what tech companies are trying to market as "artificial intelligence" is really just a server side search engine. it's a more powerful search algorithm that uses much more connected and integrated sets of data. but what's happening is essentially that each of these companies is independently mirroring the web - the same way the internet archive (the wayback machine) has been doing for years - and then conducting search algorithms on the archived data. this is more powerful and allows for more developed outcomes, but it isn't anything fundamentally different than searching.

i actually took graduate level courses in ai in university when i was studying for a computer math degree. i know what i'm talking about. that journalist over there probably doesn't, and neither do you.

what we call ai is not cognition, it's a decision tree. you train a program to search a database for information. when you train it, you get it to follow paths along a directed graph (that's the math used, graph theory; that's a technical term, directed graph), which is no different than a rat learning how to navigate through a maze. while a rat demonstrates some level of intelligence, the algorithm uses statistics and shortest path algorithms to guess at outcomes. over time, the program remembers the short cuts and goes back to the same places, but it's still not fundamentally different than searching. it's fancy searching. searching 3.14. whatever.

it follows that when some company's ai throws back child porn, it's doing so because somebody searched for it and it follows that going after elon musk for this is equivalent to going after google for somebody using google to search for child porn. google/twitter may bear some minimum level of responsibility for not filtering results, but the process of censorship is very fraught with peril for free speech.

the culprit that the law needs to go after is the person searching for the child porn, not the algorithm that performed correctly when asked to search for the child porn.

there's an anecdote i heard in a hitchens speech many years ago. i don't know it's accuracy, but it doesn't matter.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first great dictionary of English language, was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies of London.

“Dr Johnson,” they said, “we congratulate you for omitting all indecent or obscene words from your dictionary.”

“Ladies,” said Dr. Johnson, “I congratulate you for looking them up.”