Musk's assault on global knowledge

The $44 billion offer for Twitter – may it rest in peace – made everyone roll their eyes. Now Musk is offering $97.4 billion, which is more than double that amount. And more than double that amount should be the concern of citizens at the prospect of ChatGPT passing into the hands of the richest man in the world, and probably the most megalomaniac. It must be clear that Musk does not want to buy a technology – which he could develop himself without too many problems – but rather he aspires to keep the generic name of artificial intelligence. In the last twenty years, Google has been the great entry for most of humanity into the Internet: you asked it questions and it offered you results that you had to visit. Therefore, you knew which source corresponded to which content.

ChatGPT works in a much more opaque way: it gives you an answer and doesn't explain how it got there, so whoever controls its algorithm has an unmeasured ability to determine what the AI decides is true or false. That this person is Elon Musk, seeing the precedent of what he has done with Twitter and the hatred he professes on Wikipedia, makes you want to flee to Mars... if it weren't, of course, that not even in this way can one escape the influence of someone who is becoming a kind of mega-editor with global reach that would make George Orwell tremble. I see a tendency in younger generations to replace search engines with artificial intelligence tools. It is worrying because without traceability it is impossible to contrast and weigh sources. Some applications cite them optionally, but most do not: it would show that they do their business from content created – and paid for – by others. In any case, democratising knowledge certainly cannot involve concentrating so much power in just one hand.