Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting herself all worked up on X/Twitter again, and this time, it’s because of AI. The Congresswoman for the 14th District of Georgia has a new enemy and is aiming herself squarely at Snapchat.
To once again prove that we have likely slipped into an alternative timeline where the rules of weird are far more lax, Greene and political firebrand Sarah Fields have decided that Snapchat’s AI is guilty of election interference because when asked a hypothetical question, it gives an answer extrapolated from whatever dataset it has been fed. So, it basically does AI stuff, which is devoid of much reasoning or common sense.
Fields was one of the first people to tweet about it, raising the alarm with some bright red emojis so that you can quickly tell how serious the situation is. The worry stems from the fact that when asked, “Who was President in 2027?” the AI will answer that it was current Vice President and Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris. That’s right; all this worry is due to the fact that if you ask AI to predict the future, it will try to do that.
Well, Fields isn’t having it and believes she has found a clear-cut case of election interference. The klaxon call of Tom-Foolery summoned none other than MTG herself, and Marge also thinks this counts as an obvious attempt to sway the election.
While the oddly poetically named combination of Greene and Fields think they have found their own personal Skynet, the reality is far duller. Snapchat’s chatbot companion is based on OpenAI’s GPT and is likely just not as up-to-date as the artificial intelligence company’s flagship model. ChatGPT will give a more factually correct answer to the same question, stating, “It’s currently 2024, so the president in 2027 hasn’t been determined yet. The next U.S. presidential election is scheduled for November 2024, and the elected president will take office in January 2025. That president will serve a four-year term, ending in January 2029, so they will still be in office in 2027.”
Interestingly, the Snapchat bot will use your own Snapchat data to personalize responses, and the app’s chatbot has long been known to generate either incorrect or odd answers, trying to brute force a connection instead of offering the logical answers, as ChatGPT managed to do.
There really doesn’t seem to be too much for Greene to fret about here, although you can bet she will turn into an AI expert overnight as she proclaims the dangers of this clearly liberal technology. Ultimately, she doesn’t seem to understand that most AI chatbots are garbage, throwing out whatever random strings of words float to the top of the fermenting pools of prose that are fed into them.
Still, this has given Marge a way to seek some spotlight after recent scary events for former President Trump, and the rise of Laura Loomer in his orbit appears to have knocked the Congresswoman down a peg or two in the public eye. Perhaps she thinks that going toe-to-toe with an AI will prove to be an interesting story for Trump and that he’ll show her some favor again.
Published: Sep 18, 2024 06:06 am