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Perhaps the best example of what Twitter offers now—and what we stand to gain or lose from its demise—is illustrated by the path charted by public-health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, and nurses over the past three years.

They offered guidance that a flailing government response was too slow to provide, and helped cobble together an epidemiological picture of infections and case counts. At a moment when people were terrified and looking for any information at all, Twitter seemed to offer a steady stream of knowledgeable, diligent experts.

But Twitter does another thing quite well, and that’s crushing users with the pressures of algorithmic rewards and all of the risks, exposure, and toxicity that come with virality

t imagining a world without it can feel impossible. What do our politics look like without the strange feedback loop of a Twitter-addled political press and a class of lawmakers that seems to govern more via shitposting than by legislation

What happens if the media lose what the writer Max Read recently described as a “way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it”? The answer is probably messy.

here’s the worry that, absent a distributed central nervous system like Twitter, “the collective worldview of the ‘media’ would instead be over-shaped, from the top down, by the experiences and biases of wealthy publishers, careerist editors, self-loathing journalists, and canny operators operating in relatively closed social and professional circles.”

Twitter is, by some standards, a niche platform, far smaller than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The internet will evolve or mutate around a need for it. I am aware that all of us who can’t quit the site will simply move on when we have to.

Many of the past decade’s most polarizing and influential figures—people such as Donald Trump and Musk himself, who captured attention, accumulated power, and fractured parts of our public consciousness—were also the ones who were thought to be “good” at using the website.

the effects of Twitter’s chief innovation—its character limit—on our understanding of language, nuance, and even truth.

“These days, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us,” he said. “The fact that you have a social media that tells you how many characters to use, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What’s the game there?

in McLuhanian fashion, the constraints and the architecture change not only what messages we receive but how we choose to respond. Often that choice is to behave like the platform itself: We are quicker to respond and more aggressive than we might be elsewhere, with a mindset toward engagement and visibility

it’s easy to argue that we stand to gain something essential and human if we lose Twitter. But there is plenty about Twitter that is also essential and human.

No other tool has connected me to the world—to random bits of news, knowledge, absurdist humor, activism, and expertise, and to scores of real personal interactions—like Twitter has

What makes evaluating a life beyond Twitter so hard is that everything that makes the service truly special is also what makes it interminable and toxic.

the worst experience you can have on the platform is to “win” and go viral. Generally, it seems that the more successful a person is at using Twitter, the more they refer to it as a hellsite.

Using tech devices is addictive, and it's becoming more and more difficult to disengage with their technology.In fact, the average US adult spends more than 11 hours daily in the digital world

These days, we have a world of information at our fingertips via the internet. While this is useful, it does have some drawbacks. Entrepreneur Beth Haggerty said she finds that it "limits pure creative thought, at times, because we are developing habits to Google everything to quickly find an answer."

Technology can have a negative impact on relationships, particularly when it affects how we communicate.One of the primary issues is that misunderstandings are much more likely to occur when communicating via text or email

Another social skill that technology is helping to erode is young people's ability to read body language and nuance in face-to-face encounters.

young adults who use seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than those who use two or fewer platforms.

Can you imagine doing your job without the help of technology of any kind? What about communicating? Or traveling? Or entertaining yourself?

Smartphone slouch. Desk slump. Text neck. Whatever you call it, the way we hold ourselves when we use devices like phones, computers, and tablets isn't healthy.

hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.

Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”

A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.

AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.

GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.

it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.

sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.

the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.

OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”

“We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”

OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.

OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests

Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.

The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.

GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.

The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.

GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.

The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.

Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.

In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.

Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.

Musk seems willing to grant this power to racists, conspiracy theorists, and trolls. This isn’t great for reasonable people who want to have nuanced conversations on social media, but the joke has always been on them. Twitter isn’t that place, and it never will be.

one of Musk’s first moves after taking over was to fire the company’s head of policy—an individual who had publicly stated a commitment to both free speech and preventing abuse.

On Friday, Musk tweeted that Twitter would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” noting that “no major content decisions [would] happen before that council convenes.” Just three hours later, replying to a question about lifting a suspension on The Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, Musk signaled that maybe that wasn’t exactly right; he tweeted: “Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail.” He says he wants a democratic council, yet he’s also setting policy by decree.

Perhaps most depressingly, this behavior is quite familiar. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has pointed out, we are all stuck “watching Musk speed run the content moderation learning curve” and making the same mistakes that social-media executives made with their platforms in their first years at the helm.

Musk has charged himself with solving the central, seemingly intractable issue at the core of hundreds of years of debate about free speech. In the social-media era, no entity has managed to balance preserving both free speech and genuine open debate across the internet at scale.

Musk hasn’t just given himself a nearly impossible task; he’s also created conditions for his new company’s failure. By acting incoherently as a leader and lording the prospect of mass terminations over his employees, he’s created a dysfunctional and chaotic work environment for the people who will ultimately execute his changes to the platform