If anything it seems more concerning for Twitter, morale there must be just the best right now.
You’ve said this a couple times, it is incorrect. Pattern recognition is simultaneously a terrible way to attack bots, and a great way to kill lots of interesting uses of twitter. This field is much, much more complex than you are making it sound.
NLP is also absolutely not pattern recognition. Perhaps back in the day with expert systems, but that era is far behind us now.
Paypal hit the similar barriers for a fraud-sorting task, and even in that day they found that a hybrid approach, part AI part human solved the problem well enough for that company to surive.
It is entirely possible that a couple decades from now we'll have a range of words to cover this whole territory, but I don't think we do now (or you'd have used 'em and cited 'em, or I'd have encountered them.) That we don't yet is understandable, it's early days. Right now if we have a better word or phrase (goal is kinda self-referential) I don't know it - even if I'm talking about the pattern of balance, compostion, color choice and line that makes "art," the pattern that can be called "artistic" is pretty much the best I can do. Feel free to put forward a better word if you would. DALLE-E and Stable Diffusion do seem to be able to recognize and spit out artistic results (rather than ugly, inartistic results) to a surprisingly large extent.
There are a billion ways AI moderation could be done. Many will be worse than useless as you say. One thing I notice a lot is that bad recognition systems merely sort out whatever is odd; if you are eccentric (perhaps because you are ridiculously well-educated) or highly creative you may get sorted out and punished by crap "algorithms." They're cheap-like-borscht systems, they don't give a damn about recognizing or addressing edge cases. It wouldn't be too hard to I sense you've run into a lot of that too. That's one reason why you want both far better (more computationally expensive) nets/associated logic and at least one human in the loop. But as well, as stated, spending more and getting a more complex net that is actively looking for patterns of language that suggest mere (safe) eccentricity or over-education is a case in which more and more detailed pattern-recognition is called for, not less recognition of patterns.
It's absolutely true that in the past companies (looking at you Google, Facebook) have been primarily motivated to reduce the expense of moderation no matter how crude the results. Just to take expensive humans out of the loop, no matter what breaks. That gives exactly the crap results you cite.
But I think Elon is betting that much better AI hardware (from Tesla) and more sophisticed, expensive nets (fed much more data) can, together with humans, do a far better job at a big but affordable price. Part of that bet is, I think, that computing power will decline in price steeply over the next decade and more, so it's worth spending far more (in the short run) on the moderation task, to get it right, than has been spent by social media companies to date.
He wants a lot fewer posts killed, but the bot and fake nation-state-actor posts killed, etc. Hard task. I doubt he thinks that's a dead-easy task.
We will have self twetting twitters by next year.
In reality, the world leader in the application of machine learning and other AI tools to social media content right now is Twitter. They’re also probably the best at international policy and privacy law monitoring and litigation.
Twitter is flawed in many ways, as I think might be inevitable for any large social media platform, but the myth that has developed about them being wholly incompetent at all this is a bizarre one that’s unsupported by the evidence.
I don't doubt that Twitter is on the case, but I also don't doubt that better hardware and a different perspective on the software can help - plus I'm talking about a hybrid approach. The inflexibility of much modern software is stunning to us old folks, but this rather goes double with twitter, for me.
It also has to be said, as the whistleblower has said, that Twitter had a very large financial incentive for tolerating, not even detecting, large numbers of fake accounts and posts; and seems to have succummed to that. Hardly the first company that's happened to - I'd say it's closer to the norm.