AI Chat Bots Don't Know Anything About 9/11 Conspiracies

 I tried out the artificial intelligence (AI) chat bot "ChatGPT" today.

It was kind of fun at first... but then when I asked any sort of questions about 9/11, it gave the most hard-core official story answers possible. It was very annoying. Clearly it has been programmed not to promote any sort of conspiracy information.

I realized if, as a lot of people are talking about, AI becomes a major source of information for people ding research or who need to do writing, it is perfectly designed to cover up conspiracies. This is both disturbing from a censorship point of view, but also good int he sense that conspiracy theories are going to be something that will never get taken over by AI, unlike so many other jobs that can potentially be destroyed by AI. ... unless someone writes an AI program specifically for conspiracies, which would be interesting but kind of disturbing too.

Overall, the writing ability of the chatGPT bot was impressive, particularly how fast it goes, but it wasn't that sophisticated in its level of understanding or detail on a few subjects I asked it about.

Learning to Fly to the Moon Again

"Artemis I: NASA releases beautiful photos of the moon as Orion prepares to return to Earth"

Not too surprisingly, the pics aren't that amazing and don't show much surface detail. That might be inconvenient, you know.

This is funny though:

"A rare print of the only image of Neil Armstrong on the moon is expected to sell for $30,000 at auction"

It's a very silly story and doesn't make that much sense.

Newly Released Documents Show "Bush Knew"

On April 29, 2004, President George W. Bush hosted one of the most unusual meetings to ever take place inside the Oval Office. The 10 members of the 9/11 Commission got to ask him and Vice President Dick Cheney any question they wanted about the September 11, 2001, attacks. The words that were spoken in that room remained secret for nearly two decades. Now, we can finally read what Bush said. 

Earlier this month, after more than 18 years, the government declassified a 31-page "memorandum for the record," which compiles notes that the commissioners took during the meeting. 

The document shows the commissioners giving Bush multiple chances to acknowledge the numerous documented warnings he'd received from his own government of an impending attack by Al Qaeda. For the most part, Bush failed to do so. Instead, he passed the buck. 

Perhaps the largest of Bush's evasions that day concerned his CIA director, George Tenet: "The threat was overseas — that was what George said." Bush's implication at the time is clear. He wanted the commission, and by extension the public, to think that no one could have anticipated Al Qaeda mounting a large-scale attack on US soil. But in fact, Tenet's CIA had warned Bush more than once that Al Qaeda could strike anywhere, at any time, and that all US citizens were potential targets. 

The most notorious warning that Bush received, but not the only one, was a CIA briefing headlined "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Very little of Bush's excuse-making and clumsy attempts to rewrite history found their way into the 9/11 Commission's report. 

Indeed, one of the commissioners, Richard Ben-Veniste, told Insider he still had questions today about what Bush knew, and when. "I could never square in my mind CIA Director Tenet's intense preoccupation with the Al Qaeda threat in the months leading up to 9/11, with his claim that he never briefed President Bush on the many clues the intelligence community had developed that bin Laden was planning to launch a 'spectacular' attack on the US homeland," Ben-Veniste said. 

The commission report's approach to this mystery is to make the apparent disconnect between CIA and the Oval Office sound like something out of a Greek tragedy: "No one working on these late [Al Qaeda] leads in the summer of 2001 connected them to the high level of threat reporting … no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground." 

What the new memo makes clear is that the White House's lack of urgency in facing down the domestic Qaeda threat wasn't all that complicated. Tenet, the record shows, did everything he could to get Bush to focus on Al Qaeda. Bush just wasn't interested.