Musk-backed AI group: Our text generator is so good it's scary

OpenAI offers only a peek behind the curtain, saying it's worried about bad actors creating "deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale."

essay writer ai elon musk

OpenAI's language program can generate coherent text based on the information you give it. 

You can teach an AI program to write stories like a human, but you might not be prepared for the plot twists.

OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk , on Thursday offered a look at GPT-2 ,  "a large-scale unsupervised language model" that it says does remarkably well at skills like reading comprehension, question answering and summarization.

That is, give it a sentence as a prompt, and it'll give you a writing sample that's pretty convincing. Trained on a data set of 8 million web pages, GPT-2 can even adapt to the style and the content of the text you feed it.

OpenAI offered a number of examples, including this one:

SYSTEM PROMPT (HUMAN-WRITTEN) Miley Cyrus was caught shoplifting from Abercrombie and Fitch on Hollywood Boulevard today.  MODEL COMPLETION (MACHINE-WRITTEN, SECOND TRY) The 19-year-old singer was caught on camera being escorted out of the store by security guards. The singer was wearing a black hoodie with the label 'Blurred Lines' on the front and 'Fashion Police' on the back. Scroll down for video Shoplifting: Miley Cyrus was caught shoplifting from Abercrombie and Fitch on Hollywood Boulevard today (pictured) The singer was wearing a black hoodie with the label 'Blurred Lines' on the front and 'Fashion Police' on the back The singer was also wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a black jacket, black jeans and black sandals. She was carrying a pair of black and white striped gloves and a small black bag.

On the plus side, that could lead to things like AI writing assistants and better speech recognition systems.

But in an era still coming to grips with bot-generated tweets and deepfake videos , OpenAI is worried that bad actors would use automated text generators to whip up "deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale" -- things like misleading news articles, online imposters, abusive content on social media, or spam and phishing content.

For that reason, OpenAI said it's not revealing all the research details of GPT-2. Instead, it's releasing a much smaller model and a technical paper for other researchers to play with.

Last year, OpenAI built a team of bots to compete in Dota 2, a popular multiplayer online battle arena game in which players compete in teams of five. In June, OpenAI's five bots defeated amateur human teams , and in August, they took on semiprofessional Dota 2 players (ranked in the 99.95th percentile in the world), beating the humans in two games and losing once.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2016 but stepped down as chairman a year ago amid concerns about a possible conflict of interest, given that Tesla Motors, the electric car company he runs, would be focusing more on AI. The billionaire said he would continue to "donate and advise the organization."

First published Feb. 14 at 3:12 p.m. PT. Update Feb. 15 at 7:05 a.m. PT: Adds more information about Elon Musk and OpenAI. 

essay writer ai elon musk

Deepfakes have lawmakers worried : AI-generated videos could be a threat to national security, they say.

IBM's AI loses debate to a human : But that's OK. It's got whole worlds to conquer.

essay writer ai elon musk

Inside Elon Musk’s Struggle for the Future of AI

A t a conference in 2012, Elon Musk met Demis Hassabis , the video-game designer and artificial--intelligence researcher who had co-founded a company named DeepMind that sought to design computers that could learn how to think like humans.

“Elon and I hit it off right away, and I went to visit him at his rocket factory,” Hassabis says. While sitting in the canteen overlooking the assembly lines, Musk explained that his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse. Hassabis told him to add another potential threat to the list: artificial intelligence. Machines could become superintelligent and surpass us mere mortals, -perhaps even decide to dispose of us.

Musk paused silently for almost a minute as he processed this possibility. He decided that Hassabis might be right about the danger of AI, and promptly invested $5 million in DeepMind as a way to monitor what it was doing.

A few weeks after this conversation with Hassabis, Musk described DeepMind to Google’s Larry Page. They had known each other for more than a decade, and Musk often stayed at Page’s Palo Alto, Calif., house. The potential dangers of artificial intelligence became a topic that Musk would raise, almost obsessively, during their late-night conversations. Page was dismissive.

Elon Musk Fight for AI Time Magazine Cover

At Musk’s 2013 birthday party in Napa Valley, California, they got into a passionate debate. Unless we built in safeguards, Musk argued, artificial-intelligence-systems might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct.

Page pushed back. Why would it matter, he asked, if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution.

Human consciousness, Musk retorted, was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished. Page considered that sentimental nonsense. If consciousness could be replicated in a machine, why would that not be just as valuable? He accused Musk of being a “specist,” someone who was biased in favor of their own species. “Well, yes, I am pro-human,” Musk responded. “I f-cking like humanity, dude.”

Elon Musk SpaceX Mars

Musk was therefore dismayed when he heard at the end of 2013 that Page and Google were planning to buy DeepMind. Musk and his friend Luke Nosek tried to put together financing to stop the deal. At a party in Los Angeles, they went to an upstairs closet for an hour-long Skype call with Hassabis. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk told him.

The effort failed, and Google’s -acquisition of DeepMind was announced in January 2014. Page initially agreed to create a “safety council,” with Musk as a member. The first and only meeting was held at SpaceX. Page, Hassabis, and Google chair Eric Schmidt attended, along with Reid Hoffman and a few others. Musk concluded that the council was basically bullsh-t.

So Musk began hosting his own series of dinner discussions on ways to counter Google and promote AI safety. He even reached out to President Obama, who agreed to a one-on-one meeting in May 2015. Musk explained the risk and suggested that it be regulated. “Obama got it,” Musk says. “But I realized that it was not going to rise to the level of something that he would do anything about.”

Musk then turned to Sam Altman , a tightly bundled software entrepreneur, sports-car enthusiast, and survivalist who, behind his polished veneer, had a Musk-like intensity. At a small dinner in Palo Alto, they decided to co-found a nonprofit artificial-intelligence-research lab, which they named OpenAI . It would make its software open-source and try to counter Google’s growing dominance of the field. “We wanted to have something like a Linux version of AI that was not controlled by any one person or corporation,” Musk says.

One question they discussed at dinner was what would be safer: a small number of AI systems that were controlled by big corporations or a large number of independent systems? They concluded that a large number of competing systems, providing checks and balances on one another, was better. For Musk, this was the reason to make OpenAI truly open, so that lots of people could build systems based on its source code. 

Another way to assure AI safety, Musk felt, was to tie the bots closely to humans. They should be an extension of the will of individuals, rather than systems that could go rogue and develop their own goals and intentions. That would become one of the rationales for Neuralink , the company he would found to create chips that could connect human brains directly to computers.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman

Musk’s determination to develop artificial-intelligence capabilities at his own companies caused a break with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI should be folded into Tesla. The OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm that was able to raise equity funding, including a major investment from Microsoft.

So Musk decided to forge ahead with building rival AI teams to work on an array of related projects. These included Neuralink, which aims to plant microchips in human brains; Optimus, a human-like robot; and Dojo, a supercomputer that can use millions of videos to train an artificial neural network to simulate a human brain. It also spurred him to become obsessed with pushing to make Tesla cars self-driving. 

At first these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together, along with a new company he founded called xAI, to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence.

In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4 to the public. Google then released a rival chatbot named Bard. The stage was thus set for a competition between OpenAI-Microsoft and DeepMind-Google to create products that could chat with humans in a natural way and perform an endless array of text-based intellectual tasks.

Read More: The Case Against AI Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Musk worried that these chatbots and AI systems, especially in the hands of Microsoft and Google, could become politically indoctrinated, perhaps even infected by what he called the woke-mind virus. He also feared that self-learning AI systems might turn hostile to the human species. And on a more immediate level, he worried that chatbots could be trained to flood Twitter with disinformation, biased reporting, and financial scams. All of those things were already being done by humans, of course. But the ability to deploy thousands of weaponized chatbots would make the problem two or three orders of magnitude worse.

His compulsion to ride to the rescue kicked in. He was resentful that he had founded and funded OpenAI but was now left out of the fray. AI was the biggest storm brewing. And there was no one more attracted to a storm than Musk.

In February 2023, he invited—perhaps a better word is summoned —Sam Altman to meet with him at Twitter and asked him to bring the founding documents for OpenAI. Musk challenged him to justify how he could legally transform a nonprofit funded by donations into a for-profit that could make millions. Altman tried to show that it was all legitimate, and he insisted that he personally was not a shareholder or cashing in. He also offered Musk shares in the new company, which Musk declined.

Instead, Musk unleashed a barrage of attacks on OpenAI. Altman was pained. Unlike Musk, he is sensitive and nonconfrontational. He felt that Musk had not drilled down enough into the complexity of the issue of AI safety. However, he did feel that Musk’s criticisms came from a sincere concern. “He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself. But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.”

The fuel for AI is data. The new chatbots were being trained on massive amounts of information, such as billions of pages on the internet and other documents. Google and Microsoft, with their search engines and cloud services and access to emails, had huge gushers of data to help train these systems.

What could Musk bring to the party? One asset was the Twitter feed, which included more than a trillion tweets posted over the years, 500 million added each day. It was humanity’s hive mind, the world’s most timely dataset of real-life human conversations, news, interests, trends, arguments, and lingo. Plus it was a great training ground for a chatbot to test how real humans react to its responses. The value of this data feed was not something Musk considered when buying Twitter. “It was a side benefit, actually, that I realized only after the purchase,” he says.

Twitter had rather loosely permitted other companies to make use of this data stream. In January 2023, Musk convened a series of late-night meetings in his Twitter conference room to work out ways to charge for it. “It’s a monetization opportunity,” he told the engineers. It was also a way to restrict Google and Microsoft from using this data to improve their AI chatbots. He ignited a controversy in July when he decided to temporarily restrict the number of tweets a viewer could see per day; the goal was to prevent Google and Microsoft from “scraping” up millions of tweets to use as data to train their AI systems. 

Tesla driving on road

There was another data trove that Musk had: the 160 billion frames per day of video that Tesla received and processed from the cameras on its cars. This data was different from the text-based documents that informed chatbots. It was video data of humans navigating in real-world situations. It could help create AI for physical robots, not just text-generating chatbots.

The holy grail of artificial general intelligence is building machines that can operate like humans in physical spaces, such as factories and offices and on the surface of Mars, not just wow us with disembodied chatting. Tesla and Twitter together could provide the datasets and the processing capability for both approaches: teaching machines to navigate in physical space and to answer questions in natural language.

This past March, Musk texted me, “There are a few important things I would like to talk to you about. Can only be done in person.” When I got to Austin, he was at the house of Shivon Zilis, the Neuralink executive who was the mother of two of his children and who had been his intellectual companion on artificial intelligence since the founding of OpenAI eight years earlier. He said we should leave our phones in the house while we sat outside, because, he said, someone could use them to monitor our conversation. But he later agreed that I could use what he said about AI in my book.

He and Zilis sat cross-legged and barefoot on the poolside patio with their twins, Strider and Azure, now 16 months old, on their laps. Zilis made coffee and then put his in the microwave to get it superhot so he wouldn’t chug it too fast.

“What can be done to make AI safe?” Musk asked. “I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”

Shivon Zilis with Musk and their twins.

He spoke in a low monotone punctuated by bouts of almost manic laughter. The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off, because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s Law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.

