Last week I posted in the Claude AI Community Facebook group about the Musk vs. OpenAI lawsuit. The post was a photo with a single headline: Musk sues over AI concentration risk. The irony writes itself.
The argument: the man who controls the algorithmic reach of the most influential social media platform on earth, who owns military satellite infrastructure, who builds autonomous weapons systems, and who runs a company working on brain-computer interfaces, is in court arguing that a small group of people controlling a superpowerful AI is dangerous. His own lawyer opened the trial citing concentration risk as the core reason he got involved in founding OpenAI to begin with.
Here is what I didn't include in the post but probably should have: AI is a male-dominated space. The small group of people making decisions about the technology that will shape everything (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang) are, with very few exceptions, men. The concentration of power being debated in that courtroom is also a concentration of gender.
So when a woman points out the irony of one of those men complaining about concentration risk, what happens next is basically predictable. The men show up to do the PR work.
A bunch of people commented, and 85% of them were men. One told me to stick to secretarial work. One informed me I jerked off to Columbine footage at least twice a day; sometimes you really have to stand in awe that so many people have brains attached to their bodies that come up with insults like that. Another demanded I be banned from the group. These are all, presumably, real adults.
On the other hand, a lot of people liked the post. The women who showed up were almost entirely able to see the perspective being discussed.
What's interesting about social media and gender here is that while the comment section looked like a fight, the reaction data (who liked the post) looked like agreement that it is actually absurd for Elon Musk's opening argument in this case to be handwringing about concentration of power in AI, given everything he has done since he helped found OpenAI.
The men who push back, frequently in atrocious ways, seem to do so because they believe that if they just work hard enough and play along with the facade long enough, one day it could be them in the courtroom, using the legal system to litigate their tech-bro drama.
On a personal note, I have no issue with being spoken to this way. Getting there took a lot of reflection. But it demonstrates what reasonable people, of any ideology, are up against.