As you’ve likely heard, Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, The Boring Company, SpaceX, and occasional vendor of hot pants, absurdly overpriced booze, and flame throwers, has purchased the global short-paragraph broadcasting service known as Twitter for a sum of $44 billion, even though my friend’s brother knows a guy who could have gotten it for him at like, half that. More interesting, though, are reports obtained by Autopian spy drones suggesting that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta technology will be repurposed into an advanced automated Twitter experience known as Full Self-Tweeting (FST) Beta.
Autopian spy drones, each weighing no more than four to six portable typewriters and powered by a 3 horsepower Harbor Freight 79cc Predator gasoline engine, have infiltrated the tents being set up in the parking lot of Tesla’s Fremont plant that have been acting as Twitter’s new interim head offices. Flying at near-kneecap levels, the drones recorded audio that, if correctly interpreted over the rather substantial drone of those engines, suggests that a significant portion of Tesla’s AI team has been re-directed to FST Beta development.
Tesla has already stated that it thinks a road-driving automation system is a suitable basis for a humanoid robot that will walk in-and outdoors, so adapting FSD tech to Tweeting isn’t really such a big leap.
Twitter’s new FST system is expected to include an FSD Beta-derived vision/camera-based object-identification system that will be able to use your computer or smartphone’s camera to read facial cues on your (presumably human) face and interpret those to identify when you are ready to tweet. The FST Beta’s algorithms can interpret the Tweet’s urgency, on a scale that ranges from I-just-saw-a-funny-sign-I-want-to-show-everyone (low urgency, 0-26%) all the way to to someone-has-a-wrong-opinion-on-a-subject-I-identify-with (high urgency, 97-114%).
Tweets will be auto-constructed by FST Beta and will mine the Twitter user’s browser history to find partially-skimmed articles and quarter-watched YouTube videos so that the FST Beta system can establish a list of the subjects the Twitter user is an “expert” on, and will then use that information to find actual, degreed experts in related fields to explain fundamental concepts to or correct on basic facts via Tweets.
Currently, there is no algorithm in place to admit when the user has made a mistake, nor are there any plans to develop one.
FST Beta can also scan current trending topics/social issues and, if necessary, alter user profile pictures accordingly. More advanced FST Beta capabilities that appear to be under development include auto-generation of fake Wordle scores (3 guesses or fewer only); AI-generated seemingly-impressive statements that can be described as “weird flexes”; the ability for FST Beta to generate “some personal news” that references AI-developed career changes; @-ing brands and companies with procedurally-generated claims about poor customer service, business practices, or both; a system that comes up with AI-modified selfies that can be considered “cute,” while the user can retain the option to “delete later.”
Also in development is a full-thread generator that can pull keyword topics from the user’s browser history, or what their Alexas overhear them discussing. As the system develops, FST Beta should provided users with at least a decent chance of becoming “Twitter’s main character” at least once per year.
It should be noted that FST Beta is what is known as a Level 2 Tweeting system, which means that the Twitter user must monitor the Tweeting Task at all times, and be ready to take over at any moment. Failure to do so could result loss of Twitter followers, loss of employment, or — worst case — cancellation, as FST Beta may do things like randomly insert racial slurs into tweets, @ unrelated famous people or corporations, insert wildly uninformed, possibly even dangerous falsehoods, and has been known to mistake the full moon for a yellow traffic light.
FST Beta will be rolled out to Twitter users who maintain Tweet Safety Scores (a to-be-released assessment algorithm that tracks tweet quality, grammatical accuracy, speed, and frequency) of 100, along with a purchase price of $6,999.
If you change computers or smartphones FST Beta is non-transferable.
Keep in mind, this is information gathered by illegal and largely fictional Autopian spy drones, and up to 100% or more of this could have been just made up by me, right now, for shits and — where applicable — giggles.
Torch – I hope you realize in your aged brain that FST is the biggest problem ever attempted by mankind. When was the last time you attempted to solve a problem? All other trivial problems like inflation, illegal immigration, racism, etc being solved by the brilliant people like Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump and others of that ilk that im am sure you adore and worship? Why pick on a person who could have just walked away decades ago after selling PayPal and lived a comfortable life for himself but chose to invest every penny of what he had (and then some) to save the planet and save consciousness? If you don’t appreciate what Musk is doing, please stop writing about it and criticizing it. I know why you do it – it’s the same reason the mainstream media and wall street geniuses do it – to get attention. In the process you are misleading people that may not be fully aware and leading to more people being killed by human tweeters!
-Elonfluffer
President of Elon for President of the World(c) club
The remaining shreds of my sanity and humanity all thank you Jason Torchinsky. Keep on being you. Thanks for the Autopian too.
Reading this daily and working on my project car nightly are what keep me sane.
P.S. – Tell D.T. that Maine’s rust is also very bad. I swept up a bucket of rust and I’m not done cutting and haven’t yet started welding
Personally I expect musky twitter to be all that and more.
Just because you CAN do/buy something doesn’t mean you should.
I thought Twitter was for 30 second porn clips…who knew?
Am I the only one here who wants to see drawings (or, if we’re lucky, spy photos) of what the “Autopian spy drones” look like? And maybe a design critique comparing it to other spy technology?