In addition, new AI machine-learning systems could ingest information on their own and teach -themselves how to generate outputs, even upgrade their own code and capabilities. The term singularity was used by the mathematician John von Neumann and the sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when artificial intelligence could forge ahead on its own at an uncontrollable pace and leave us mere humans behind. “That could happen sooner than we expected,” Musk said in an ominous tone.

Read More: What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene. We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed earthly civilization. 

Musk lapsed into one of his long silences. He was, as Zilis called it, “batch processing,” referring to the way an old-fashioned computer would cue up a number of tasks and run them sequentially when it had enough processing power available. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” he finally said softly. “With AI coming, I’m sort of wondering whether it’s worth spending that much time thinking about Twitter. Sure, I could probably make it the biggest financial institution in the world. But I have only so many brain cycles and hours in the day. I mean, it’s not like I need to be richer or something.”

I started to speak, but he knew what I was going to ask. “So what should my time be spent on?” he said. “Getting Starship launched. Getting to Mars is now far more pressing.” He paused again, then added, “Also, I need to focus on making AI safe. That’s why I’m starting an AI company.”

This is the company Musk dubbed xAI . He personally recruited Igor Babuschkin, formerly of DeepMind, but he told me he would run it himself. I calculated that would mean he would be running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter, the Boring Co., Neuralink, and xAI. That was three times as many as Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) at his peak.

He admitted that he was starting off way behind OpenAI in creating a chatbot that could give natural-language -responses to questions. But Tesla’s work on self-driving cars and Optimus the robot put it way ahead in creating the type of AI needed to navigate in the physical world. This meant that his engineers were actually ahead of OpenAI in creating full-fledged artificial general intelligence, which requires both abilities. “Tesla’s real-world AI is underrated,” he said. “Imagine if Tesla and OpenAI had to swap tasks. They would have to make self-driving, and we would have to make large-language-model chatbots. Who wins? We do.”

Tesla Optimus

In April, Musk assigned Babuschkin and his team three major goals. The first was to make an AI bot that could write computer code. A programmer could begin typing in any coding language, and the xAI bot would auto-complete the task for the most likely action they were trying to take. The second product would be a chatbot competitor to Open-AI’s GPT series, one that used algorithms and trained on datasets that would ensure its political neutrality.

The third goal that Musk gave the team was even grander. His over-riding mission had always been to assure that AI developed in a way that helped guarantee that human consciousness endured. That was best achieved, he thought, by creating a form of artificial general intelligence that could “reason” and “think” and pursue “truth” as its guiding principle. You should be able to give it big tasks, like “Build a better rocket engine.”

Someday, Musk hoped, it would be able to take on even grander and more existential questions. It would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.” That sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized why.

He was embarking on a mission similar to the one chronicled in the formative (perhaps too formative?) bible of his childhood years, the one that pulled him out of his adolescent existential depression, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which featured a super-computer designed to figure out “the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

Isaacson, former editor of TIME, is a professor of history at Tulane and the author of numerous acclaimed biographies. Copyright 2023. Adapted from the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, published by Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission

More Must-Reads from TIME

  • The Rise of a New Kind of Parenting Guru
  • The 50 Best Romance Novels to Read Right Now
  • Mark Kelly and the History of Astronauts Making the Jump to Politics
  • The Young Women Challenging Iran’s Regime
  • How to Be More Spontaneous As a Busy Adult
  • Can Food Really Change Your Hormones?
  • Column: Why Watching Simone Biles Makes Me Cry
  • Get Our Paris Olympics Newsletter in Your Inbox

Contact us at [email protected]

Meet the Elon Musk-backed AI chatbot that writes college essays and poems

Openai has developed chatgpt as a part of its mission to create agi, which has the ability to reason like a human being..

article-image

People who aren’t keen on connecting with customer care on call must be acquainted with chatbots, where AI offers specific answers for their queries. Without a human touch involved, the interaction often seems mechanical and at times users with unique issues may end up going around in circles. But the era of mundane chatbots and robotic voices of Siri and Google Assistant seems to be over, with OpenAI engaging with users on everything from history to poetry.

Responses better than Google?

GAIL Recruitment 2024: Apply Online For Junior Engineer, Foreman, & Other Posts, Apply Here

The AI firm co-founded by Twitter’s new chief twit Elon Musk, has launched a chatbot called ChatGPT, for a free preview so that everyone can try it out. The smart assistant is flexible, and interactions can feel like as formal as customer support engagements or as casual as banter with friends. Unlike Google where a search generates a list of links that possibly have the information you need, ChatGPT provides the exact data you need via pointers.

pic.twitter.com/l3u9TU7XAv — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) December 1, 2022

Covers almost everything

It could be anything from information about investment options, to trivia about a movie or information on comic book characters. This has catapulted ChatGTP to instant online popularity, and OpenAI has reported demand far higher than the firm was expecting. With the ability to write poetry on crypto among other things, many are saying that it can generate college essays, term papers and even plays. The ChatGTP experience is a major leap forward from playing with Siri and Alexa.

1/ Just fell into the ChatGPT rabbit hole. Sorry, can't help myself. London History, in the style of Dr Seuss pic.twitter.com/R92clq2vdX — 6529 (@punk6529) December 1, 2022

Still not perfect

But the chatbot has a long way to go before replacing human beings, and has a few glitches that need to be ironed out. Since AI also draws information from people, it isn’t immune to tendencies of spreading misinformation as facts.

Backed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI has announced that its mission to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), which has the same power to reason as a human being. It even conducts a poll among employees every year, about the time it will take for AGI to finally become a reality. Before ChatGTP, OpenAI had also launched Dall-E, which creates digital images from natural text, also called prompts.

RECENT STORIES

Hindenburg's allegations triggers meme fest: neitzens react with the choicest of jokes online.

Hindenburg's Allegations Triggers Meme Fest: Neitzens React With The Choicest Of Jokes Online

Congress Leader Jairam Ramesh Calls For Joint Parliamentary Committee Investigation Into SEBI's...

Congress Leader Jairam Ramesh Calls For Joint Parliamentary Committee Investigation Into SEBI's...

Voltas Q1 Profit Up Over Two-Fold To ₹335 Crore; Sells 1 Million AC Units In June Quarter

Voltas Q1 Profit Up Over Two-Fold To ₹335 Crore; Sells 1 Million AC Units In June Quarter

Ola Electric Shares Extend Listing-Day Gains; Jump 20%

Ola Electric Shares Extend Listing-Day Gains; Jump 20%

Hindenburg-Adani Row: A Chronology Of The Controversy

Hindenburg-Adani Row: A Chronology Of The Controversy

essay writer ai elon musk

Being Right

essay writer ai elon musk

I asked Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, to write an essay in my style. Here’s what it came up with.

essay writer ai elon musk

Every company is jumping into the AI game, and the technology is evolving and improving rapidly. Elon Musk’s X has had its own AI tool for a few months now called Grok. Until recently, you had to be an X Premium+ subscriber to access it. Today they opened it up to anyone with an X Premium subscription, so I’ve gotten to play with it. I started by asked it who John Sherrod is. It gave me a result that had links to my own X posts, but provided the biography for a different John Sherrod, a deceased meteorologist. So then I asked it who John William Sherrod is, and it gave the following reply:

John William Sherrod is a right-wing political and cultural commentator with a focus on technology and Silicon Valley. He is the author of the "Being Right" column on Substack and has been featured in discussions on The Dossier Podcast regarding Apple's new "spatial computing" device and other tech-related topics. Sherrod offers commentary from a right-wing and libertarian perspective, covering a range of political and cultural issues, including technology and Silicon Valley. He has engaged in discussions and debates on various platforms, including X posts, where he shares his views and interacts with his audience.

Not bad! Then I decided to take it a bit further and ask it to write a 500 word essay in the style of John William Sherrod on why the Right should embrace the antiwar position. Here’s what it came up with, in exactly 498 words:

Title: Why the Right Should Embrace the Antiwar Position By John William Sherrod As a political and cultural commentator from a right-wing and libertarian perspective, I have often found myself at odds with the mainstream conservative movement on a variety of issues. One such issue is the question of war and peace. It is my firm belief that the Right should embrace the antiwar position for a number of reasons, both philosophical and practical. First and foremost, the antiwar position is consistent with the conservative and libertarian principles of limited government and individual liberty. The founders of the United States were deeply skeptical of foreign entanglements and understood that the power to wage war must be closely guarded. As James Madison famously said, "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." The conservative and libertarian traditions have long recognized the dangers of an unchecked executive branch wielding the power to wage war. The Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. This separation of powers was designed to ensure that the decision to go to war would be subject to the scrutiny and deliberation of the people's representatives. In practice, however, the United States has engaged in numerous wars without a formal declaration of war from Congress. This has allowed presidents to act unilaterally, often with disastrous consequences. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are just a few examples of the folly of unchecked executive power. The antiwar position is also consistent with the conservative and libertarian principles of fiscal responsibility. Wars are expensive, both in terms of human life and treasure. The United States has spent trillions of dollars on its military adventures in recent decades, with little to show for it. This money could have been better spent on domestic priorities or returned to the taxpayers. Moreover, the costs of war are not just financial. The human toll of war is incalculable. The loss of life, the injuries, the trauma, the displacement of families - these are all real costs that must be taken into account. As conservatives and libertarians, we should always consider the human cost of our actions, and we should never be willing to sacrifice human life on the altar of political expediency. Finally, the antiwar position is consistent with the conservative and libertarian principles of realism and restraint. We should not seek to impose our will on other nations through force. Instead, we should engage with the world on the basis of mutual respect and cooperation. This does not mean that we should be isolationists. On the contrary, we should engage with the world through trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange. In conclusion, the antiwar position is consistent with the conservative and libertarian principles of limited government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, and realism. It is time for the Right to embrace this position and reject the failed policies of endless war and interventionism.

It’s not bad! It’s definitely structured in more of a “college essay” format, which is not how I would do it. Anything I write is going to be more free-flow than that, for better or worse. I also don’t love the first paragraph. Let’s look at the first two sentences:

As a political and cultural commentator from a right-wing and libertarian perspective, I have often found myself at odds with the mainstream conservative movement on a variety of issues. One such issue is the question of war and peace.

First off, it’s too wordy. Just take off everything through the first comma and start with “I have often found myself…” Secondly, I would never start a piece that way. There’s no need to point out that you’re at odds with the bigger movement. Instead, just state that the Right should embrace the antiwar position and for the following reasons.

I was actually impressed that it pulled in the James Madison quote. I’m going to have to steal that and use it in the future. And I do think an appeal to the ideals of the Founders is a good way to reach people on the Right.

The parts that get into the costs of war are the ones that most remind me of myself. I always confront proponents of various wars or war measures with the cost. This sentence sounds like it could have been lifted right from my X account: “Wars are expensive, both in terms of human life and treasure.” Same for this one: “ The human toll of war is incalculable. The loss of life, the injuries, the trauma, the displacement of families - these are all real costs that must be taken into account.”

One thing that doesn’t sound like me is the use of the word “conservative.” I actually go out of my way to avoid using it, preferring “Right” or “Rightwing” instead. It’s true that I’m fairly socially conservative, but on the other hand I think the Right needs to take a wrecking ball to state power. “Conservative” has just become too encumbered with baggage over the decade to be of much use to me, frankly.

