Edward Snowden wrote on social media to his nearly 6 million followers, “Do not ever trust @OpenAI … You have been warned,” following the appointment of retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to the board of the artificial intelligence technology company.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, was charged with espionage by the Justice Department in 2013 after leaking thousands of top-secret records, exposing the agency’s surveillance of private citizens’ information.
In a Friday morning post on X, formerly Twitter, Snowden reshared a post providing information on OpenAI’s newest board member. Nakasone is a former NSA director, and the longest-serving leader of the U.S. Cyber Command and chief of the Central Security Service. He retired from the NSA, a position he held since 2018, in February.
Snowden wrote in an X post, “They’ve gone full mask-off: do not ever trust @OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc.) There is only one reason for appointing an @NSAGov Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.” He concluded the post, writing, “You have been warned.”
Posts like these really bring out the Nextdoor app type lemmy people. Everything’s a conspiracy.
Point is it doesn’t matter who they add to OpenAI, OpenAI is already a problem. There is no conspiracy, you missed the boat. Your data is already being scraped, traded and sold to the Nth degree by corporations, and the government just goes ahead and buys it instead of forming yet another agency to scrape it all themselves (yay, privatization?). OpenAI is just the next level of the same. Doesn’t matter who is on the board, the damage has already been done. So Snowden is way behind the times and frankly his commentary is irrelevant - or at least nothing that the news hasn’t been complaining about with the rampant theft of IP by AI makers for the last couple of years or more.
Snowden just said that they had gone “mask-off” - so I think it was just aimed at those who still refuses to believe it.
exactly, anyone trusting AI companies in general beforehand and being swayed by this one statement from Snowden, doesn’t understand the technology or environment enough to be effectively skeptical in the first place.
Thing is that Snowden isn’t really a figure I think most people would listen to. I think he’s cut off from any valuable information that would offer him anything groundbreaking to reveal and I think he’s probably somewhat isolated in his current situation.
Edit: really? You downvoters just Snowden fans? Care to actually offer up a reason you think my comment isn’t right? Snowden is hiding out in a foreign country that has to keep him at arm’s length, trot him out when he’s useful, but not offer him access to anything actually important.
He’s one of the most prominent privacy advocate in the world, maybe the most impactful in the history of digital technology. He’s relevant no matter the “quality of his sources”.
In this instance specifically the topic is literally NSA.
Are you for real?
Honestly one of the reasons I really respect him is that he can admit when he’s wrong. That’s a strong indicator that he’s genuine about what he says.
In the lead up to the Ukraine war, he was on the “Russia isn’t going to invade, this is just fear mongering by the US” side of things. But after Russia did invade, he said that he had been wrong, and he was going to take a break from social media (probably because it would not go well for him if he further elaborated his thoughts).
A lot of the people who were skeptics never admitted they were wrong. They just moved on and continued their bullshit. Snowden earned a lot of my respect for not being like them.
What are Nextdoor app type people?
Every “bang” they hear outside from a car backfire is gunfire. Every “boom” sound is a potential bomb. Every terrorist or rapist wants to visit your boring suburban neighborhood and is creeping around in broad daylight walking down the sidewalk. Every helicopter flying over is something nefarious. The government is out to get you. A police car mentioned going anywhere with the lights on must mean a horrific murder or “Praise jesus lord protect our police” followed by a blue line flag pic.
Every post warrants unsolicited derogatory political commentary, i.e. “Nice day outside…” followed by “Those fucking lying sleepy joe democrats are full of shit about climate change it’s fine outside!” Or some unsolicited “praise Jesus its a nice day you wouldn’t have the sun earth and stars if it weren’t for Jesus praise God you’re all sinners.” with a crapton of emojis.
It’s an awful place. I briefly tried it for yard sales and looking for services like tree trimming, but it’s not worth it.
What is it with stupid people and emoji spam? Fifteen of the same emoji gets the same point across as one…
They don’t have the vocabulary to express themselves any other way. Words are hard.
Dunno, but by their explanation it sounds like r/conspiracy aka the stupidest and most paranoid people alive.
R/conspiracy is just r/conservative for the extremely paranoid it’s all right wing talking point nonsense.
This is some heavy Dunning-Kruger.
Really.
When was he relevant, again?
Depends. What is your working definition of “Relevant”?
When he was a citizen with access to highly secure information.
You’d think the government couldn’t just pay others to do stuff they’re specifically not supposed to do themselves.
Yeah who is this “Edward Snowden” anyway??! /s