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.”

    • swayevenly@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Was looking up if that word meant something else and the first result was a British show called Spooks. My mom used to watch it but I didn’t recognize it because it was called MI-5 in North America since spook is a racial slur. Atleast it is in the US.

      • Cheradenine
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        5 months ago

        I have never heard anyone say that as a racial slur and I grew up with a bunch of racists. Historically it was, at least in some parts of the u.s.

        I love William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ from 2007. I don’t remember any controversy about the title then.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country

        • sunzu@kbin.run
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          5 months ago

          spook as in undesirable government creep?

          because that title alone can be interpenetrated so many different ways without context

          PS i checked the wiki but now that i know the other meaning, i likely explains some of the weird takes i got in the past.

          • Cheradenine
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            5 months ago

            I always knew of spook as a racial slur, but never heard it used that way. Spook was always used as a government intelligence officer, like CIA , FBI , NSA , MI6.

      • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Spook is a term for intelligence agents. It is not a racial slur. Whoever you know that used it as a slur made it a slur by themselves.

        An easy way to see it’s not a racial slur in America is it’s use in culture, such as the X-Files.

        • gt5@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          No, it’s both. It can be an intelligence agent. It can also be equivalent to the n word

      • sunzu@kbin.run
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        5 months ago

        Citation to the most authoritative source on the net: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spook.

        spooks

        1. Government intelligence agents, see G-men.

        2. Anyone involved in espionage.

        3. Careful on this phone line, there could be spooks listening in.

        4. I heard this place was crawling with spooks, some kind of weapon of mass destruction is being sold or something. by Alan May 9, 2004