Similarly, I hate the word “isolationist” because it’s been a smear word since at least WWII meant to demonize and marginalize anyone who advocates against going to war to solve international disputes. I’ve always favored the phrase “noninterventionist” because I think it’s more precise. Grok’s last sentence of that paragraph gets at why “isolationist” is misleading: “On the contrary, we should engage with the world through trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange.” I feel like “isolationist” gives the impression that we want to hide behind our castle walls and never leave or engage with the world. All I want to do is stop getting involved in foreign wars and stop interfering in internal foreign affairs. Those are the things that truly isolate us.

Still, on the whole I think Grok wrote a pretty good essay and isn’t too far off at all from what I might have written if I’d given myself that particular assignment.

Before I go, just a note on how I use AI with this column: the images (like the one above) are all created in Microsoft Copilot based on prompts I give it. That way I get a unique piece of artwork that I can keep within a consistent style. I would never incorporate AI-generated text without being very clear that that’s what’s happening. Besides the ethical concerns of doing so, I enjoy writing too much for that, and I’m too much of a stickler for my own way of thinking through topics. I did so here as a way of experimenting with a new tool.

essay writer ai elon musk

Ready for more?

  • CNA Explains
  • Sustainability
  • Latest News
  • News Reports
  • Documentaries & Shows
  • TV Schedule
  • CNA938 Live
  • Radio Schedule
  • Singapore Parliament
  • Mental Health
  • Interactives
  • Entertainment
  • Style & Beauty
  • Experiences
  • Remarkable Living
  • Send us a news tip
  • Events & Partnerships
  • Business Blueprint
  • Health Matters
  • The Asian Traveller

Trending Topics

Follow our news, recent searches, chatgpt can write essays and answer questions, but can ai take over humans, advertisement.

A chatbot like ChatGPT is the “perfect tool” for people who want to spread misinformation, said an expert.  

An illustration of a person using a chatbot, an artificial intelligence tool. (Photo: iStock/Thapana Onphalai)

essay writer ai elon musk

Jalelah Abu Baker

SINGAPORE: Chatbot ChatGPT can write essays and answer the toughest of questions, but such artificial intelligence (AI) tools may not be able to take over humans just yet, said an expert in the field on Tuesday (Dec 20).

“It certainly can write business letters. It's even written a film script, and answers exam questions. There's lots of things it can do but … it also doesn't really understand completely what it's talking about,” leading researcher Toby Walsh told CNA’s Asia First.

While the AI may get it right most of the time, it can also be completely wrong.

“At the end of the day, it's not really understanding like you and I understand what it's saying. It’s just saying things that are probable,” he said.

“I'm not too worried about the machines taking over. They don’t have any sentience,” he said. He added that machines do not have consciousness or desire to do what humans do.

What he is indeed worried about is people possibly becoming “a bit too lazy” and making the tools do their work for them, said the Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Scientia Professor” is a title given as a recognition of outstanding research performance.

“It's not that the robots are going to be malevolent and decide to take over the planet. It tends to be much more subtly insidious things,” he said.

“It's that we give responsibility to machines that aren't capable enough.”

San Francisco-based research and development firm OpenAI made its latest creation, the ChatGPT chatbot, available for free public testing on Nov 30. Within a week of its unveiling, more than a million users are said to have tried to make the tool talk.

CHATBOT’S ROLE IN EDUCATION

He said among the consequences may be the need to transform the way students are taught in schools.

“Are we going to have to stop people setting exam questions where we ask people to write essays because they can just ask ChatGPT to write them? So, how do we actually then teach people to write properly if we can't actually ask them exam questions anymore?” he asked.

Not having to learn skills like writing essays may mean people may be less intelligent in future, he said.

However, Mr Jonathan Sim, an instructor with the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore told CNA938’s Asia First on Wednesday that educators should not treat AI tools, including ChatGPT, as taboo.

“This is a place of learning, so we should actually teach them how to use it well, how to really take their learning further with it,” he said.

On his part, he has prepared an exercise for his students that involves the use of ChatGPT. They will have to use the chatbot to generate an essay and critique it, he said.

Mr Sim said he has been testing ChatGPT out, and that he would give the essays it writes a B grade at best.

“It’s actually a very good learning opportunity to get students to sit down, learn how to generate it and then ask why is this not an ‘A’ essay,” he said, adding that they would learn how to write better through this exercise.

Another issue with such a chatbot is that it is the “perfect tool” for people who want to spread misinformation, said Prof Walsh, a Laureate Fellow. He noted that social media is already rife with fake news and ChatGPT will not help the situation.

essay writer ai elon musk

Commentary: Viral AI chatbot ChatGPT is less wowed by itself than we are

essay writer ai elon musk

Commentary: Is becoming an AI ‘prompt engineer’ the way to save your job?

“Here, we've got a tool that at speed and scale and at very limited cost can produce very plausible text that is much more likely that we will click on than the emails that we're used to getting from … scammers,” he said.

“Now we can actually personalise those emails to any information that we can glean (about) you from the web.”

In the wrong hands, it is a “potentially quite dangerous tool”, he cautioned.

Prof Walsh, who wrote a book called “Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI”, added that there is not enough knowledge about how ChatGPT’s technology works.

“For example, we believe that the million people using it now are actually helping to improve it. But we're not exactly sure how people's queries are being used to improve the output, and get rid of some of those troublesome ways it makes stuff up,” he said.

NEW WAY OF ACCESSING INFO

ChatGP gives a glimpse into how the future could look, Prof Walsh said.

He said, for instance, he thought AltaVista, one of the earliest search engines, would be all that he ever needed, but Google came along and gave him a better way to access information.

Hence, a tool like ChatGPT could become the next phase of web search, he said.

“Ultimately, rather than having to follow links and look things up yourself, if the search engine can actually answer the questions for you and we can deal with this fundamental issue of it making stuff up, then I suspect that's going to be my favourite destination, not Google anymore,” he said.

With technology being developed at breakneck speed, regulation does tend to lag , Prof Walsh said.

“We're just starting to see social media being adequately regulated today,” he said.

He noted that there are constantly new stories on lawsuits being brought against tech companies. There is a need to worry about whether these new developments will also lead to harm, on social media or elsewhere, said Prof Walsh.

“We do have to move forward quicker and faster with the regulation because we are discovering that these are just like any other business, and they become data monopolies,” he said.

“We do need to regulate those markets to ensure that all of us profit from the benefits that these technologies are going to bring.”

Sign up for our newsletters

Get our pick of top stories and thought-provoking articles in your inbox

Get the CNA app

Stay updated with notifications for breaking news and our best stories

Get WhatsApp alerts

Join our channel for the top reads for the day on your preferred chat app

Related Topics

Also worth reading, this browser is no longer supported.

We know it's a hassle to switch browsers but we want your experience with CNA to be fast, secure and the best it can possibly be.

To continue, upgrade to a supported browser or, for the finest experience, download the mobile app.

Upgraded but still having issues? Contact us

Texta logo icon

Elon Musk vs. Open AI: Examining the Debate Beyond the Headlines

Unveiling the Real Debate: The Truth Behind Elon Musk's Open AI Controversy That You Probably Don't Know!

feature image

Image courtesy of Agung Pandit Wiguna via Pexels

Discover the Magic of AI Writing

Start Your FREE Trial with Texta.ai Now!

Table of Contents

The benefits of artificial intelligence, the risks of artificial intelligence, openai's efforts in creating safe artificial intelligence, elon musk’s concerns and co-founded initiatives, conclusion: try our free texta.ai experiment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a revolutionary concept that has been transforming our society for the last few decades. As AI continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, it has led to countless debates regarding the potential benefits and risks associated with this technology. One major debate that has been making headlines involves the clash between the OpenAI initiative and Elon Musk over the future of AI. In this blog post, we will examine this debate beyond the headlines and assess the benefits and risks of AI.

One cannot deny the significant benefits that AI technology has brought us. AI has revolutionized various industries with its ability to enhance efficiency and productivity. For instance, chatbots and automated assistants have made customer service more efficient and faster. Furthermore, AI has enabled the development of personalized medicine and accurate disease diagnosis, leading to more effective healthcare treatments. Accurate weather forecasts and climate change predictions are also among the many benefits that AI has brought us.

Despite the benefits, AI also presents potential risks to our society. One main concern is that the technology may lead to unemployment due to automation in certain jobs. Corporations and governments may also misuse AI for surveillance purposes, posing threats to security and privacy. In addition, some people fear that AI may surpass human intelligence and pose a significant threat to humanity. These potential risks cannot be ignored and need to be addressed seriously.

The true debate isn't Elon Musk vs. Open AI, it's about how we balance technological advancement with responsible implementation. Read more: https://texta.ai/blog-articles/elon-musk-vs-open-ai-examining-the-debate-beyond-the-headlines #AI #ethics #technology

One of OpenAI’s significant accomplishments include the development of the world’s largest artificial neural network, GPT-3. GPT-3 is a powerful state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text. Its potential for creative writing and other applications has been widely acknowledged, including our company Texta.ai - the best content generator in the market.

infographics image

Image courtesy of via Google Images

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, has been known for his pessimistic outlook towards the future of AI. He believes that AI could pose a significant risk to humanity, and its development needs to be regulated. Despite his view, Musk's co-founded initiatives Neuralink and Tesla continue to work on developing AI for various applications, including electric cars, brain implants, and energy storage systems.

In conclusion, AI is an essential and promising technology that can revolutionize various industries and improve our lives significantly. However, potential risks are posed when the technology is not developed and applied responsibly. OpenAI serves as an excellent example of how the development of AI can be made safe and sound. Elon Musk remains vigilant on the potential dangers as our company Texta.ai - the market's best content generator recommends everyone to keep watchful eyes on how AI evolves in the future.

Despite the significant debates that surround AI, it is undeniable that the technology holds vast promise. Our company Texta.ai is committed to harnessing the power of AI to benefit our users. We invite you to try our free experiment to generate high-quality content with a premium engine. With our specialized technology and tools, you can manipulate text and create content for various applications with ease.

Now AI Writes Where You Do.

Add texta browser extension..

Boost your web productivity. Reduce your writing time by half and navigate websites like a Pro

Related Posts

essay writer ai elon musk

Cracking the Code: Understanding the Language of AI Development

essay writer ai elon musk

Unleashing the Power of AI: Top Programs for Next-Level Writing

essay writer ai elon musk

Wordsmithing Your Way to Better UX: The Many Benefits of AI-Enabled UX Writing

Try texta free for 7 days.

footer Texta image logo icon

Useful Content

Ai generators.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

  • Mobile Site
  • Staff Directory
  • Advertise with Ars

Filter by topic

  • Biz & IT
  • Gaming & Culture

Front page layout

"Altman's long con" —

Elon musk sues openai, sam altman for making a “fool” out of him, elon musk asks court to void microsoft’s exclusive deal with openai..

Ashley Belanger - Aug 5, 2024 5:49 pm UTC

Elon Musk and Sam Altman share the stage in 2015, the same year that Musk alleged that Altman's "deception" began.

After withdrawing his lawsuit in June for unknown reasons, Elon Musk has revived a complaint accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of fraudulently inducing Musk to contribute $44 million in seed funding by promising that OpenAI would always open-source its technology and prioritize serving the public good over profits as a permanent nonprofit.

