The father of tech titan Elon Musk offered up a rare image of his son when he was a kid after an AI-generated photo of the future Tesla mogul made him look like a “dwarf adult human.”
Earlier this month, the Twitter parody account “Not Jerome Powell” posted a photo showing a brown-eyed boy with Musk’s recognizable stern face dressed in a white, buttoned-down shirt underneath suspenders.
“BREAKING: Elon Musk was reportedly working on some anti aging formula but it got way out of hand,” read the tweet, which has generated more than 4.5 million views as of Thursday.
Errol Musk, the 77-year-old retired electromechanical engineer, slammed the AI picture of his famous son as “ridiculous.”
“It’s a photo of a dwarf adult human,” the elder Musk told The US Sun.
The dad shared a photo of the South African-born Elon sporting blond hair while and a big smile while wearing kid-appropriate shorts and a striped short-sleeve shirt.
“[There’s] no resemblance whatsoever to Elon at that age, more a version of him as an adult turned into a dwarf,” Errol Musk told the news site.
Errol Musk also weighed in on his son’s potential cage fight with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, warning that Elon was walking into a “no-win situation.”
“The thing is if this crazy fight goes ahead, if Elon beats this guy, Elon will be called a bully, being so much heavier and taller,” Errol Musk told the US Sun.
“While if he loses, the humiliation would be total.”
Errol Musk added: “Elon loses if he wins and loses if he loses.”
“Wins, he’s a bully. Loses, he’s a loser.”
Elon and Errol Musk have had a notoriously contentious relationship. In September, Elon said he had financially supported his father since the 1990s.
In a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Musk described his father as “brilliant with engineering” but “such a terrible human being.”
Errol Musk, who divorced Elon’s mother Maye in 1979, recently made headlines after he reportedly fathered two children with his stepdaughter
Elon Musk has been critical of AI even as he pursues the technology through his own businesses – including a generative AI project that will directly compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Last month, Musk warned there is a “non-zero chance” that rogue advanced artificial intelligence could annihilate humanity.
“There’s a non-zero chance of it going Terminator. It’s not zero percent,” Musk said.
“It’s a small likelihood of annihilating humanity, but it’s not zero. We want that probability to be as close to zero as possible.”
Musk also raised the possibility that an advanced AI system could decide to place humanity “under strict controls.”
In March, Musk joined more than 1,000 experts in advocating for a six-month pause on advanced AI products until proper safety measures and guardrails could be put in place.
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