Earlier this week, as a major storm took aim at the little island where I live, I saw a story in which Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, defended his company’s energy use by comparing it to how much energy humans use to do similar tasks.
“…it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he argued, when asked about AI’s insatiable – and destructive – appetite for energy. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”
It was late in the evening, and I was about to lose power, but the insanity of Altman’s comparison struck a nerve, and I wanted to call it out. I’ve mostly refrained from my old habits of dunking on idiotic shit through social media – back when I was on Twitter, I’d regularly engage in the practice. But I left Twitter when Altman’s fellow oligarch Elon Musk purchased (and ruined) the place, and in the past few years, I’ve started using LinkedIn as a home for various outbursts, most of them tame in comparison.
But Altman’s ridiculous statement got under my skin, and I reverted to my old Twitter ways. “What a total asshole,” I posted, along with a link to the TechCrunch piece.
The post began to gather steam, logging 15 comments and nearly 60 likes in its first half hour. Most folks agreed with my sentiment, but a few pointed out that my comment was not entirely in character. “Not on Sunday please 🙏🏼✝️” pled one commentator. Another responded, quite reasonably, with this: “Curious, given your background in writing and thinking through complex problems, there are some clear logical fallacies in Altman’s argument worth dissecting. What drew you to name-calling over that analysis?”
He was right. I didn’t have the time to write a proper post about the topic, as the storm had already taken down several trees nearby and we were busy laying in firewood for what turned out to be a four-day power outage. So I dashed off an apology of sorts: “You make a completely fair point. I’ll try to do better.”
I left it at that, the power went out, and for the next few days I forgot about the incident.
But checking my mail yesterday, I got my second-ever takedown notice from a social media site (we’ll get into the first in a minute). “Your post doesn’t comply with our Professional Community Policies on bullying and harassment. It’s been removed from LinkedIn and only you can access it.”
A social media site that removes posts for name calling?! I suppose it does make sense. LinkedIn is a professional network, and calling someone an asshole is certainly not professional. It’s not easy to impose “community standards” on a platform of 1.2 billion people, and I’ve got no issues with this particular slap on my wrist.
As for Twitter (nee X), well, that’s another story. My first ever violation of a social media site’s community standards came in late 2022, as I was both leaving Twitter and setting up an account at Mastodon, an open source, federated version of Twitter. Here’s the offending post, which was cross posted to Twitter from my Mastodon handle:
For those of you with a sense of history, I was poking a bit of fun at Elon with that post – the very first post on Twitter was from co-founder Jack Dorsey:
Well, Elon’s new team did not like my sense of humor, apparently, nor did they appreciate my linking to a direct competitor. My post was flagged for violating community standards, and degraded in search and X’s algorithmic feed.
What a bunch of assholes!