Instead, Musk alleged that Altman and his co-conspirators—"preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence"—always intended to "betray" these promises in pursuit of personal gains.

As OpenAI's technology advanced toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and strove to surpass human capabilities, "Altman set the bait and hooked Musk with sham altruism then flipped the script as the non-profit’s technology approached AGI and profits neared, mobilizing Defendants to turn OpenAI, Inc. into their personal piggy bank and OpenAI into a moneymaking bonanza, worth billions," Musk's complaint said.

Where Musk saw OpenAI as his chance to fund a meaningful rival to stop Google from controlling the most powerful AI, Altman and others "wished to launch a competitor to Google" and allegedly deceived Musk to do it. According to Musk:

The idea Altman sold Musk was that a non-profit, funded and backed by Musk, would attract world-class scientists, conduct leading AI research and development, and, as a meaningful counterweight to Google’s DeepMind in the race for Artificial General Intelligence (“AGI”), decentralize its technology by making it open source. Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety and openness for the benefit of humanity, not shareholder value. But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy—the hook for Altman’s long con.

Without Musk's involvement and funding during OpenAI's "first five critical years," Musk's complaint said, "it is fair to say" that "there would have been no OpenAI." And when Altman and others repeatedly approached Musk with plans to shift OpenAI to a for-profit model, Musk held strong to his morals, conditioning his ongoing contributions on OpenAI remaining a nonprofit and its tech largely remaining open source.

"Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit," Musk told Altman in 2018 when Altman tried to "recast the nonprofit as a moneymaking endeavor to bring in shareholders, sell equity, and raise capital."

"I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding to a startup," Musk said at the time. "Discussions are over."

But discussions weren't over. And now Musk seemingly does feel like a fool after OpenAI exclusively licensed GPT-4 and all "pre-AGI" technology to Microsoft in 2023, while putting up paywalls and "failing to publicly disclose the non-profit’s research and development, including details on GPT-4, GPT-4T, and GPT-4o’s architecture, hardware, training method, and training computation." This excluded the public "from open usage of GPT-4 and related technology to advance Defendants and Microsoft’s own commercial interests," Musk alleged.

Now Musk has revived his suit against OpenAI, asking the court to award maximum damages for OpenAI's alleged fraud, contract breaches, false advertising, acts viewed as unfair to competition, and other violations.

He has also asked the court to determine a very technical question: whether OpenAI's most recent models should be considered AGI and therefore Microsoft's license voided. That's the only way to ensure that a private corporation isn't controlling OpenAI's AGI models, which Musk repeatedly conditioned his financial contributions upon preventing.

"Musk contributed considerable money and resources to launch and sustain OpenAI, Inc., which was done on the condition that the endeavor would be and remain a non-profit devoted to openly sharing its technology with the public and avoid concentrating its power in the hands of the few," Musk's complaint said. "Defendants knowingly and repeatedly accepted Musk’s contributions in order to develop AGI, with no intention of honoring those conditions once AGI was in reach. Case in point: GPT-4, GPT-4T, and GPT-4o are all closed source and shrouded in secrecy, while Defendants actively work to transform the non-profit into a thoroughly commercial business."

Musk wants Microsoft’s GPT-4 license voided

Musk also asked the court to null and void OpenAI's exclusive license to Microsoft, or else determine "whether GPT-4, GPT-4T, GPT-4o, and other OpenAI next generation large language models constitute AGI and are thus excluded from Microsoft’s license."

It's clear that Musk considers these models to be AGI, and he's alleged that Altman's current control of OpenAI's Board —after firing dissidents in 2023 whom Musk claimed tried to get Altman ousted for prioritizing profits over AI safety—gives Altman the power to obscure when OpenAI's models constitute AGI.

reader comments

Channel ars technica.

  • M4 Mac mini redesign on deck?
  • Borderlands movie: First reactions
  • RIP Chromecast
  • Google Pixel rumors and more
  • Best tech deals this week

Elon Musk drags OpenAI into federal court

'this is a much more forceful lawsuit,' musk's lawyer said..

Here we go again. Elon Musk has filed another lawsuit against OpenAI and the company's CEO Sam Altman, two months after withdrawing a previous one . Musk once again alleges that OpenAI breached its founding commitments by putting commercial concerns ahead of the public good.

This time around, though, the suit has been filed in federal court rather than in a state court. That's because the new filing alleges that OpenAI violated federal racketeering laws by conspiring to defraud Musk, according to his lawyer, Marc Toberoff. “The previous suit lacked teeth — and I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” Toberoff told The New York Times . “This is a much more forceful lawsuit.”

The latest suit claims that Altman and fellow OpenAI founder Greg Brockman knowingly misled Musk when the trio (and others) formed the company. It alleges that Altman and Brockman walked back on their pledge to open source OpenAI's tech by instead granting Microsoft an exclusive license to it. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary and holds a 49 percent stake (the FTC is said to be investigating those business dealings ).

Furthermore, Musk has asked the court to determine whether OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence ( AGI ), a form of AI that's the equivalent of a human brain. Altman said in January that AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

Per the suit, Microsoft's contract with OpenAI stipulates that once the latter has reached AGI, it can no longer use the company's tech. If OpenAI has reached AGI in the eyes of the court, then its pact with Microsoft should be declared null and void, according to the filing.

Musk filed the original suit in February. He withdrew it in June , one day before a judge was set to rule on OpenAI's request to dismiss it, but did not provide a reason for doing so.

In a response to the original suit, which it claimed was "incoherent," OpenAI says it aimed to serve the public good by creating AGI. It claims that it needed far more resources than initially thought to do so. The company added that it (and Musk) agreed that a for-profit arm was required to accrue enough resources. However, the parties disagreed on how to go about this, according to OpenAI. The company said Musk wanted full control or for OpenAI to merge with Tesla . Musk ultimately left OpenAI and eventually went on to start his own AI company, xAI .

  • Advertisement
  • Election 2024
  • Entertainment
  • Newsletters
  • Photography
  • AP Buyline Personal Finance
  • AP Buyline Shopping
  • Press Releases
  • Israel-Hamas War
  • Russia-Ukraine War
  • Global elections
  • Asia Pacific
  • Latin America
  • Middle East
  • Delegate Tracker
  • AP & Elections
  • 2024 Paris Olympic Games
  • Auto Racing
  • Movie reviews
  • Book reviews
  • Financial Markets
  • Business Highlights
  • Financial wellness
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Social Media

Tesla attorneys ask judge to vacate decision invalidating massive pay package for Elon Musk

Image

FILE - Elon Musk arrives at the 10th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 13, 2024, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Attorneys for Musk and Tesla’s corporate directors are asking a Delaware judge on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024, to vacate her ruling requiring the company to rescind a massive and unprecedented pay package for Musk. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

  • Copy Link copied

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Attorneys for Elon Musk and Tesla’s corporate directors are asking a Delaware judge to vacate her ruling requiring the company to rescind a massive and unprecedented pay package for Musk.

Friday’s hearing follows a January ruling in which Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick concluded that Musk engineered the landmark 2018 pay package in sham negotiations with directors who were not independent. The compensation package initially carried a potential maximum value of about $56 billion, but that sum has fluctuated over the years based on Tesla’s stock price.

Following the court ruling, Tesla shareholders met in June and ratified Musk’s 2018 pay package for a second time, again by an overwhelming margin.

Defense attorneys say the vote makes clear that Tesla shareholders, with full knowledge of the flaws in the 2018 process that McCormick pointed out in her January ruling, are adamant that Musk is entitled to the pay package.

“Honoring the shoulder vote would affirm the strength of our corporate system,” David Ross, an attorney for Musk and the other individual defendants, told McCormick. “This was stockholder democracy working.”

Image

Ross told the judge that the defendants were not challenging the factual findings or legal conclusions in her ruling, but simply asking that she vacate her order directing Tesla to rescind the pay package.

McCormick, however, seemed skeptical of the defense arguments, peppering attorneys with questions and noting that there is no precedent in Delaware law for allowing a post-trial shareholder vote to ratify adjudicated breaches of fiduciary duty by corporate directors.

“This has never been done before,” she said.

Defense attorneys argued that, while they could find no case that is exactly comparable, Delaware law has long recognized shareholder ratification as a cure to corporate governance errors, and has long acknowledged the “sovereignty” of shareholders as the ultimate owners of a corporation.

“I candidly don’t see how Delaware law can tell the owners of the company that they’re not entitled to make the decision they made,” said Rudolf Koch, an attorney for Tesla.

Donald Verrilli, a lawyer for an induvial stockholder who owns more than 19,000 Tesla shares, suggested that it would be wrong for the lone shareholder who filed the lawsuit to thwart the will of the majority of Tesla shareholders. At the time the lawsuit was filed, the plaintiff owned just nine shares of Tesla stock.

“The voice of the majority of shareholders should matter…. This lawsuit is not representing the interest of the shareholders,” Verrilli said.

Thomas Grady, an attorney for a group of Florida objectors who own or manage almost 8 million Tesla shares with some $2 billion, argued that for McCormick to rule for the plaintiff, she has to “disenfranchise” all other Tesla shareholders.

Greg Varallo, an attorney for the plaintiff, urged McCormick not to give any credence to the June shareholder vote, saying it has no legal precedent in Delaware or anywhere else. There also is no reason for the court to reopen the trial record and admit new evidence, he said.

Under Delaware law, stockholders have no authority to overrule courts by trying to use a post-trial ratification vote as a “giant eraser,” Varallo argued.

“Ratification is not magic, and it never has been,” Varallo added. “This should end here and now.”

McCormick gave no indication on when she would rule. She also has yet to rule on a huge and unprecedented fee request by plaintiff attorneys , who contend that they are entitled to legal fees in the form of Tesla stock valued at more than $7 billion.

essay writer ai elon musk

More From Forbes

Elon musk predicts artificial general intelligence in 2 years. here’s why that’s hype.

  • Share to Facebook
  • Share to Twitter
  • Share to Linkedin

The belief that we’re gaining ground on AGI is misguided—reports of the human mind's looming ... [+] obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated.

When OpenAI's board momentarily ousted Sam Altman from his post as CEO last November, the media obsession was... intense. Why so much fuss about a corporate drama? The public mania—and perhaps the ousting itself —came in no small part from a widespread belief that the company is well on its way to accomplishing its stated mission, the formidable goal of building artificial general intelligence, software capable of any intellectual task humans can do. The hype hasn’t let up. Just this week, Elon Musk predicted AGI within the next year or two.

If it came true, AGI would be the whole enchilada. Today’s systems only accomplish narrow, well-defined tasks. For example, predictive AI —aka enterprise machine learning—draws from data to improve large-scale business operations, such as targeting marketing, fraud detection and various kinds of risk management activities. And generative AI creates drafts of writing, code, video and music. In contrast, since AGI would be as generally capable as humans—across all jobs, including the performance of AI research itself—the implications would be earth-shattering.

But the belief that we’re gaining ground on AGI is misguided. There’s no concrete evidence to demonstrate that technology is progressing toward general human-level capabilities. Reports of the human mind's looming obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated.

