Elon Musk’s Latest Post – or Is It? 

Here is a short video clip I saw the other night that freaked me out – Elon Musk speaking into the camera about President Trump’s response to controversial remarks made by Ilhan Omar. 

It’s 20 minutes long, but by the second minute I was beginning to think that it might be fake – i.e., AI-generated. I watched it twice and was convinced I was right. How convinced? Like 99%. 
 
Three reasons:
 
1. The content of Musk’s argument is riddled with key words and short transitional phrases that I see whenever I ask ChatGPT to summarize an argument. 
 
2. The way his argument is generally structured – the way statements are made, the way they are supported, the way one piece fits into the next one – is reminiscent of my experience working with ChatGPT. 
 
3. The individual gestures look real. But if you watch for a while, you see that they repeat themselves with a consistency that does not look real.
 
It made me realize how quickly AI technology is developing. Last year, I saw the results of several attempts to produce digital images of celebrities and politicians speaking, and none of them looked remotely believable. This one was very believable. 
 
So, what does that mean about the effect of AI on the news in the future? How soon will it be that we stop trusting anything we get through the digital media? Even when we see it with our eyes!
 
I misplaced the link to this video and went back online to find it by googling “Elon Musk talks about America.” I found several similar videos with different scripts but all the same tells, indicating that they, too, were AI-generated. Then I looked a bit further and found – to my chagrin – that I wasn’t discovering something that no one else had noticed. The story was already out there. 
 
Here, for example, is a report from CBS News on the phenomenon.

England Embraces Digital ID: This Is Scary! 

How weird – and disturbing – is this?

It’s British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing the issuance of a new form of identification – a national digital ID. A digital ID that all Brits will have to show to apply for jobs, get licenses and permits, buy cigarettes and alcohol, book air travel and train travel and rooms in hotels.

And here is where this story gets really crazy.

Starmer is promoting the digital ID as a tool to combat illegal aliens.

Really?

This is the same guy that is in favor of putting British citizens in jail for posting anti-immigrant content on their social media platforms. The same guy that excoriated Brits who protested against the stark rise in violent crime in areas where legal and illegal Muslim immigrants lived. And the same guy who, despite being in charge of keeping British towns and cities safe from violence, spent 10+ years hiding and burying the fact that thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of young White girls were groomed, trafficked, and raped by Pakistani gangs because exposing them and arresting them would have been politically incorrect.

Keir Starmer is the face of Woke politics in Britian. This sudden turnaround on the immigration issue is not going to convince anyone that he’s seen the light, nor will it bring conservative and right-wing Brits over to his party.

But I don’t think that’s what is going on here anyway. I think it is a ruse to take attention away from what the purpose of the digital ID really is.

I’ve written about this as it relates to digital currency. In past essays, I’ve made the claim that digital currency in the US (and all other Western countries that have fiat currencies) is inevitable because it gives the government the ability to keep track of virtually everything every one of its citizens do every day. It will be promoted by the government as a tool for fighting white collar crime, I said, again as a ruse to distract from its real intent. And after it is instituted (because all politicians from all sides will recognize its value to them), the government’s control of and power over virtually every aspect of every citizen’s life will be quickly expanded until the idea of individual liberty is not just gone but not even understood.

When I wrote those pieces, I was focused on national digital currencies, because they could be structured to emulate the US dollar or the British pound. Which would mean that their supply and demand could be artificially regulated and US and British politicians could continue to make promises that their governments couldn’t afford to make. But now I can see that a government can get almost all of the power and control they want without going the extra yard to a digital currency. A digital ID, with the right sort of “sensible” regulations, will do much the same thing.

We should be alarmed. But so far, nobody seems to even understand it, let alone criticize it. Except little ol’ me.