Edward Snowden wrote on social media to his nearly 6 million followers, “Do not ever trust @OpenAI … You have been warned,” following the appointment of retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to the board of the artificial intelligence technology company.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, was charged with espionage by the Justice Department in 2013 after leaking thousands of top-secret records, exposing the agency’s surveillance of private citizens’ information.
In a Friday morning post on X, formerly Twitter, Snowden reshared a post providing information on OpenAI’s newest board member. Nakasone is a former NSA director, and the longest-serving leader of the U.S. Cyber Command and chief of the Central Security Service. He retired from the NSA, a position he held since 2018, in February.
Snowden wrote in an X post, “They’ve gone full mask-off: do not ever trust @OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc.) There is only one reason for appointing an @NSAGov Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.” He concluded the post, writing, “You have been warned.”
Thing is that Snowden isn’t really a figure I think most people would listen to. I think he’s cut off from any valuable information that would offer him anything groundbreaking to reveal and I think he’s probably somewhat isolated in his current situation.
He’s one of the most prominent privacy advocate in the world, maybe the most impactful in the history of digital technology. He’s relevant no matter the “quality of his sources”.
In this instance specifically the topic is literally NSA.
Are you for real?
Honestly one of the reasons I really respect him is that he can admit when he’s wrong. That’s a strong indicator that he’s genuine about what he says.
In the lead up to the Ukraine war, he was on the “Russia isn’t going to invade, this is just fear mongering by the US” side of things. But after Russia did invade, he said that he had been wrong, and he was going to take a break from social media (probably because it would not go well for him if he further elaborated his thoughts).
A lot of the people who were skeptics never admitted they were wrong. They just moved on and continued their bullshit. Snowden earned a lot of my respect for not being like them.