Twitter to thwart ‘manipulation of public opinion’ with AI, says Elon Musk

Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter, will employ artificial intelligence to thwart attempts to sway public opinion on the social platform. 

The move to deploy AI could help combat "manipulation" on Twitter, according to the business magnate. 

"In the months ahead, we will use AI to detect & highlight manipulation of public opinion on this platform," said the tech billionaire in a tweet on Saturday. 

"Let's see what the psy ops cat drags in …" he punned. 

The billionaire, however, did not elaborate on how the San Francisco-based company intends to accomplish this.

It is unknown if this is linked to Musk's rumored hiring of a team, which includes a former engineer from Google parent Alphabet, to create a competitor to OpenAI's sensation chatbot ChatGPT.

Igor Babuschkin, who just departed DeepMind AI, was reportedly in talks with him to manage a team of artificial intelligence researchers in the project, according to The Information's article from last week.

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), [a] non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google," Musk said in response to a tweet last month seeking his reaction to comments he made earlier in February about AI.

"But now it has become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all." added the business magnet. 

Musk to reveal the Twitter algorithm 

Meanwhile, the Tesla and SpaceX chief announced that on March 31, Twitter will reveal its long-guarded recommendation system, allowing users to examine its inner workings.

Musk stated that he would reveal the algorithms used by the social media platform to suggest content in the coming weeks.

"Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st," Musk tweeted.

"Our 'algorithm' is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things, but we'll patch issues as soon as they're found!" he added in the thread of tweets. 

While social media businesses maintain algorithms as a closely-guarded trade secret, the tech billionaire's choice to make them public is unusual, but he made a commitment to do so before he purchased the social media platform for $44 billion.

With more than 131.8 million followers on Twitter and a net worth of $169 billion, Musk is the second-wealthiest person in the world. 

He is well-known for his frequent and contentious usage of the social media site he owns.