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You won’t be shocked to learn that conspiracy theorists have latched onto Monday’s total solar eclipse, but they have. As it turns out, in addition to your usual “end times”-type claims about the eclipse having something to do with the apocalypse, Alex Jones and his ilk have been portraying totally normal actions by local governments as evidence of various nefarious plots. It’s exhausting.
For a complete breakdown, I recommend reading these pieces over at USA Today and Rolling Stone.
“Debunking misinformation, conspiracies sparked by 2024 solar eclipse | Fact check roundup” (USA Today, Hannah Hudnall, 4/5/24)
The April 8 total solar eclipse, which is expected to shroud the homes of tens of millions of Americans in darkness, has the internet buzzing. While millions are traveling to witness the phenomenon, some have latched onto the idea that the eclipse is linked to something nefarious.
Conspiracy theories linking the eclipse to a portal opening and a "sex magic ritual" have spread widely, as has an assertion that the sun and moon aren't actually aligned.
“The Far Right Is Crawling With Eclipse Conspiracy Theories” (Rolling Stone, E.J. Dickson, 4/4/24)
This latest onslaught of misinformation began, as it often does, with InfoWars host Alex Jones, who has spent the past few weeks ranting on X about the upcoming eclipse. Last week, he posted a clip with the caption: “Major Events Surrounding The April 8th Solar Eclipse[.] Masonic rituals planned worldwide to usher in New World Order.”
The post, which has more than 3,000 retweets and 1 million views, illustrates how the trajectory of the most recent solar eclipse viewable in the United States, as well as the trajectory of the upcoming eclipse, form an “Aleph” and “Tav,” which (as anyone who was forced to go to Hebrew school instead of staying home and using cheat codes to make your Sims woo-hoo naked knows) are the first and last letters in the Hebrew language, signaling the beginning and end times.
On Saturday, I wrote about how Twitter’s new “Grok” AI chatbot-generated trending page is straight-up inventing news now.
I want to point out that this is quite literally what writer Ed Zitron said would happen back in December 2023!
“Elon's Gordian Knot” (Where’s Your Ed At?, Ed Zitron, 12/5/23)
Grok is apparently trained on billions of posts and allegedly has real-time access to X’s data, a form of digital inbreeding that will continually train its model on the data of a website that, other than being a deeply-unreliable source of information, is beset with spam, both from the numerous bots on the site and Twitter Blue users desperate to juice its creator program. While it’s possible that those working at xAi have found ways to mitigate this lack of quality, it is, from what I can tell, the only real-time data that Grok has access to.
In the event that Grok is truly trained on Twitter’s posts (after all, this is an Elon Musk product), it will become what Jathan Sadowski calls a “habsburg AI,” a “system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI's that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”
Musk rushed a Large Language Model to market in a few months, one where bigotry is a feature not a bug, and has potentially trained it on the garbled musings of people that he has incentivized to fill its data source with nonsense. And that’s acknowledging the fact that LLMs — even those developed a legion of well-resourced and well-fed PHDs, like GPT-4, and based on a well-curated dataset of high-quality material — have a habit of hallucinating facts, figures, and events. Already, despite only being available to a handful of users, Grok has fabricated a story about a British MP being expelled from Parliament, presumably confusing the ouster of disgraced New York congressman George Santos with a separate and unrelated story from across the Atlantic.
Two things: when my daughter was in grade school her whole class went to a part of the state where the eclipse was total, while it was partial where we lived. No sex rituals in sight. Nor any super werewolves.
Also: For a large part of the US the eclipse will be partial. Very partial where I live. Does that mean the Mason's efforts to start the New World Order will only be partially successful? I'll bet the Masons never dreamed that something that happens pretty much every 18 months SOMEWHERE gave them such power.
It's not going to be total on any of the coasts, so I guess the Masons getting total domination of the stretch where the eclipse will be total (mostly of parts of the south and Midwest) might not be such a bad thing.