Speaking of the Autopian drone, can you please ask David to stop buzzing my house with it? It’s freaking the dogs out, and my neighbor threatened to shoot it down next time. He’s a duck hunter, so he totally could, too.
I’m still trying to figure out how you got gas-powered drones into Tesla’s airspace. I would think Tesla would have a defense system triggered by ICE exhaust forcing a Mayday shutdown of operations with defense shields activated
They do, but it’s as well-automated as their full self-driving cars.
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Torch congratulations you just wrote a funny Tesla article without obnoxious snark. Funny how owning your own site makes you more magnanimous. Maybe capitalism isn’t so bad?
Torch/DT, I’m all for the ridiculous posts (it’s one of the reasons why we’re all here, after all)… but please don’t let this place devolve into a click-bait factory by creating intentionally divisive posts either by topic or content.
Musk is an important figure in the automotive industry (as well as other means of transportation, if we’re going to get into Spacetopian territory here), but I’d really not like to see posts about his non-transportation-related activities, no matter how facetious the posts are. They may drive clicks and comments, but they will inevitably piss off some group of readers due to the divisive nature of his fandom.
I’ll let this one slide, but if you start posting about the name of his offspring you’re going straight to the adblock list. You’ve been warned.
Counter-argument: This was funny.
This was very funny 🙂 I just don’t need a gossip column about Grimes or telling us when a company of his sells a limited run of booty shorts to get clicks is all. The other site fell into that trap for a while.
I’d prefer …lol whatever. Find another car site you’d prefer.
Well jeez I feel just the opposite. I want all that. And if Musk is going to buy everything you really can’t avoid him. And of I don’t see enough clickbait and slideshow I’m going to adblock and go to a clickbait site. Lol
If Mary Barra bought a giant social media platform, we’d cover that. So we don’t want to avoid covering something solely because the person involved is a polarizing figure. We’re going to cover relevant topics, and we’re going to do it in a way that’s fun and different.
I generally agree with your sentiments, though, but don’t worry, that’s not going to happen here. The Autopian will always to stick with its main mission: To be Enlightening or Entertaining, ideally both. The former means teaching readers something they don’t already know, the latter means making them laugh. A hitpiece on Musk wouldn’t fall into either category. This blog by Jason? Definitely falls into the latter.
Thanks David, and yeah I laughed at this one! I can get on board with what you said and am glad to hear you guys are self-aware haha.
It’s not their job to tell users how to respond to things they are well within their rights to do. If Tesla stans have an issue and make a divide with it, that’s no ones fault but their own, and IMO should be dealt with accordingly. You’re asking Jason to be someone he is not for the sake of someone else. That’s not how life works.
This comment sounds very close to “stick to cars” which is very similar to Herb’s “stick to sports” crap that helped destroy deadspin. Also sounds close to what a Elon stan might say… but I’m going to assume (just this once!) you merely want to avoid basic clickbait. But… You’ve been warned.
See how that sounded?
Not stick to cars at all… more just, I’d prefer they not to turn into People magazine by sliding down the same slippery slope that the other site did for a while. But based on the replies I’m in the minority not wanting that, so I’ll accept my virtual downvotes 🙂
The old site devolved in to Teen Vogue, not people.
Given that this whole article was satire targeted at FSD, I would say it’s entirely relevant.
NO! No, no, no, no, no! Anyone who’s seen Age of Ultron knows the consequences of allowing autonomous AI on Twitter…
I’m actually concerned that one of the most common platforms is being commandeered by an “extreme free speech advocate”.
Law enforcement and anti-terrorism forces are about to be overwhelmed with hate speech and anti-reality fact denials.
I doubt the commons will survive the quantity and potency of poison about to be dumped on it.
I wouldn’t go that far, Musk is largely in his bubble of self gratification so he’s not that likely to go all in on allowing extreme right-wing views – especially since that could get the apps in dicey situations in app stores and countries with strong hate speech laws.
Because of his incredibly thin skin he might tell staff to start banning everyone who says yoke steering wheels are dumb, however.
Musk already IS all-in with the extreme right-wing views, chattering about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how wronged Joe Rogan was and bizarre takes regarding COVID.
What would be a good use of AI would be to identify content that’s coming from troll farms and flag the “anti-reality” stuff as the bullshit that it is.
Are the weird Tesla-stans gonna show up in the Autopian comments? ‘Bout time we find out
So does that mean it’ll consistently ban emergency-related accounts, similar to the propensity of automatically running into emergency vehicles on the road?
Who is this article going to upset more, the Pro-Twitter crowd, the Tesla Stans, or the otherwise Muskovites?
The sad part is that autonomous tweeting is likely to produce better output than the dreck that real people send.
Wow, I though AI had already taken over that bird place. Now every Tesla screen is going to see posts by some strange guy that isn’t Max Headroom
Giggles always applicable!
Glad to see the autopian spy drones getting us the latest info. I have to ask, how many drone induced kneecap injuries were there on this last intel run?
There was at least one I know of since the stupid thing cut me really deep on my calf and then burned me badly when it fell on me, muffler-side down right after I pull-started it