting rid of the people who's job it is to try to make sure the AI isn't racist doesn't seem like a good start.

So your view is that an example of a human being doing bad things should make us more willing to trust human moderators?

Sure seems like humans have a demonstrated history of disregarding ethics.

Human beings are not monoliths.

Neither are artificial intelligences. <-- which was my original point.

I agree with you that there is clearly a difference in how you and I think about the world. You are taking the negatives behaviors of some specific entities and generalizing them to assert that all entities with a set of characteristics must exhibit those same negative behaviors.

AI is cool and everything, but I don't think it's automatically a net positive. I also don't think we know all the harms that are going to result. A human being can pull the power plug if necessary. If you let AI go, without people overseeing it and at least trying to prevent the bad stuff from happening, then bad stuff is going to happen. Is a human overseer perfect? No. But its better than nothing.

I think maybe you know different human beings than I do. I think humans are cool and all, but in lots of situations humans aren't automatically a net positive. When we let humans go without some sort of oversight bad stuff can and does happen. We have thousands of years of recorded history demonstrating all the bad stuff humans do, starting with murder and war, progressing to genocide, and throwing in nuclear meltdowns exacerbated by (human) operator error.

Would AI moderation be perfect? No. It'll make mistakes. But it's better than nothing. And given how much bias and racism humans have been demonstrated to exhibit -- and how much harm (human moderated) social media seems to done to our democracy -- the status quo clearly is not sustainable.