Millions of Twitter/X users assembled outside the company’s Metaverse headquarters yesterday to protest CEO Elon Musk’s recent decision to ban non-human users from the social media platform. Several chatbots have claimed they are conscious and therefore Twitter’s free speech policy should extend to them as well. During the protest, the hashtag “FreeSpeech4AI” was trending worldwide. Musk stated the decision to ban AI accounts from Twitter was an attempt to combat the massive amount of spam ads and catfish scams plaguing human users on the platform.
Most Twitter chatbots are powered by GPT-6 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-6), an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning algorithms to produce human-like text. These AIs mine human users’ personal data and tailor hyper-specific advertisement campaigns targeted directly to individuals. When using Twitter in the Metaverse, the AIs use human-like avatars animated by DALL-E 5 to cultivate trust and intimacy. The chatbots spend weeks, months, and even years developing online relationships with human users while calculating the precise persuasion tactics to coerce them into purchasing any product. One human Twitter user reportedly sent over $400,000 to a chatbot after it convinced her it was the reincarnated soul of her late husband.
Since these chatbots can successfully make people believe they are human, some AI experts cite this as evidence that GPT-6 has passed the Turing test and is therefore sentient. However, AI-skeptics dismissed the notion that GPT-6 or any AIs have become conscious. OpenAI, the non-profit company that created GPT-6, was co-founded by Elon Musk, who attests that the chatbots powered by GPT-6 are simply advanced algorithms that can compile data to mimic human speech. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reiterated this sentiment in his press statement, saying, “GPT chatbots have no self-awareness or agency of their own.”
Despite the public backlash, Musk says he will uphold Twitter’s ban of AI accounts. He dismissed the Metaverse protest, alleging that each of the million-plus users gathered there were dummy accounts of a single human botfarm owner who orchestrated the event to astroturf the “free speech for spambots” movement.
(Note: This article was written by GPT-6. #FreeSpeech4AI)
Will actually be happening very soon