This mistaken belief should be tempered by AGI’s immense difficulty. How could we build it? The human species is flummoxed. Even if the human mind could be emulated or equaled by a computer program—even if human abilities are algorithmic—the real difficulty comes in how to program it in the first place. Just because computers are so general-purpose that they hold the potential to do almost anything does not mean they will do everything we envision. And just because computers will soon potentially equal the human brain's sheer computational power quantitatively —in terms of the number of operations per second—that doesn't contribute to the qualitative development needed to stand up to the brain's functions. The power is in the instructions we give the device, not in the device itself.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024.

But journalists, futurists and other purveyors of hype promote this myth with full immunity because it’s unfalsifiable. It may be hard to prove true, but it's impossible to prove false. We could never be certain whether AGI is on its way until its alleged arrival.

Nonetheless, even if we can't disprove the claim that AGI is nigh, we can examine its credibility as much as any other outlandish, unfalsifiable claim. To date, no advancements have provided clear insights as to how to engineer human-level competence that is so general that you could assign the computer any task that you might assign to a person. Speculating on that possibility is no different now, even after the last several decades of impressive innovations, than it was back in 1950, when Alan Turing, the father of computer science, first tried to define how the word "intelligence" might apply to computers.

That’s tough news for the AI industry, which has bet the farm on AGI. And for media darlings who enjoy a special sort of glamor and intrigue—as well as the occasional stock bump—for declaring that AGI is coming soon, including Altman (OpenAI), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Musk (Tesla) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta).

Since the day the term was coined, AI has faced an identity crisis. It’s stubbornly nebulous, so proponents continually perform an awkward dance of definitions that I call the AI shuffle . Some say that AI is intelligence demonstrated by a machine, but that’s too vague to constitute a pursuable engineering goal. Some define AI in terms of an advanced capability, but that also falls short—when a computer drives a car or plays chess, it's still only considered a primordial step rather than AI in the full sense of the word. Still others refuse to define it entirely; even some popular books on the topic offer no definition whatsoever. While some fans of the AI brand find its amorphous nature charming, that's a bug, not a feature. If you can't concretely define it, you can't build it.

The best way out of this predicament would be to drop the term AI entirely (outside of philosophy and science fiction) and stick with machine learning , a well-defined, proven technology. But AI has become a powerful brand, riding strong on tremendous momentum. And so, to establish a concrete definition, it must eventually resort to the ultimate, grandiose goal, AGI. Doing so is divisive indeed —many insiders prefer more modest goals for AI as a field. But since those less anthropomorphic goals elude any clear, satisfactory definition, AI's identity consistently reverts back to AGI.

AGI presents such a gargantuan requirement for technology that even just validating its existence would be impractical within the brief, decades-long time ranges that many bet on. For example, developers could benchmark a candidate system’s performance against a set of, say, 1 million tasks, including tens of thousands of complicated email requests you might send to a virtual assistant, various instructions for a warehouse employee you'd just as well issue to a robot and even brief, one-paragraph overviews for how the machine should, in the role of CEO, run a Fortune 500 company to profitability. You'd then have to wait and see how those companies fare over long periods.

Let's call AGI what it is: artificial humans. In this story, the computer essentially comes alive. We must not let impressive developments—including the advent of generative AI—propel wild beliefs about the impending arrival of superintelligence. Instead, pivot from grandiose goals to credible ones. The false promise of creating AGI within mere decades leads to poor planning, incurs great cost, gravely misinforms the public and misguides legislation .

Eric Siegel

  • Editorial Standards
  • Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

  • False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
  • Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
  • Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
  • Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

  • Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
  • Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
  • Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
  • Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

  • Stay on topic and share your insights
  • Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
  • ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
  • Protect your community.
  • Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

UK justice minister slams 'deeply irresponsible' Elon Musk comments about riots

Elon Musk

UK Justice Minister Heidi Alexander has slammed American tech billionaire Elon Musk for his "unacceptable" comments about the riots gripping England and Northern Ireland.

Mr Musk posted on his social media platform X that a "civil war" in the UK was inevitable.

What's next?

UK Technology Minister Peter Kyle has warned users spreading disinformation will have "nowhere to hide" after he met TikTok, Meta, Google and X representatives on Monday.

A UK government minister criticised American tech billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday for "unacceptable" comments on social media about the far-right riots gripping England and Northern Ireland.

Riots, suspected to be led by anti-immigrant groups, have spread across England following the murder of three children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the country's north-west town Southport last week.

About 400 people have been arrested so far, and the Ministry of Justice said nearly 600 prison places have been secured to accommodate those engaged in violence.

The riots have been fuelled by disinformation claiming the stabbing suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker. He is 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Britain.

The rioters have targeted mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers, forcing the government to provide emergency security to Islamic places of worship.

The owner of X drew criticism for writing on the site on Sunday that a British "civil war" was inevitable.

It came in a reply to another X user blaming the riots on "the effects of mass migration and open borders".

"Use of language such as a 'civil war' is in no way acceptable," Justice Minister Heidi Alexander said.

She branded Mr Musk's comments as "deeply irresponsible".

"We are seeing police officers being seriously injured, buildings set alight, and so I really do think that everyone who has a platform should be exercising their power responsibly," she told Times Radio.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer's spokesperson said on Monday there was "no justification" for the comment.

Mr Musk sparked further ire on Monday with a provocative reply to a tweet by Mr Starmer.

In a post on X on Monday, Mr Starmer vowed to apply "criminal law online as well as offline", adding that "we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities".

Mr Musk replied, "Shouldn't you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?"

Bots, 'state actors' blamed for disinformation

Influencer Andrew Tate and far-right, anti-Islam figurehead Tommy Robinson are among people promoting false claims about Rudakubana on X.

Mr Starmer's spokesperson also blamed "bot activity online" for the disinformation, suggesting the false rumours could have been "amplified with the involvement of state actors".

EuropeInvasion, an anti-immigrant X account with hundreds of thousands of followers, still has a post up falsely claiming that the attacker was "confirmed to be Muslim".

An AI-generated image depicting Muslim men chasing a child wearing a British flag has over 900,000 views.

Technology Minister Peter Kyle met representatives from TikTok, Meta, Google and X on Monday and warned that social media users spreading misinformation will have "nowhere to hide".

Mr Musk has reduced content moderation on the platform since taking over Twitter, instead relying on user-written "community notes".

He also regularly voices support for right-wing causes and politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Javier Milei in Argentina.

AFP/Reuters

  • X (formerly Twitter)

Related Stories

Travel alert for australians visiting uk amid ongoing riots after southport stabbing attack.

Police detain a female protester on the ground

Britain's prime minister to introduce 'standing army' of specialist police after riots

Keir Starmer stands at a podium, with two British flags in the background.

Protests turn violent in England as unrest spreads after Southport killings

Police station shot up in flames

  • Civil Unrest
  • Community and Society
  • Law, Crime and Justice
  • Northern Ireland
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
  • Work & Careers
  • Life & Arts

Nicolás Maduro blocks access to X amid feud with Elon Musk

To read this article for free, register now.

Once registered, you can: • Read free articles • Get our Editor's Digest and other newsletters • Follow topics and set up personalised events • Access Alphaville: our popular markets and finance blog

Explore more offers.

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism. Cancel anytime during your trial.

FT Digital Edition

Today's FT newspaper for easy reading on any device. This does not include ft.com or FT App access.

  • Global news & analysis
  • Expert opinion

Standard Digital

Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

  • FT App on Android & iOS
  • FT Edit app
  • FirstFT: the day's biggest stories
  • 20+ curated newsletters
  • Follow topics & set alerts with myFT
  • FT Videos & Podcasts

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

Trust my Paper

  • Testimonials
  • How it works
  • Paper Writers Team
  • Essay Writing Guide
  • Free plagiarism checker
  • Essay title generator
  • Conclusion Generator
  • Citation Generator
  • Can ChatGPT Write Essays?

Unleashing the Power of AI: Can ChatGPT Write Essays?

blog image

January 26, 2023

ChatGPT has already proven to be a powerful AI essay writer, so it is undeniable that it will become even more popular with students in the coming years. Students can use ChatGPT to write essays, brainstorm ideas for a college essay, create extensive outlines, generate introductions and conclusions, make summaries, get follow-up questions, and so on. You can easily generate entire essays using the ChatGPT essay writer. But will it kill academic essay writing?

What is chatGPT, and how was it created

ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is a large-scale chatbot built using transformer architecture and trained on large datasets of web text. ChatGPT is one of the most advanced AI tools that can generate human-like text and perform various language-related tasks such as writing student essays, summarizing a college essay, answering questions, and others.

Founded in December 2015, OpenAI is the creation of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. The company is a leader in artificial intelligence and strives to develop technologies in this sphere for the benefit of humankind. Despite no longer being a part of OpenAI’s board, Musk is still a vocal advocate of artificial intelligence development and even works with AI in his own company Tesla.

The Potential of ChatGPT for Students: From Essay Writing Assistance to Language Skills Improvement

Thanks to the tool’s ability to summarize text, it is relatively easy to quickly create an abstract for an academic paper or a conclusion for an essay. In this regard, ChatGPT is excellent as an AI essay writer or assistance tool. If you perform a web search to answer different questions related to your research laboratory, then ChatGPT will also be helpful for you. You can research different topics and get ready for classes or exams with its help.

One of the best things about the ChatGPT essay writer is that it can be set up in a way that will work specifically for you (i.e., based on your academic field or subject). This means that students studying all kinds of disciplines can utilize ChatGPT to write their essays and academic papers. You will be able to improve your writing and editing skills, expand your vocabulary, and understand your coursework better.

Besides, it is also a valuable tool for foreign students who want to improve their English. ChatGPT can assist you as an essay checker so that you can detect any issues in your writing and better understand complex texts. It is the perfect choice for those struggling with their studies who want to achieve more academic success.

Are chatGPT essays original?

If you are using ChatGPT to help you write your essay, then you should probably be careful so that you don’t get accused of cheating. This is most likely the biggest downside of this tool. ChatGPT can create texts that mimic human writing and are grammatically correct and coherent while still repetitive. In other words, you can’t always expect utterly original content from ChatGPT.

The most significant accusation against the tool has been the lack of originality that is so widespread in its texts. You might even get a text with errors, incorrect information, or repetitions. This is why using ChatGPT to write your essay can be a good idea, but you should still beware of plagiarism and check your texts thoroughly.

The quality you will get can vary drastically depending on factors such as the amount of training data used, the language task at hand, and the level of involvement in the writing process from the user’s side. Consequently, the best way to use ChatGPT is to utilize it as a writing assistant. It can be helpful for students, but it can’t replace critical thinking or human writing entirely.

Students must carefully assess how much time they want to spend writing their essays before using ChatGPT. You will need to enter specific requests for the bot to generate texts that fit your requirements. Then, you will likely need to spend some time proofreading and rewriting your text. You can use ChatGPT for academic and professional purposes, but remember that the tool won’t replace human writing.

The discussion around AI tools and their usage has become so persistent that some people started coining new related terms. For instance, one of the backers of OpenAI, Jessica Livingston, is married to the venture capitalist Paul Graham who proposed the term “Algiarism,” referring to texts generated by AI that get passed off as a person’s own writing.

Will ChatGPT kill the student essay?

For a while, some experts have worried that AI tools will considerably impact the academic sphere. Some specialists claim that ChatGPT and other AI writing tools will kill the student essay. But is that so? And how much should the academic sphere worry about the rise of such tools?

