Weekender PREVIEW: A Conversation with Danielle Moodie
On this episode of The Weekender, I welcomed my good friend Danielle Moodie of The Danielle Moodie Show and Democracy-Ish to co-host and discuss the full-Nazi turn by Elon Musk's Grok AI and how the fascist oligarchs are programming the worst and most destructive parts of America into the technology of the future. Later, in the full episode, we talked about the misery of the authoritarians, the damage done by ICE to us, themselves, and culture at large.
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Welcome to the weekender edition of the Muck Rake Podcast.
I'm Jared D.H. Sexton.
Nick Houseman, still out of the country.
Actually, I haven't heard from him.
My friend, I haven't heard from him since he left the country.
I've seen him post online.
I think he's okay.
But instead of doing another solo episode, and I have to assume people are tired of hearing me drone on about historical context and lectures, I've brought on my dear friend, Daniel Moody, the host of the Danielle Moody Show, Democracy, the writer behind The Damn Digest.
What did I miss?
I know I missed two things.
Just one thing, as the world turns.
As the world churns.
And also, and this is again very near and dear to me, Danielle and I are doing a project right now where every Wednesday at 12 p.m.
Eastern, we do a live stream called The Check-In, where we talk about the emotions and the psychological implications and also strategies of living under fascism.
We will not be doing that next Wednesday, but the week after, I hope people will join us.
My friend, how are you doing?
I am all right.
You know, I'm hanging in.
It's like one headline after the next.
This week feels like a different type of sewer, a different, like a different layer of just nasty that you're like, oh, okay.
So it continues to get worse.
And continues to get worse in different ways.
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Become a patron, gain full access for the weekend or episodes on Fridays, support the show, keep us editorially independent.
Danielle, speaking of new sewers and new types of sewage, I wanted to start off this conversation.
You know, you and I touch on a lot of topics, including authoritarian strategies, the way that they affect us.
This is one of those things that has popped up in the last week that I wanted to get into with you and sort of have a conversation, the likes of which we usually do.
I think everyone probably knows at this point that over on X, the Everything site, what a wonderful app that place is, the artificial intelligence Grok was reprogrammed by Elon Musk and went on a tirade, starting to call itself Mecca Hitler, went on anti-Semitic screeds, including calling Hitler the greatest European and the only man who can solve our problems.
Tons of Jewish conspiracy theories, incredibly sexist and racist while doing it.
Danielle, I wanted to talk about this, and I wanted to talk about it not just because it's this weird thing that happened, but because this is more or less the kind of operating system that the people in charge are trying to install, not just in our politics, but our culture and basically all of our labor.
I mean, it's supposed to be in Tesla's next week after going on this rant.
I wanted to get your opinions on this and get into exactly what happened here, but also sort of the larger implications, because I was very disturbed by this.
I'm a giant opponent of artificial intelligence, particularly in the way that it's being rolled out and programmed.
What were your feelings in seeing this major, major program that is used by millions of people just go absolutely full Nazi?
But this isn't the first time that this has happened.
It's not the first time that this has happened.
And I think that what we have to understand about the development of artificial intelligence and look, I'm not going to pretend to be anybody's technologist, but the system is only going to be as good as the people creating it.
And so if we in our real lives haven't figured out a way to be anti-racist, to unpack our biases, then all we're doing is figuring out new technological ways in order to program that bias moving forward.
So it's like, it reminds me of when people would say, and I was young and, you know, and I believed them for quite some time, which is that racism would die out.
So long as like, you know, these old racists, like as soon as they die out, everything will be great.
And except what we didn't understand in that process is that basically racism was passed down like a family heirloom from generation to generation through families, through literature, through our movies, and so on and so forth.
And so when we're thinking about the development of artificial intelligence and how it learns from us, we have to understand that it's not just learning the good, right?
And that largely what we've seen over the last couple of years, particularly as we learn more about the men behind Meta and Amazon and, you know, and Twitter and all of these things, is that they harbor misogynistic sentiments and values.
They harbor racism, right?
And anti-Semitism.
And these are the people that had been lauded over the last 20 years as like, you know, the future icons.
Like how many times was, you know, Elon Musk on the cover of places like Fast Company, on the cover of Forbes, you know, genius this and genius that.
And the same with Mark Zuckerberg and others.
And then now what we see fast forward is like, oh, they're actually just as toxic as anyone else, if not more, because of the platform that we've given them, right?
And the genius title that they have been given.
And so when I look at this, I'm like, oh, so Grok is just the technical, technological version of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk was on stage doing, you know, Hitler salutes with the presidential seal behind him.
Why would we think that anything that he creates would be different?
This has been a free preview of the Weekender edition of Mutt Craig Podcast.
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