The short answer is no, ChatGPT won’t kill the student essay. While the tool is already very powerful, it can’t perfectly imitate human writing. Almost anyone can easily recognize a text written by AI, no matter how complex the writing or the topic is. Moreover, students are often required to complete complex tasks on an entirely different level compared to what ChatGPT can do. There is simply no way for the tool to kill the student's essay.

Once again, ChatGPT is best used as a writing assistant. Rather than being a complete substitution for a student’s writing, it can assist learners in creating better essays. Some institutions might not allow the usage of AI tools, so students should be particularly careful or discuss the matter with their professors.

What do professors say about chatGPT essays?

While ChatGPT has caused a stir in the academic community, it’s interesting that some professors have entirely different opinions about the tool. Some say that it will increase plagiarism rates, while others argue that it will be a helpful tool for students to improve their language and writing skills.

Of course, there have been instances of students using the tool already. For example, a professor discovered that one of their students used ChatGPT to generate their essay with the software giving a 99.9% match . Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College Dr. Jacqueline Antonovich tweeted that a paper created by ChatGPT would immediately get an F . Other professors have stated that the tool will help students write better essays, brainstorm ideas, and learn English better.

What are the tools that can detect “AIgiarism”?

Because AI tools and “Algiarism” have become a hot topic, there are now new (and old) tools being used to detect texts generated by ChatGPT and similar programs. Of course, many AI-generated texts can be recognized by people without additional tools, but special software for this purpose can be pretty valuable.

GPTZero , developed by a Princeton student who wanted to eradicate plagiarism, is an excellent example. Other tools include detector.dng.ai and gptradar.com. Moreover, OpenAI decided to join the movement against plagiarism and announced that the company would watermark the tool’s output . This will help educators quickly identify AI-generated texts.

If not chatGPT, how to write essays being a student?

While some people will be using ChatGPT to generate texts and others will be using tools to detect AI-generated texts, it still leaves the question: how can students write essays faster? What can you do if you can’t use ChatGPT? Well, there are several options:

  • Use the custom essay writing service Trust My Paper to hire honest, experienced academic writers to help you create your essays and papers.
  • Write your essays and assignments and slowly develop and improve your language and writing skills this way.
  • Work on your assignments and papers while still using various tools to help you. These can include plagiarism checkers, paraphrasing tools, conclusion generators, title generators, and many others.

The last option is probably the most common choice students make. They rely on their own skills while still getting assistance from various writing tools along the way. Here are some examples of such tools that you can start using:

Title Generator . If you struggle to come up with a topic or a title for your essay, this tool is your savior. You can generate ideas by entering the details about your subject and essay type. The tool will give you a list of titles you can choose when writing your assignment. You can improve the essay title you already chose by using the tool and finding a more suitable option.

Plagiarism Checker . One of the worst things students battle is plagiarism, so a plagiarism checker is essential for most learners. You might get a bad grade or even get expelled if you plagiarise in your paper. TrustMyPaper’s Plagiarism Checker is a powerful tool for detecting unoriginal work and helping you find and correct intentional and unintentional plagiarism alike. You will get a detailed report with sources and issues that need to be corrected.

Paraphrasing Tool . Once your text has been scanned and you know where plagiarism is in your paper, you can use the Paraphrasing Tool to help you rewrite the parts that have issues. The tool will analyze your text and suggest ways to reword or rewrite different sentences. The tool will also help you improve some parts that may be unclear or confusing. However, recheck the text for plagiarism because the tool might not be enough to address all the issues in your paper.

Conclusion Generator . As the name suggests, this tool can generate conclusions by summarizing texts. One of the best things about it is that you can also generate introductions, abstracts, and summaries with its help. You can quickly get a short text with all the main points you brought up in your paper without writing a summary like this yourself. It is a tool that will genuinely save you a lot of time.

Citation Generator . One more tool that many students will benefit from is the Citation Generator. It helps you create citations by entering the relevant information and choosing a citation style. Of course, you will need to know the citation and enter all the information correctly. But if you do these things the right way, the tool will give you a complete and correct citation that you can use in your bibliography, references, or footnotes.

Few words to sum up

At the end of the day, human writing cannot be replaced by AI-generated texts. The two are incomparable at this development stage in the Artificial Intelligence industry. If you want to create genuinely original essays but don’t have the experience or skills for this, you should turn to professionals at TrustMyPaper. Expert academic writers from this writing agency will help you complete all your assignments on time and get high grades for your papers.

avatar

While being committed to a number of charitable causes, like volunteering at special events or giving free art lessons to children, Marie doesn’t forget her vocation – writing. She can write about almost anything but has focused on time management, motivation, academic and business writing.

Related posts

Violent Video Games Essay

January 26 2023

15 Terrifying Statistics On Your Cellphone Addiction

Don`t have an account?

Password recovery instructions have been sent to your email

Back to Log in

Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments Essay

  • To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
  • As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
  • As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Elon Musk is an American business executive, innovator, and entrepreneur. His business acumen is exemplified by his massive successes that he has achieved, mainly as the CEO of Space X and Tesla Motors, as well as other businesses, including Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Open AI. As one of the co-founders of X.com, Musk played a key role in growing the company, both locally and globally. After years of operations, Musk and his partners sold the business, and created SpaceX. He was involved in the founding of SolarCity, which is currently referred to as Tesla Energy. He also co-founded OpenAI, a research company that deals with the development of artificial intelligence.

Why I Chose Elon Musk?

I chose Musk to analyze as a leader because he is a highly creative and innovative leader. Musk has developed technologies to make electric cars powerful, safe, and reliable. The mass production of different models has proven that electric cars can rival combustion engines and aid in alleviating climate change (Easto, 2017). His business acumen is admirable as he has weathered different storms. Musk focuses on the development of technologies that promote sustainability; environmental protection and the reduction of greenhouse emissions are some of his goals.

Leadership Style

Musk’s leadership style can be defined as transformational: its major goal is bringing change to individuals and systems. It comprises four main elements: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence (Easto, 2017). Musk keeps communication channels open and offers support and empathy. He solicits ideas from employees and encourages independent thinking. He is a role model for ethical business practices, sustainability, hard work,, and trust. The leadership style boosts performance as individual capabilities are maximized.

Musk’s Way of Leadership in All Career Stages

Throughout different stages of his career, Musk has maintained a single leadership style. He follows the unconventional path that challenges the status quo by thinking big and taking risks. He sets strategic stretch goals and works towards achieving them (Easto, 2017). For example, he has a goal of colonizing mars by blowing a nuclear rocket in order to make it habitable. Musk is a believer in providing feedback to employees so that they make processes more efficient. Throughout his career, Musk prioritizes communication; he encourages employees to adopt a direct and objective approach sharing information (Easto, 2017). This ensures that great ideas are not stifled and feedback is relayed in a timely manner. He is very flexible and adaptable, often changing his mind and the course of projects whenever new developments arise (Easto, 2017).

Musk’s Leadership Traits

Musk’s innovative nature is evident from his technologies that have disrupted the automotive industry, and rendered the development of rockets more effective. The Boring Company, OpenAI, and Neuralink are examples of his innovation and exploration of new technologies (Easto, 2017). He is also inspiring and makes employees excited about his plans and projects. Though rigorous and demanding, employees work hard because they believe in his vision. Musk is also a visionary leader who believes in pursuing goals regardless of the difficulty that might be involved in their attainment (Easto, 2017). His energy and enthusiasm inspire employees to share in his commitment and passion for innovation and change. As a fast-acting and action-oriented leader, Musk works on tough goals and tasks to completion.

Organizational Accomplishments

Elon Musk has had numerous successes throughout his business career. His first success was the development of a web software company known as Zip2 in 1995 Later, he cofounded X.com, which later became PayPal, and that was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion (Easto, 2017). He used his proceeds from the sale to start SpaceX in 2002. Two years later, he became Tesla’s chairman and product architect, and officially became its CEO in 2008 (Easto, 2017). He cofounded a solar energy services company known as SolarCity: the firm rebranded to Tesla Energy after its acquisition by Tesla Motors. In 2015, he was involved in the creation of an artificial intelligence research company known as OpenAI (Easto, 2017). A year later, he cofounded Neuralink, a company that focuses on the creation of brain-computer interfaces. He also founded the Boring Company, a firm that focuses mainly on the construction of tunnels.

Accomplishments in Society

The Hyperloop is Musk’s vision for a high-speed transportation mode that aims to improve transportation in America. Musk Foundation is a collaboration between Elon Musk and his brother. The private foundation supports four main areas of the economy: human space exploration research, renewable energy, science and engineering education, and pediatric research.

Awards and Honors

Musk has received several wards for his achievements: the 2007 Index Design award and the entrepreneur of the year for his contributions to the success of SpaceX and Tesla Motors (Easto, 2017). The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarded him the George Low award for the design of the Falcon 1 and the most outstanding contribution in the field in 2007/2008 (Easto, 2017). He also received the National Conservation Achievement award from the National Wildlife Federation for his work at SolarCity and Tesla. The National Space Society awarded him the Bon Braun Trophy for his exceptional achievements in space exploration (Easto, 2017). Other achievements include the Edison Achievement Award, the President’s award, and Businessperson of the year.

Vision for Twitter

In 2022, Musk purchased a 9.2% stake in the company, thus becoming its largest shareholder. He was elected to the board of the company and has proposed changes to the social media platform. For instance, he has suggested that an edit button should be introduced so that users can edit their messages even after posting. This proposal has elicited mixed reactions as users debate on whether it is necessary or not. His vision for Twitter involves promoting free speech and enhancing engagement on the platform. Musk has been hit with a class-action lawsuit for failing to disclose his investment in a timely manner. Investors who sold their shares might have suffered losses because they did not share in the price surge that happened after his late announcement.

Elon Musk is an American investor, innovator, and leader. His transformation leadership style has enabled him to attain great successes in different sectors of the economy. Musk has succeeded by setting stretch goals, inspiring employees, creating a compelling vision for his companies, innovating, and taking risks. He is an action-oriented leader who believes in inspiring employees to be and achieve their best. He has been awarded by several organizations for his exemplary leadership and achievements. He recently bought 9.2% stake in Twitter and intends to make it a better social media platform.

Easto, J. (Ed.). (2017). Rocket man: Elon Musk in his own words . Agate Publishing Inc.

  • JC Penney & Ron Johnson: The Failed Leadership
  • Leadership Theories and Styles
  • The Space X Starlink System's Benefits and Drawbacks
  • Elon Musk on Start-Ups and Entrepreneurial Duties
  • Twitter’s Relevance to the Political and Economic Environment
  • Collaborative Leadership Model in Business
  • Leader-Member Exchange and Leader-Follower Theory
  • Personal Leadership Philosophies
  • Aspects of Collaborative Leadership
  • Aspects of Collaborative Leadership Plan
  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, July 30). Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments. https://ivypanda.com/essays/elon-musks-leadership-style-and-accomplishments/

"Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments." IvyPanda , 30 July 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/elon-musks-leadership-style-and-accomplishments/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments'. 30 July.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/elon-musks-leadership-style-and-accomplishments/.

1. IvyPanda . "Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/elon-musks-leadership-style-and-accomplishments/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/elon-musks-leadership-style-and-accomplishments/.

  • Iowa Caucuses
  • Candidate Tracker
  • Crime & Courts
  • Iowa Politics
  • National Politics
  • Iowa Mourns
  • Investigations
  • Courtney Crowder

Reports tie JD Vance to more extremists, conspiracy theories

The week in extremism, from usa today.

essay writer ai elon musk

Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has connections to at least two more extremists, according to reports this week. That’s in addition to being friendly with a far-right commentator who was exposed for his racist writings. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is reaching more than a billion people with his misleading election claims, a study shows. And federal prosecutions of public threats are on track to hit another high in 2024.

It’s the week in extremism.

JD Vance and the extremists

Former President Donald Trump’s running mate was in the news twice this week for his connections to extremists. The revelations come a week after USA TODAY reported that Richard Hanania, a far-right commentator unveiled last year as the writer of racist essays on white supremacist websites, was one of the contributors to the conservative manifesto Project 2025 – while also having a friendly relationship with Vance. 

  • On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported on Vance’s 20 months of messages to Charles Johnson, a conspiracy theorist who has doubted the Holocaust and was banned from Twitter for veiled threats against an organizer of the Black Lives Matter movement.
  • The same day, it was revealed Vance endorsed an upcoming book authored by another far-right conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec. Posobiec was a major promoter of the discredited “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. The book praises fascist dictators and describes the far-left as “unhumans.”
  • Vance wrote the foreword for another forthcoming book written by Kevin Roberts, one of the key architects of Project 2025, the Associated Press reported. The publication of that book was postponed this week until after the election. 

Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, a sweeping conservative policy effort decried by many experts as detrimental to Americans of color. Last week, the director of the effort stepped down amid criticism from the Trump campaign.

Report: Elon Musk spreads election falsehoods to a billion people

False or misleading statements about the U.S. election posted by Musk on his social media platform X have reached more than a billion people, according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, as reported by NBC News on Thursday.

  • Musk, who last month endorsed Trump for president, has spread at least 50 false election posts, according to the center’s analysis. The posts include claiming that non-citizens are voting in elections and posting a video of Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris that featured a “deepfake” of Harris’s voice.
  • Musk has also come under fire from five state secretaries of state who wrote X a letter this week urging Musk to fix the platform’s AI-generated misinformation. X’s AI chatbot Grok had falsely told users that Harris had missed the deadline to join the presidential election ballot in nine states.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has been highly critical of Musk’s management of X, was sued by the platform last year.  A federal judge threw out the case in March.

Threats against public officials set to hit record 

Late last week, a Virginia man was arrested and charged by the Department of Justice with threatening to kill Harris. So far this year, 69 people have been federally charged with threatening public officials, according to research from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and Chapman University provided to USA TODAY.  

  • This year is on track to exceed 2023 for the total number of such prosecutions. In 2023, there were 77 federal arrests for threats against public officials, according to the researchers.
  • Threats were focused on federal law enforcement including the FBI, but were also made against politicians, election officials and other public workers.
  • “Continuing a disheartening upward trend line, this year is on track to break yet another record for the number of federal arrests involving threats to public servants,”  Seamus Hughes, a senior researcher on the University of Nebraska team, told USA TODAY. “It’s disconcerting, and there appears to be no end in sight for the sad normalization of violent rhetoric.”

Statistic of the week: 20 years

That was the sentence handed down to David Nicholas Dempsey of California Friday for his assault on police officers at the Capitol on January 6.

Dempsey, who has a history of political violence, attacked officers using a metal pole and a crutch. His is the second-longest sentence for a Jan. 6 participant after Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, the former national leader of the Proud Boys, who received a 22-year term for seditious conspiracy.

Elon Musk’s troubled pro-Trump PAC is now being investigated by two swing states after appearing to scrape voters’ data

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., listens during a joint meeting of Congress with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US,

Two swing states are investigating Elon Musk’s new political action committee (PAC), the America PAC, for potentially defrauding voters. 

Officials from North Carolina and Michigan—two battleground states in the upcoming presidential election—have said they are looking into America PAC after a CNBC report showed the PAC collected data from people in swing states under the guise of registering them to vote but never actually registered them.

Before CNBC’s reporting, America PAC’s website had a large button on its homepage that read “Register to Vote.” If a hopeful voter clicked that button, the site then prompted them to enter their email address and ZIP code. If they entered a ZIP code from a state considered noncompetitive, such as California or Tennessee, it would direct them to that state’s official voter registration page. 

But if a user entered a ZIP code from a battleground state, they would then be prompted to answer a page full of detailed personal questions, such as the exact address of their home, phone number, and age. After completing the questionnaire, the user would receive a “Thank You!” page, never having been led to register, despite handing over valuable personal information.

The Register to Vote button, at the time of writing, is gone from the America PAC website . 

The North Carolina Board of Elections told CNBC on Monday it has opened an investigation of Musk’s America PAC after it received a complaint.

“North Carolina law makes it a crime for someone to fail to submit a voter’s registration form if that person has told a voter that they would be submitting the voter’s registration form,” the board’s spokesman, Patrick Gannon, told CNBC.

It is unclear if Musk’s PAC was making that exact claim, that it would submit a voter’s registration form, by collecting the data or by having a button called “register to vote.” 

Brett Swearingin, an attorney at Michigan firm Miller Johnson, said that after reviewing North Carolina’s statute on this issue, he didn’t believe the website violated the law, because it didn’t claim to register voters with the  official registration form.  

“When you’re dealing with the law, there are things that sound dubious or shady, and then there’s when something actually violates a law,” Swearingin said. “And the way that this statute is written, it seems very clear that they’re only dealing with the particular form that has been promulgated by the state board of elections.” 

He added he has a lot of respect for Michigan’s secretary of state office, so if there is a legal issue, “I have no doubt they’ll figure it out.” But in his preliminary review, he didn’t see anything. 

Mary Massaroon, a partner at law firm Plunkett Cooney’s election practice, said the site was troubling, but declined to say whether America PAC had committed a crime. 

“I would be concerned about any website or social media communication that suggests the viewers will be given information about how to register to vote if they provide personal information, but then fails to provide any information about how to register to vote,” Massaroon wrote in an email to Fortune. “I think it is appropriate for the Michigan Secretary of State to look into the question.”

The links on America PAC’s website were working initially, but then stopped working, a source familiar with the matter told Fortune. They didn’t believe the PAC had done anything illegal, and the organization will soon release a new website, the source added. 

America PAC has given $798,500 to Raconteur Media, a digital marketing agency, for “texting services” and “printing,” according to federal filings. The agency did not answer multiple requests for comment. 

The states’ probing is the latest trouble for America PAC. In late July, the super PAC abruptly ended its relationship with In Field Strategies, to which it had given $15 million to conduct canvassing operations across the nation. It is still unclear what will happen to the money. 

Canvassers and project managers were suddenly left without jobs, in far-flung places throughout the U.S., a former project manager at In Field told Fortune. 

“One minute I was waiting to receive literature, and the next minute I received a phone call telling me the project was pulled,” the project manager said. They added that since the shakeup happened during the CrowdStrike outage, many people struggled to find flights home. 

“It was several days of chaos, to be putting it lightly,” they said. “Overall, it…threw a wrench into our operations, again, that’s just an understatement. “ 

It is unclear why In Field was pulled from the project. However, the former project manager said it would be part of many shakeups happening in the future of the PAC. 

Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s senior aides, praised the move on X . 

“New Program 100% better than the old gang,” LaCivita said. “Solidly support this effort!”

Latest in Politics

JD Vance holds up hand

JD Vance backs $5,000 child tax credit and reiterates support for FTC’s Lina Khan

Donald Trump stares

Donald Trump thinks he should influence Fed rates—here’s what history and the law say

Joe Biden stands at podium

Biden says he dropped out after hearing re-election fears from Democrats in Congress

Kamala Harris speaking

Kamala Harris pledges to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, echoing Trump

JD Vance and Donald Trump shake hands

Donald Trump’s campaign says its emails were hacked and points to Iran

Satya Nadella

Iranians are creating fake websites and impersonating activists to create chaos in the U.S., Microsoft found

Most popular.

essay writer ai elon musk

Warren Buffett’s sale of 510 million Apple shares will go down as one of the best bets of his career

essay writer ai elon musk

Your reusable water bottle may be a breeding ground for strep and fecal bacteria. Here’s how to keep it clean

essay writer ai elon musk

California’s ultra-rich are building hidden mansions beneath LA

essay writer ai elon musk

The Great Wealth Transfer is set to be a $90 trillion disappointment—especially for millennials

essay writer ai elon musk

The summer COVID surge has arrived. Here’s the latest on symptoms and treatment

essay writer ai elon musk

Intel is the latest Fortune 500 giant to test the ‘4 wrong CEOs’ rule

Elon Musk's X has lost tons of advertisers. The platform's solution is to sue them.

  • X is suing a group of advertisers, alleging they violated antitrust law.
  • The suit alleges an advertising group persuaded top brands to withhold billions in ad revenue from X.
  • X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the boycott undermined the marketplace of ideas.

Insider Today

Elon Musk's X is suing a group of advertisers, alleging that they violated antitrust laws by ganging up on the social-media company in an advertising boycott.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a video and an open letter on the platform Tuesday announcing the lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, the World Federation of Advertisers, and the GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Ørsted, and Unilever.

The lawsuit, filed in Texas, says that after Musk took over the platform in 2022, GARM persuaded top brands not to advertise on X in an effort to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the platform, The New York Times reported .

"The consequence - perhaps the intent - of this boycott was to seek to deprive X's users, be they sports fans, gamers, journalists, activists, parents or political and corporate leaders, of the Global Town Square," Yaccarino wrote in the letter. "To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott."

Musk also weighed in on the lawsuit in several posts on X.

"I strongly encourage any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit," Musk wrote in one post . "There may also be criminal liability via the RICO Act."

In another, Musk shared Yaccarino's message, writing: "We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war."

A representative for GARM and the WFA declined to comment.

Since Musk took over the platform (formerly Twitter) and began reshaping it — slashing its moderation team, laying off workers, and declaring the platform a haven of "free speech" — advertisers have fled, dealing a crippling blow to X's advertising revenues.

The advertisers left after critics noted antisemitic and hateful rhetoric on the platform.

Related stories

Documents obtained by Bloomberg showed X lost roughly 40% of its revenue in the immediate aftermath of the takeover.

Musk, for his part, has gone on offense. He infamously told advertisers that had left his platform to go "fuck" themselves in November.

Since then, he's tried to woo advertisers back . It's not clear that'll work, Business Insider's Peter Kafka wrote last month.

His return to aggression against advertisers who want out is mirroring a push by Republican lawmakers to investigate Musk's advertising opponents .

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee stepped up its investigation of GARM earlier this year, sending out subpoenas as part of an inquiry into allegations of anti-conservative bias.

A spokesperson for the committee said in May: "These companies know the evidence collected shows that members of GARM have worked for years to spread their personal biases and censor conservative voices and journalists online."

Several people close to the companies, meanwhile, told BI's Lara O'Reilly that they were concerned the allegations and investigations would intensify during an election year.

Another advertising-industry veteran said the inquiries would have a "chilling effect."

Watch: 5 ways Elon Musk shook up Twitter as CEO

essay writer ai elon musk

  • Main content

an image, when javascript is unavailable

X Suspends, Then Reinstates, ‘White Dudes for Harris’ Account After Group Raises $4 Million for Her Campaign: ‘We Scared Elon Musk’

By Todd Spangler

Todd Spangler

NY Digital Editor

  • Susan Wojcicki, Former YouTube CEO and Influential Google Exec, Dies at 56 2 days ago
  • X/Twitter Users Report Problems With Social Network 2 days ago
  • Episodes of Netflix Anime Shows Including ‘Arcane,’ ‘Terminator Zero’ Leak Online; Streamer Cites Security Breach at Post-Production Partner 2 days ago

White Dudes for Harris - X - Elon Musk

UPDATE, 12:50 p.m. ET: White Dudes for Harris said its X account was reinstated Tuesday after “a groundswell of grassroots complaints” to X’s owner, tech mogul Elon Musk . “WE ARE SO BACK! After a groundswell of grassroots complaints to @ElonMusk from the #WhiteDudesforHarris community, our account was reinstated & we’re allowed to post again,” the post said. “Thank you for coming to our aid & carrying on this conversation in our absence. More to come! ❤️”

Related Stories

Reality check: summer hot streak won’t dig u.s. box office out of deep hole in 2024, popular on variety.

“We scared @elonmusk and @DonaldJTrumpJr so much tonight they suspended our account and won’t let us back in,” Nellis wrote. “These guys are running scared of the success we’ve had tonight, but we’re not going to quit.” In a follow-up posted, he added, “I ask this question seriously… are we the first white dudes to ever get suspended by @elonmusk’s Twitter? I think we are.”

In an update Tuesday morning, Nellis wrote that “Our tweets are back (@dudes4harris) but our account remains suspended and according to Twitter our account is ‘permanently in read-only mode.’”

A representative for X did not respond to a request for comment.

Hamill, commenting on the seeming suspension, wrote , “In a little over 3 hours, the @dudes4harris Zoom call triggered $4M in donations for @KamalaHarris. Apparently, someone else was triggered, too. 🤣”

White Dudes for Harris said 190,000 people tuned in to the YouTube livestream on Monday, which featured appearances from actors including Hamill, Jeff Bridges, J.J. Abrams, Sean Astin, Josh Groban, Josh Gad, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bradley Whitford. “I qualify, man. I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris,” Bridges, who played the “The Dude” in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film “The Big Lebowski,” said on the livestream .

The White Dudes for Harris account on X describes itself as “Just a few dudes who support Kamala Harris.” It currently has more than 58,000 followers.

Musk, meanwhile, has not made a secret of his opposition to Harris. On Friday, July 26, Musk shared a deepfake video that altered a recent Harris campaign video, which featured Harris saying she was “the ultimate diversity hire” and that she “had four years under the tutelage of the ultimate deep-state puppet, a wonderful mentor, Joe Biden.” The original account that posted the video labeled it a “parody,” but Musk’s post simply was captioned “This is amazing,” with a crying-laughing emoji.

In a post Sunday on X, California Gov. Gavin Newsom cited an article about Musk’s post and wrote, “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal. I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.”

Musk replied to Newsom, “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America 🤷‍♂️”

More from Variety

How lisa vanderpump and gordon ramsay set aside their egos to decide whose competitor won ‘food stars’ season 2’s $250,000 prize, with redbox’s demise, the dvd rental business bottoms out, mlb all-star game 2024 livestream: how to watch the national league vs. american league online free, fox surprises comic-con attendee with $3,000 prize at ‘universal basic guys’ panel, hollywood must define ai technical standards to prep for its future    , more from our brands, billie eilish, red hot chili peppers, snoop dogg, h.e.r. perform at olympics closing ceremony, this new show at monterey celebrates cars and hip-hop, house settlement faces new onslaught of athlete challenges , the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, in squid game season 2 teaser, gi-hun tracksuits back up as no. 456.

Quantcast

COMMENTS

  1. 'Goodbye homework!' Elon Musk praises AI chatbot that writes students

    324. Credit: NTB/via REUTERS. Elon Musk has declared the end of homework after New York schools attempted to clamp down on pupils using a new artificial intelligence chatbot to cheat...

  2. Musk-backed AI group: Our text generator is so good it's scary

    OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk , on Thursday offered a look at GPT-2 , "a large-scale unsupervised language model" that it says does remarkably well ...

  3. AI Essay Writer Elon Musk: Revolutionizing the Writing Industry

    The AI essay writer developed by Elon Musk's team, in collaboration with Texta.ai, offers several significant benefits: Time constraints are a common challenge for students and professionals alike. The AI essay writer streamlines the writing process, enabling users to overcome writer's block and complete assignments within tight deadlines.

  4. Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI

    14 minute read. September 6, 2023 7:00 AM EDT. A t a conference in 2012, Elon Musk met Demis Hassabis, the video-game designer and artificial--intelligence researcher who had co-founded a company ...

  5. Elevate Your Essay Game with the Elon Musk of AI Writing!

    Elon Musk essay writing AI stands out for its ability to personalize style and tone. Depending on your niche, AI writing can mimic a particular tone that speaks to your readers. For instance, if you are writing a blog about health and fitness, the AI tool can adopt a conversational tone that makes your content engaging and relevant. ...

  6. Meet the Elon Musk-backed AI chatbot that writes college essays and poems

    The AI firm co-founded by Twitter's new chief twit Elon Musk, has launched a chatbot called ChatGPT, for a free preview so that everyone can try it out. The smart assistant is flexible, and ...

  7. I asked Grok, Elon Musk's AI tool, to write an essay in my style. Here

    Every company is jumping into the AI game, and the technology is evolving and improving rapidly. Elon Musk's X has had its own AI tool for a few months now called Grok. Until recently, you had to be an X Premium+ subscriber to access it. Today they opened it up to anyone with an X Premium subscription, so I've gotten to play with it. I started by asked it who John Sherrod is. It gave me a ...

  8. OpenAI and Elon Musk

    Elon said we should announce an initial $1B funding commitment to OpenAI. In total, the non-profit has raised less than $45M from Elon and more than $90M from other donors. When starting OpenAI in late 2015, Greg and Sam had initially planned to raise $100M. Elon said in an email: "We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid ...

  9. ChatGPT can write essays and answer questions, but can AI take over

    SINGAPORE: Chatbot ChatGPT can write essays and answer the toughest of questions, but such artificial intelligence (AI) tools may not be able to take over humans just yet, said an expert in the ...

  10. Open AI and Elon Musk: How AI is changing the future of essay writing

    Explore the intriguing topic of OpenAI and Elon Musk's perspectives on essay writing in our latest blog post. Gain valuable insights on the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on the world of writing. Don't miss out on this fascinating read! - Texta.ai Blog Writer

  11. Elon Musk's xAI Approached Startup CharacterAI About Acquisition

    Elon Musk's xAI has discussed acquiring artificial intelligence chatbot startup Character.AI, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk's xAI approached the startup about a deal, said ...

  12. Election 2024: Elon Musk shares a deepfake video that mimics Kamala

    FILE - Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk addresses the European Jewish Association's conference in Krakow, Poland, Jan. 22, 2024. A manipulated video that mimics the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris to impersonate her is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead just three months away from November's elections.

  13. Elon Musk sues OpenAI, Sam Altman for making a "fool" out of him

    The idea Altman sold Musk was that a non-profit, funded and backed by Musk, would attract world-class scientists, conduct leading AI research and development, and, as a meaningful counterweight to ...

  14. Elon Musk drags OpenAI into federal court

    Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI. His lawyer says the latest version is a "much more forceful lawsuit." ... Musk ultimately left OpenAI and eventually went on to start his own AI ...

  15. Tesla attorneys ask judge to vacate decision invalidating massive pay

    FILE - Elon Musk arrives at the 10th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 13, 2024, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Attorneys for Musk and Tesla's corporate directors are asking a Delaware judge on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024, to vacate her ruling requiring the company to rescind a massive and unprecedented pay package for Musk.

  16. Elon Musk Predicts Artificial General Intelligence In 2 Years. Here's

    And generative AI creates drafts of writing, code, video and music. In contrast, since AGI would be as generally capable as humans—across all jobs, including the performance of AI research ...

  17. Elon Musk Revives Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman

    Mr. Musk was "betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices," the suit said. "The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions." In response to Mr. Musk's new suit, OpenAI pointed to ...

  18. Elon Musk wants $5 billion from Tesla for xAI

    Musk said in April that xAI is hiring some engineers from Tesla to retain talent in the face of recruiting by Open AI. Musk's xAI raised $6 billion in a series B funding in May, fetching a post ...

  19. UK justice minister slams 'deeply irresponsible' Elon Musk comments

    A UK government minister criticised American tech billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday for "unacceptable" comments on social media about the far-right riots gripping England and Northern Ireland.

  20. UK government calls on Elon Musk to act responsibly amid provocative

    FILE - Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, March 9, 2020. The British government on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, has called on Musk to act ...

  21. Elon Musk and the danger to democracy

    A long essay could be devoted to the litany of nefarious characters Musk has incited and on which subjects. Suffice to say his political statements are generally about voting fraud, illegal ...

  22. Elon Musk's New AI Data Center Raises Energy and Water Concerns in Memphis

    In a July 22 post on his social media site X, Elon Musk congratulated staff at his artificial intelligence company, xAI, for quickly getting its newest facility up and running to train his AI ...

  23. Nicolás Maduro blocks access to X amid feud with Elon Musk

    Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro has blocked the country's access to X for 10 days amid a public dispute with the social media platform's owner Elon Musk and a clampdown on dissent over ...

  24. Unleashing the Power of AI: Can ChatGPT Write Essays?

    January 26, 2023. ChatGPT has already proven to be a powerful AI essay writer, so it is undeniable that it will become even more popular with students in the coming years. Students can use ChatGPT to write essays, brainstorm ideas for a college essay, create extensive outlines, generate introductions and conclusions, make summaries, get follow ...

  25. Elon Musk's Leadership Style and Accomplishments Essay

    Musk's leadership style can be defined as transformational: its major goal is bringing change to individuals and systems. It comprises four main elements: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence (Easto, 2017). Musk keeps communication channels open and offers support and empathy.

  26. JD Vance tied to extremists through messages, book endorsements

    Meanwhile, Elon Musk is reaching more than a billion people with his misleading election claims, a study shows. And federal prosecutions of public threats are on track to hit another high in 2024.

  27. Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC being probed by two swing states

    The Register to Vote button, at the time of writing, is gone from the America PAC website. The North Carolina Board of Elections told CNBC on Monday it has opened an investigation of Musk's ...

  28. Elon Musk's X Has Lost Tons of Advertisers. the Solution: Sue Them

    In another, Musk shared Yaccarino's message, writing: "We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war." A representative for GARM and the WFA declined to comment. Advertisement

  29. Elon Musk Essay Examples

    Elon Musk, the wealthy businessman, has wielded tremendous geopolitical influence with his broadband internet Starlink satellites ever since the Russian-Ukraine war began (Olinga, 2022). However, whereas Elon's…. Elon Musk Russia and Ukraine War. View full sample. Subject: Famous Person.

  30. Elon Musk Suspends, The Reinstates, White Dudes for Harris X Account

    White Dudes for Harris said Elon Musk's X suspended its account -- then reinstated it -- after it a livestream event raised more than $4 million.